Heron Dance is for, by and about seekers, searchers and creative outsiders:
people who create unique lives based on their own vision and values and dreams as opposed to those of the dominant culture.
We create our reality.
Heron Dance is a working artist’s journal. It is published online in preliminary form, and in a quarterly journal and planner in its print version. It is as useful, interesting and beautiful as we can make it:
Heron Dance explores the use of journaling as a tool in creating a life and doing creative work. Keeping a journal can help us understand the hidden currents that underlie our lives, guiding us without our full awareness.
Heron Dance includes thought-provoking stories from the memoirs and journals of creative outsiders, searchers and seekers intermingled with excerpts from the hundreds of Heron Dance interviews of adventurers, activists and creative outsiders and reflections.
Roderick MacIver, creator of Heron Dance, has been a working artist for thirty years. His work celebrates the beauty and mystery of wild nature and of life.
There are two ejournals, a weekend and a weekday edition.
Weekend edition: Published each Saturday and Sunday. Free, though contributions in support are gratefully accepted. Sample issue here, including a little of the background and thinking behind Heron Dance. Sign up here.
Weekday edition: Published three to four days a week. Available to all who support Heron Dance in any form in any amount including a one time donation, recurring monthly support, the purchase of an art print or original, notecards, a poster, etc. When you make a contribution or order something from the website, you’ll be automatically signed up. Support Heron Dance here.
There are two print books.
Quarterly Art Journal: One two-page spread for each day of the quarter including both a painting and exploration of the ideas and principles at the core of living a quality life based on one’s own values and on one’s own terms. Subjects explored: creativity as a way of life, living with gratitude, life as adventure, the beauty and mystery of the natural world and of life.
Quarterly planner: Designed to work with the Art Journal, it provides room for notes, objectives, plans, appointments and an exploration of the underlying current, individual to you, that is guiding you perhaps without your full awareness.
Access a sample issue and summary of some of the thinking behind Heron Dance here.
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Heron Dance is an evolving creative journey.
Through art and words, Heron Dance explores the beauty and mystery of the natural world, and of life.
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Heron Dance celebrates courage and persistence.
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Heron Dance publishes an e-journal and, starting in early March 2024, a quarterly Art Journal book. Both are entitled Nurturing The Song Within.
Both explore the use of journaling as a tool in understanding one's life, in
creating art and in creating a life. Both explore what it means to live life, and make one’s living, as a creative outsider.
Both are about living on your own terms and your own values in your own way.
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The E-Journal: Nurturing The Song Within
No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.
- Walter Bagehot
Published four to six times a week.
This is the preliminary first draft of sections of the Art Journal.
Each post consists of a nature painting or watercolor sketch, and a thought-provoking story or idea from the memoirs and journals of creative outsiders, searchers and seekers. It also also contains excerpts from one of the hundreds of Heron Dance interviews conducted over the last thirty years.
Recent issue here.
The weekend posts do not require a contribution to subscribe,
but discretionary contributions keep Heron Dance publishing and are deeply appreciated.
Support this work here.
Receive an email each time we publish summarizing that post’s content.
The Quarterly Art Journal: Nurturing The Song Within
Published quarterly, with one two page spread for each day of the quarter.
More here.
Quarterly Planner
Also published quarterly, with one two page spread for each day of the quarter.
More here.
The outward work will never be puny if the inward work is great.
- Meister Eckhart
Life offers an opportunity to manifest the beauty within.
There are many pathways in this life and it doesn't matter which one you take, for they all have a common destination, and that is the grave.
But some paths give you energy and some take it away.
- Cervantes
One ought every day at least to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture,
and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.
- Goethe
There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle.
The other is as though everything is a miracle.
- Albert Einstein
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
- Mary Oliver, The Summer Day
What in your life is trying to unfold?
The objective is clarity. Clarity isn't easy.
Listen for the special music. . . the song that nobody else can sing but you.
Your own karma badly lived is better than someone else's karma lived well.
- Uncommon Genius by Denise Shekerjian
The purpose of a journal is to explore – explore new concepts, new visions, explore fears and explore one’s relationship with oneself. A journal offers a connection to our interior world, to ideas and concepts just beyond our grasp. It helps us achieve clarity about the current that underlies each of our lives, and that guides us without us realizing it.
Man does indeed know intuitively more than he rationally understands. The question, however, is how we can gain access to the potentials of knowledge contained in the depth of us, how we can achieve increased capacities of direct intuition and enlarged awareness. . .
Just as an acorn contains in its unconscious the dream of the oak tree and that dream expresses the coming into being of the oak tree, working with a person, we have to have a method of drawing forth what is in the seed of the person, the unlived potential.
- Ira Progoff, At A Journal Workshop
An acorn contains within it the dream of a mighty oak.
A life journey, a creative journey, grows out of the seed of one’s song.
Nowhere and never and now and forever
I look for a thing that is looking for me.
- Sydney Carter
Creative work of power and beauty,
A life of beauty,
Evolve out of the quiet mind
Out of the quiet stillness inside.
- Journal note.