Drawing from Heron Dance interviews and the journals, memoirs, interviews and autobiographies of creative outsiders, Creativity as a Way of Life includes insights into the creative process of a working artist, author, filmmaker or musician. These quotes are selected based on their creative spark — potential to get us thinking and creating. Each post also includes my journal reflection on that quote and one of my more recent abstract paintings.

The book also explores the use of journaling in the creative process.

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 potentials.
- 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.
We need that song from you, the song that only you can sing.

. . .

I’ve been journaling for fifty years. It is a practice that has helped me understand my life, its patterns and potential. Putting thoughts down on paper, weighing decisions in writing, forces an element of logic on a process that simply thinking or meditating on those decisions lacks.

These quarterly journals allow you to record, on a single page, thoughts from the same day of the year each year for five years. During this process you will identify the hidden patterns that underlie your life — patterns you may not be consciously aware of. On the other side of each daily two-page is a painting and an inspirational quote on living a quality life, an interesting life, a big life, a creative life.

These journals will be available in a variety of formats. Starting with the least expensive:

• PDF

• Kindle

• Looseleaf hole-punched for a standard binder (the sheets are 8.5 x 11 in size). If you need more room for extensive journaling on any particular day simply insert a widely available lined, punched sheet. Custom Heron Dance binders that can hold the loose leaf pages will also be offered.

• Double wire-o bound (pictured in the mockup above) similar to the Nurturing the Song Within Diary.

• If we get a Kickstarter funded, there will be a hardcover with a Smyth sewn lay-flat binding. Each copy will be signed and numbered. More here.

I welcome any feedback. You can email me with private comments (rod@herondance.org) or post on Substack.