Background of Roderick MacIver, Artist and Founder

Art, wild rivers, making mistakes, living on some edge or other — certainly on the edges of our culture — and writing about that, are what my life is about. 

Out of those mistakes, rivers, experiments, people I've met has evolved Zen Mountain Journal, at first a newsletter and then an art journal, then a publisher of an annual collection of my art and poetry. And now a Substack and publisher of my journals.

As a boy I roamed the woods imagining myself an Indian, paddled remote lakes in northern Quebec, and once briefly encountered, glimpsed really, a sense of profound harmony while paddling slowly along a wilderness shore. That moment — fleeting, wordless, unforgettable — became the compass point of my life.

I left home when I was sixteen and hitchhiked up to Yellowknife in Canada’s subarctic. I fought fires with Dogrib (Dene) Indians and then spent a few weeks living alone on top of a big rock looking for fires in a lookout tower. A couple of years later I was a commercial real estate salesman, then years on Wall Street doing pre-offer due diligence for corporate raiders and acquirers. In my early thirties I returned to the woods, to art, to writing, and eventually to the ancient poems of Taoist mountain hermits and Zen monks — men who sought the same quiet I once felt, and expressed it in simple and mysterious language.

For thirty years, through Heron Dance and now Zen Mountain Journal, I’ve explored what it means to live your own life in your own way on your own terms. My work is for searchers and seekers, for those who feel called toward quiet, toward nature, toward the Great Mystery. My work is for those who want to give their inner life form through unique work and the creation of a unique life.

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• To read Rod’s Artist’s Statement, visit here.

• To read the foreword by Doug Peacock to the back issue anthology of the first five years of Heron Dance, visit here. His take on the early years is interesting.

• To read Rod’s tribute to the men who have made a difference in his life, The Quiet Men of Beauty, visit here.

• To read how Heron Dance got its name, visit here.