Joanna Macy: A grandeur that reaches down into our hearts.
For years, Zen Mountain Journal’s predecessor, the Heron Dance Art Journal, explored gratitude as a spiritual practice and as a philosophy of life. I want to weave that back into this current work — a celebration of the beauty and mystery of wild nature and of life. It is an antidote to the often dark and discouraging news we encounter daily. Joanna Macy, a friend of Heron Dance, was one of the bright lights that helped us find the path forward.
Above, a page from the Heron Dance Book of Love & Gratitude, the most popular book Heron Dance has published to date, now out of print. It will shortly be republished as a gratitude journal, available both as a wire-o bound softcover and as a section of the Journal Meditations binder. You can read more about the Journal Meditations binder here.
If you have difficulty reading the page image above, here are the words:
To love means never to be afraid of the windstorms of life: should you shield the canyons from the windstorms you would never see the true beauty of their carvings.
- Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, M.D.But authenticity, and beauty, include brokenness and darkness and death. In moments of darkness and uncertainty, we encounter the depths of our desire that life go on. And, paradoxically, it opens us up to gratitude for this moment — our chance to breathe the air, feel our heart beating, look into the eyes of another being.
In times like that, what’s trivial or tawdry gets stripped away. And the stark grandeur appears. A grandeur that reaches down into our hearts.
- Joanna Macy from a Heron Dance interview, Issue 23
The Journal Mediations Binder is designed to hold sections that can either be used as part of a journaling practice or to house books published by Zen Mountain Press that can be read as standalone creative works of art and writing. Readers can order whichever sections they find to be of particular interest, as well as blank and lined journaling paper and watercolor paper for art journaling.
Sections include or shortly will include:
Journaling as a Tool in the Creation of a Life. (available now)
The Zen Mountain Journal Book of Love & Gratitude (available in mid-November)
Wild Waters and the Tao (available in late-November)
Meditations on Nature, Meditations on Silence (available in late-November)
Thoreau and the Art of Life (available in late-November)
The Man Who Planted Trees and related interviews of Frederic Back (available in late-November)
A Journal based on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature Writing (available early next year)
A Journal based on Walt Whitman’s Nature Writing (available early next year)
Creativity as a Way of Life (available early next year)
The Journals of Archibald Campbell, Wild Artist (available early next year)
. . .
You can read more about the Journal Meditations Binder here.
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 author 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 on high quality art paper. Each two-page spread includes a painting and journal notes on living a creative, meaningful life.