Celebrating Life,
And the Beauty and Mystery of the Natural World

A Pause for Beauty is the once-a-week free version of the daily Journal Meditations of a Wild Artist

Each A Pause for Beauty features a painting and reflection on the gentle arts of a well-lived life, as seen from the periphery, from the woods. Each is accompanied by a PDF of the art and words that you can print out.

I live in the woods and create Journal Meditations of a Wild Artist. I consider it my honor and privilege to offer words and images of beauty to readers early each morning. It is an expression of gratitude for the gift of life, an expression of reverence for the beauty and mystery of the natural world.
       - Rod MacIver, artist, Heron Dance founder. Heron Dance was founded in 1994.

Heron Dance also publishes Journal Meditations of a Wild Artist each day via email and each month via PDF. To read more about Journal Meditations of a Wild Artist and other benefits of membership in Heron Dance visit here. Memberships are based on contributions of $2 a month or $20 a year.

To receive A Pause For Beautyonce a week via email, use the sign up form to the right.

You can also order the Meditations Journal binder designed to hold A Pause for Beauty and Journal Meditations of a Wild Artist. Click here.

Heron Dance publishes an annual Art Journal . To read more about this hardcover book, click here.

Heron Dance began as a newsletter in 1994 and gradually grew into an art journal based in part on the hundreds of interviews Rod has done of artists, wilderness adventurers, people who serve some concept of a great good, filmmakers, poets, writers and musicians and others with unique perspectives on what it means to live a truly alive life. The journal has frequently drawn on excerpts from books – memoirs, novels, biographies and books of poetry.

A Pause for Beauty is also posted on the Heron Dance Facebook page, visit here.

Roderick MacIver, founder of Heron Dance:

This work evolved out of a life of searching, including a search for harmony with myself. The truths underlying life, the human experience, are contradictory, illusory and revealed only in glimpses. Even harder than realizing them is living them.

Living in the woods, paddling wild rivers, and the creation of art that evolves out of those experiences, are the basis of my life. I live near a particularly beautiful river and I’ve learned that when I’m out of sync with that current of wild water, with the rapids and the calm sections, that my life is probably out of sync. I try to bring the best of myself to that watery world and then live out of the experiences there in my daily life.

My work is multimedia, unpredictable: art and words combined in an effort to dig into what it means to live a well-lived life, a life that is its own work of art.

To read more on Rod’s background, visit here.