Journal Meditations
Working with inner silence.
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
. . .
Life is a desperate struggle to be in fact that which we are in design.
- Ortega y Gasset
Below the push and pull of our everyday lives there exists a vast reservoir of life experience and wisdom. It is individual to each of us. It holds the lessons of our successes and failures, and it holds something else: a potential, a gift, a uniqueness, seeking to manifest. It often doesn't communicate in words. It offers feelings, images, moods, colors — the vague shapes that seemingly arise out of nowhere. It wants to guide us. It waits. It is reticent, shy. It responds to relaxed silence, not to demands. Journaling helps us better understand the symbols and messages that emerge. Writing down the thoughts that form can add clarity to what comes bubbling up.
Combining journaling and meditation is an act of self-love, self-referral and self-healing. Friendship with yourself, with your quiet interior, is the basis of resourcefulness. A friendship with your quiet interior allows you to better understand the patterns of your life. A special power comes from diving deep into that world and accessing the wisdom it contains. It requires nurturing.
Your inner world guides you without you knowing it. Our thought patterns determine the quality of our lives. Journaling can help us understand patterns that have been associated with times of deep peace and accomplishment, and patterns that have repeatedly been associated with setbacks and times of turmoil. Journaling techniques — which rely on quiet time, reflective time — can allow us to better understand the options life is presenting us.
Your subconscious mind is trying to help you all the time.
So many journal entries are dead ends but you don’t know until you write them down and think about them.
My main influences in the whole idea of keeping a journal were, oddly, Henry David Thoreau and Tom McGuane. The latter used to keep his on tiny dime store notebooks, which he would toss in a box. The best and most influential journals for me where those of Dostoyevsky, with Flaubert coming in as a close second, also Loren Eisley.
It’s important for a writer not to put too much in a journal for fear of losing the energy and attention that should be left for the work itself.
Your subconscious mind is trying to help you all the time. That’s why I keep a journal –- not for chatter but for mostly the images that flow into the mind or little ideas.I keep a running journal, and I have all of my life, so it’s like your gold mine when you start writing.
- Jim Harrison, (novelist, Dalva, Legends Of The Fall). The notes above are from his journal while writing Dalva.
The private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being
It is easier to sail many thousand of miles through cold and storm and cannibals ... with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being.
- Henry David Thoreau, in his journal
Nothing was ever so unfamiliar and startling to me as my own thoughts.
My journal should be the record of my love. I would write in it only of the things I love, my affection for any aspect of the world, what I love to think of. . . I feel ripe for something, yet can’t discover what that thing is. I feel fertile merely. It is seed time with me. I have lain fallow long enough.
- Henry David Thoreau, in his journal.
If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for. Between these two answers, you can determine the identity of any person.
- Thomas Merton, My Argument With the Gestapo
Most of us have a strange inclination toward that which is counterproductive in our lives. If we pretend those patterns don't exist, they keep recurring. Written down, they can be seen, and addressed.
The juice, the truth of a human life, hangs out in the contradictions — between what we believe and how we live, between who we are and who we want to be. The contradictions can be a verbalization of a vision seeking to be born. That is the territory a journal explores. Some of the questions it raises are interesting. Some are fun. Some are hard, and if you do it right, some of the answers will be difficult to accept.
Journals from Zen Mountain Press
The Tao Te Ching Journal: A Path To Inner Quiet
Zen Mountain Journal blends the ancient wisdom of the Tao with contemplative art, reflections drawn from a lifetime shaped by wilderness, solitude, and decades doing creative work on the outer boundaries of our culture. These journals are companions for seekers — guides in the reconnection with inner quiet, beauty, and the “soundless music” of a life lived with simplicity and meaning.
• Size: 9.25 × 8.5 inches — convenient size for desk or lap.
• Hardcover — the book can be written in without a table or desk.
• Double wire-o bound to lay flat.
• Printed on Mohawk Superfine, a premium uncoated paper for a beautiful writing surface.
• 160 pages.
Nurturing The Song Within explores the inner work out of which creative work and a unique human life evolve. It contains key insights from hundreds of interviews Heron Dance founder Roderick MacIver has conducted over the last thirty years of people who choose their own path in life, and persist through the challenges and setbacks to make their dreams real.
Those interviewed include artists, adventurers, activists, and people who devote their lives to serving others. The book explores the murky waters of deep imagination, friendship with one’s inner world, and how those inspire creativity. In the interviews, and through reflections on both those interviews and his own life, the author seeks to understand the hidden wellsprings that guide and provide the clarity and courage required to create a unique life. This is a book by someone who has done it –- who has been a fulltime working artist for thirty years. Over ninety of the author’s full color paintings accompany the reflections and interview excerpts in each volume of the two-book set.
A human life is an expression of ideas, of dreams, of courage and of discipline. Or the lack thereof. A life fully lived, a unique life, grows out of something deep – the essence of a human being. It evolves out of that which is sacred inside each of us. Its exact source is difficult to explain; it can however be sensed and understood.
There are still a few copies of the first edition of Nurturing the Song Within available. This is a premium art book with a Smyth-sewn lay flat binding printed by on high. quality art paper. Each day two-page spread includes a painting and journal notes on living a creative, meaningful life.
Hardcover first edition with dust jacket. $87. Order here.
PDF $9.99 including tax. Order here.
More information here.
The Pausing For Beauty Poetry Diary
This beautiful undated diary contains dozens of poems selected to inspire thought about the nature and meaning of life and our connection to the natural world. The poems are accompanied by dozens of Roderick MacIver watercolors, some in full color, some watercolor sketches and delicate washes.
The Poetry Diary contains plenty of room for your journal notes and own poetry.
114 pages in total.
$44 print version. Order here.
$9.99 PDF. Order here.
A binder, and the books that go in it
During the last thirty years Heron Dance Press and its successor, Zen Mountain Press, has published sixteen books. Most are sold out. Rather than reprint them one at a time, we’re bringing them back as inserts for the binder pictured above. You order the inserts that interest you, add blank journaling paper (watercolor paper, premium writing paper, plain or lined) or use your own standard 11 × 8.5 inch paper, and build the journal that fits your life. Every insert will also be available as a PDF that you can print out and insert in a standard three-ring binder.
The first insert is the one on journaling: Journaling as a tool in creative work and in creating a life. It explores the tools I use to understand the patterns beneath my life and explore the territory between the life I'm living and the life I want to live. Meditation and the role of quiet before writing. Accessing the image your deeper wisdom suggests for this period of your life. Reading old journals for recurring patterns. Stepping stones, and the roads not taken. Three successes, three failures, and what they have in common. Merton's two questions. Dialogue with your future self, with your creative work, with your still point. Each section ends with one or more journaling questions.
The inserts draw from the hundreds of interviews of people who created lives on their own terms, and from my own journals about similar endeavors — arranged so that you can set them beside your own life. Each is a book first. Each can be read as a book and kept as a book; the gratitude and nature content in particular asks nothing of the reader but a quiet half hour. Order the blank pages if journaling interests you.
The first insert, on journaling, goes to the printer in the next few days, with Wild Waters and the Tao close behind. The binder itself should be available for pre-order later in September — as soon as the company making them provides a firm ship date. Each insert will also be available as a PDF as soon as it is ready for anyone who would rather begin now creating a binder of their own. Supporting members receive complimentary access to all PDFs.
The book inserts listed below will be available over the next two or three months:
Wild Waters and the Tao — the Tao Te Ching as seen from a canoe: rivers, rapids and the water's way of getting where it is going.
Creativity as a Way of Life — the inner work underlying creative work, with the journals of artists, novelists and poets: Steinbeck's working days, Anne Truitt, Robert Henri's The Art Spirit.
The Heron Dance Book of Love & Gratitude — the most loved book we ever published: peace through the acceptance and appreciation of small natural blessings.
Thoreau and the Art of Life — from his journals — the early thoughts out of which he created Walden and his other books. His journals totaled two million words.
Emerson's Laws of Nature, and Whitman's Leaves of Grass.
Meditations on Nature, Meditations on Silence.
The Journals of Archibald Campbell, Wild Artist.
The Man Who Planted Trees — Jean Giono's shepherd, and my interviews with Frédéric Back, who spent five years and twenty thousand drawings turning the story into a film.