Autobiographical Notes, Roderick MacIver
Artist & Founder of Heron Dance

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
     - Galway Kinnell from the poem Saint Francis and the Sow

I started Heron Dance in 1996 as a newsletter about a search for meaning in life. Four years earlier I had left a career as a financial analyst on Wall Street. Two years before that I had been diagnosed with advanced non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, or cancer of the lymph nodes. In the early days, the publication had a stridency bordering on desperation about it. There had to be, I felt, a better way to live than that determined by the dominant values of our culture. I still believe that, but I see life now more in shades of grey than in black and white. The challenge has become of one changing myself, of blossoming from within of self-blessing, rather than changing the world out there. I've come to see the world as essentially mysterious and the answers as elusive, but shrouded in beauty and mystery.

Heron Dance is a creative work in progress. The publication has evolved and I have evolved. Nevertheless, in all of its different manifestations, Heron Dance has been a celebration of the Gift of Life and of the natural world. I believe that the true nature of life is mysterious. We live lives of discovery, of challenge and of success and failure. Much of that success and failure is related in some way to encountering ourselves, our inner beauty and our darkness.

As Galway Kinnell suggests in his poem Saint Francis and the Sow, the potential of a human life is one of blossoming from within of self-blessing. A close relationship with our inner world, with our subconscious, our half-awake world, is important to that blossoming. Also important is a close relationship with something larger in the world that surrounds us--something that represents beauty, power, mystery and peace. For me, that something is wild nature. Quiet, beautiful places in the woods sustain me, whether they be in northern Canada or a few hundred yards out my back door in the Adirondack woods.

I believe that to live a really full life, you need to believe in yourself. To believe in yourself, you need courage. Courage is difficult. The parameters of my life have been defined by the times I've believed in myself and by the times I haven't.

I was born in 1956 in Canada. My father was in the military and we lived on Canadian army bases that were mostly rural and surrounded by fields and forests. Many of my memories of childhood involve roaming around in the woods, of soakers and bird song, of lying on my back watching the clouds float by. In my early teens I discovered wilderness canoeing. My first trips were with the YMCA a few hours drive north of Ottawa. Later, my parents owned a cottage in Quebec and I began exploring nearby lakes that had no road into them and no people. I’d drag my canoe up shallow streams, or portage, and find a place to camp where I could just sit and watch the birds and the water.

My academic career was limited. I left school when I was sixteen and hitchhiked north, hoping to find indigenous people living close to the land. The closest I came was fighting forest fires with Dogrib Indians near Great Slave Lake in what was then Canada’s Northwest Territories.

Other than a couple of night classes at university, I’ve avoided formal education. Instead, I’ve read thousands of books and interviewed hundreds of people who had insights into subjects that interested me. Following this process, I learned enough to make a good living on Wall Street as an investment analyst. A couple of years before starting Heron Dance I needed to spend a few weeks in the hospital receiving experimental chemo therapy. While there I got books on art and taught myself to draw and paint. It was something I had dreamt about for years, and I believe that following that passion helped me survive cancer. Next I focused on getting better and over the next two years, I found and interviewed people—mostly cancer researchers—who helped me survive non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.

Shortly after being diagnosed with cancer, my marriage dissolved. I had two young sons. I wanted to do something with the rest of my life, however long or short that might turn out to be, that was positive, that involved the creation of something of beauty. I wanted to leave something behind that would help my sons understand who I really was and what I had learned about what is important in life. I wanted to celebrate the gift of life, in part because I thought it might help me hang on to it.

Over the last thirty years I’ve filled dozens of journals with excerpts from books and quotes from interviews. Two in particular have had an affect on my life and on Heron Dance. The first is from an interview I did of Sara Harrison, an Outward Bound Instructor, then working in a tiny village along the Rio Grande River. She said:

I think it is incumbent upon us who have been given the gift of life, to give something back. Something that costs us, something that involves real sacrifice. It is in sacrifice that we lose ourselves, our pain, our problems. It is in the sacrifice of self, for something bigger, that life gains meaning. Quality of life is related to dedication to something outside ourselves--the loss of self, helping others, wild creatures, creativity.

A person's life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art, or love, or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first opened.

Morning Solitude

Algonquin Loons (from issue 31)

Blue sky. I am eight years old, lying on my back on the ground in the woods. I lie there and stare for two or three hours at the mashed potato clouds and their changing forms as they drift by overhead.

One afternoon, about twenty-five years later, I was driving north to canoe for a week in Canada’s Algonquin Park. I stopped by my parents’ house in Ottawa, and as I was leaving, I overheard my dad say to one of his old army buddies, “He lives for these trips.” That surprised me. I am not even sure I had yet come to completely realize how much those one-week solo trips, which I found time to take only every year or two, had come to be the center of my life. I was surprised he had seen that. I got in my car, waved and drove off. I have never mentioned it to him, but I think often of that offhand comment of his.

On the surface, I was in my early thirties, had a young family and was working in the investment business. On the surface, my dad was an ex-soldier, a bureaucrat in the secret police. We’ve had lots of ups and down, my dad and I, and yet maybe we understand more about each other than we let on.

Thirty-six or so hours later, I was sitting beside a lake that was shrouded in a gray, pre-dawn fog. I had gotten up in the dark, packed my canoe, and was sitting out at the shore sipping tea. Two loons drifted in and out of view. One stretched and called that haunting call of the wild. Four years later I had to spend one week every couple of months in a hospital getting experimental chemotherapy. I would lie in the hospital bed, close my eyes, and see and hear that lake and those loons. The actual experience lasted perhaps twenty seconds, but it sustained me through hours and months.

Perhaps each human life is fed by the underground spring of a few experiences. When we are there, we touch something beyond words. Four such experiences come to my mind. Perhaps there have been a few more. They make me who I am to me, who I am under the personas I assume to negotiate my way in the world.

For more Rod's background and the history of Heron Dance, click here.

To learn about Rod's cancer treatment, visit here.

To subscribe to The Heron Dance Nature Art Journal , visit here.

Visit here to read Rod's "Artist's Perspective".