To access the website for Rod’s studio and gallery in Hilton Head, visit here:

www.roderickmaciver.com
. . .

Heron Dance

publishes the fictional online journal of Archibald Campbell, wild artist. Well, formerly wild.
Now that he’s eighty, he’s achieved a degree of inner serenity.
He finds that peace and harmony in his creative work and
in the beauty and mystery of wild nature that surrounds his little cabin in the woods.
He writes about his creative process, and extracts from the journals, interviews and writing of other creatives
— artists, filmmakers, novelists, poets.

He looks back on a life of exploration, experimentation, of seeking and searching, of success and failure.

Archibald illustrates how journaling can support your creative process.
Because they are, at least in part, fictional, they can explore truths that transcend the facts.
More on Archibald here.
. . .

Heron Dance explores the use of journaling and meditation in the creation of art, whether that art be painting, sculpture, filmmaking, poetry, or writing. Creative work draws from imaginary worlds, from glimpses of images and ideas right on the edge of our understanding.

. . .

Journaling and your connection with your inner world.

Keeping a journal allows us to self-balance. By writing about our lives, we clarify our vision. Who we are and who we hope to become. By combining journaling with relaxation and meditation, we can pull answers from our subconscious and bring them to the surface where they can be used to shape our life and work.

Journaling is a search for your deepest truths – the truths that underly your life that you may not be aware of. The myths that are guiding you without your knowledge. Journaling offers an opportunity to explore questions that you would rather avoid. On the other side of those questions lies meaning and quality of life. The belief at the center of this work is that your journey is deeper and richer, and the ultimate destination more meaningful, if it grows out of an intimate connection with your inner world.

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

. . .

As much as anything else, the journey is an effort to understand and manifest your uniqueness as a human being.
Your journal is an ally in that process.
To read a first draft of the introduction of our next book (The Creativity Journal: Tools & Techniques) describing the tools mentioned above visit here.

. . .

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.
Sing us the song only you can sing.

. . .

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.
- Denise Shekerjian, Uncommon Genius 

For more on Heron Dance books and online art journals (Substacks), visit here.

For more on the art gallery of Roderick MacIver, founder and publisher of Heron Dance,
on Hilton Head Island visit here.