Doug Peacock’s Foreword to the Heron Dance Back Issue Anthology

In the first five years of Heron Dance, 1995-2000, Heron Dance grew rapidly and our supply of back issues sold out. I commissioned a softcover book of those five years of issues — about 550 pages if I remember correctly — and my friend and author Doug Peacock wrote the preface.

Six years ago a guy named Rod MacIver showed up in my backyard in Tucson saying he was on a search for truth. I mentioned a weekend course in Santa Monica where it was possible to get your shaman's license in three days. He wasn't interested. Rod had just left a career in the stock market to follow his passion. It would be an expensive journey. For one thing, he knew he'd soon be staring at divorce papers if he didn't get his ass back on Wall Street. But this guy was dead serious.

It's curious how discovery, such as a significant friendship between two mid-life men, can begin with a single moment, an utterly truthful answer to a simple question offered by the unguarded heart. Had I chosen any other reply, our lives would have been diminished. Instead, I received an immense gift.
About a year later, my father's spirit departed his body. Nearby, from the bottom of Sonoma Creek, a Great Blue Heron lifted out of the muddy shallows and alighted on a stump in dad's backyard. Since that moment my life has been charted by water birds, a flock of giant White Pelicans disappearing high above as dust into the white cirrus and the ubiquitous Blue Herons of my life who represent the man I most loved.
At that exact same time, Rod too was struggling with mortality, his own, a disease for which there is no known cure called non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. He had started a little shoestring publication named Heron Dance. Somehow Heron Dance survived, Rod survived. The gray-blue wing beats blew what remained of the chaff free of his life. Those long legged birds of grace and beauty were parallel reincarnations.
Acceptance of death leads directly to the sensate awareness of the gift of life. And so ”Heron Dance's” search moved into glimpses of the elusive with a creativity sketched with the delicate feather of a plumed bird: beauty, freedom, love. There was no pomposity here. Above all, I admire Rod's courage in lying open these raw chucks of soul without guile or dogma, a physical courage far less esoteric than it sounds.

If you love life and want to live in the world, you must eventually travel beyond observation. The world we love is burning. Change is necessary. Rod MacIver took up causes: peace activism and deep ecology. Yet, the deeper evolution I see in the last five years of Heron Dance has been a steady unratcheting of tight doctrinaire approaches to issues and a conscious movement away from anger. This, I think, is a big deal: the presence of extreme anger among those of us who love the Earth has been a severely limiting factor in our ability to defend the same wild landscapes. Especially in men. Projecting hostility outward misses the mark when the abode of rage is the self. Heron Dance explored fear and the letting go of anger with both creativity and elegance providing a great service to people like myself who knew that the hostile tendency to think poorly of others often prevents you from seeing what's really there.

Rod considers his greatest strength – and weakness — to be an intolerance of bullshit and hypocrisy, which has led him over time to a suspicion of people espousing high ideals. He is not always a pleasant animal to hang out with. But it also misses the point: freedom and searching for the truth come at a price. The trail winds through joy and sadness; danger may lurk just around the bend. This journey is Heron Dance’s victory, a triumph from which we must take heart to travel our own bold trails.