Living close to wild nature, creating art and a life.
The beauty and mystery of the natural world.

I live in the woods of New York’s Adirondack mountains, a quiet life on the outside looking in. Birdsong, a few good friends, paddling wild rivers. Painting. And creating Heron Dance. It has taken a while, but I’ve found that peace I traveled a lot of roads and rivers to find.

I started Heron Dance in 1994 as a newsletter that explored what it means to live a meaningful life. In the beginning, the publication was strident. I was on an evangelical mission to oppose the dominant values of our culture. I see life now more in shades of grey. The challenge has become one of nurturing the peace inside myself and creating out of that place. The world as mysterious and the answers elusive, and shrouded in beauty. We live lives of discovery, of challenge and adventure. Much of that adventure is related in some way to encountering ourselves, our inner beauty and 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.

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

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. That sacred place, that Grail Castle as Joseph Campbell called it, differs person to person.

My experience is that I can feel that I’m in the Grail Castle when I’m living with people I love, doing what I love. I get that sense of being fulfilled. But, by god, it doesn’t take much to make me feel I’ve lost the Castle, it’s gone. One way to lose the Grail Castle is to go to a cocktail party. That’s my idea of not being there at all.

You don’t really have a sacred space, a rescue land, until you find somewhere to be that’s not a wasteland, some field of action where there is a spring of ambrosia—a joy that comes from inside, not something external that puts joy into you—a place that lets you experience your own will and your own intention and your own wish so that, in small, the Kingdom is there. The joy is there.

A sacred place is hermetically sealed off from the temporal world. When you’re in such a space, there is no penetration through the enclosure. You are in an eternal zone that is protected from the impact of the stimuli of the day and the hour.

The Grail Castle — for that’s what this sacred space is: the place where your associations are not with the field of phenomenal experience, but with the field of your own inward life. You do not get there in the normal run of life. To visit the Grail Castle, you have found a sacred space. Then, once you have found the connection in your sacred space, you can perhaps translate it into other parts of your life.

To live in sacred space
is to live in a symbolic environment
where spiritual life is possible,
where everything around you
speaks of exaltation of the spirit.

A Joseph Campbell Companion, selected and Edited by Diane K.
Osbon

Quiet, beautiful places in the woods sustain me, whether they be in northern Canada or a few hundred yards out my back door here in the woods. I grew up surrounded by fields and forests. Many of my memories of childhood are of 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 in northern Canada. 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.

Over the last thirty years I’ve filled dozens of journals with excerpts from books and quotes from interviews. My words in Heron Dance evolve out of reflections on the words of others who are or were on their own search for truth. I want live in a way that nurtures my inner wisdom and peace.

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 senior official in Canada’s 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 treatment. 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.

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.

– Albert Camus

My heart first opened in the woods. I seek to serve the sense of peace and joy I have found and continue to find out there.

For more on Rod’s background the history of Heron Dance, click here.

To reach Rod by email, (rod(at)herondance(dot)org), click here.