The following rough notes were used to improvise off in the creating the video voiceover. What I actually ended up saying was different than these notes, but they may help clarify anything unclear in the video.

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I want to talk about a book that is just now going on sale that I created 18 months ago, but first, to put it in context for newer subscribers, here’s a little about the history of Heron Dance.

Before Zen Mountain Journal, for twenty years, Heron Dance was an art journal that explored topics related to gratitude as a philosophy of life and spiritual practice, creativity and the human connection to the natural world. After a hiatus of a few years, I relaunched Heron Dance as a Substack. Eighteen months ago I published a hardcover book of my art and writing, Nurturing the Song Within. It does have similarities with Zen Mountain Journal, although they approach the subject from different perspectives – east and west. Both explore our connection to our inner world, and both use journaling as a tool for accessing those deeper levels of awareness and inner peace.

Because it is outside the focus of my current work – the ancient poetry of Taoist mountain hermits -- I’m reducing the price of Nurturing from $95 to $77 including shipping for the last few copies.

I’d like to tell you a little about the book. It is full color throughout, smythe sewn binding – the highest quality commerical binding for books available -- dust jacket, first edition. It is full of my art, but in terms of written content, it summarizes everything I’d learned in thirty plus years of living a creative life on my own terms, including the struggles, false hopes and dead ends. And the deep meaning I’ve found doing this work.

For the right person on your Christmas list, for a creative person, someone to whom living a meaningful life is important, the book is an extraordinary Christmas gift.

Some subjects the book explores:

• Life as a sacred journey. That which is sacred, every sacred path, requires sacrifice.

• The journey starts with an expression of gratitude. We seek to invite into our work and life unseen influences. What we express gratitude for grows in significance in our lives.

• Nurturing the Song Within explores difficult questions at the heart of a human life. The quality of the questions we ask ourselves determines, in part, the quality of our lives. An important role of journaling is the exploration of questions we’d rather avoid. The dark, dusty corners where the unseen influences, many from our childhood, determine the hidden underlying repeating patters of our lives.

• Having faith in our uniqueness is difficult but crucial to creating a meaningful, unique life.

• The role of a journal in exploring corners of our lives including the dusty, hidden corners, the fearful corners as well as the new creative ideas that may be worth exploring, your relationships with others and with yourself.

• The role of dreams in creating a life. There is no big merit in just being a dreamer, but some outstanding things happen to people who people who dare to do something about those dreams. That’s a quote from my interview of Verlen Kruger, a canoeist who paddled over 100,000 miles in his life.

• What are you living for? What do you want to life for? Between those two realities, you can determine the identity of any person. That’s from Trappist Monk Thomas Merton.

• What are the four beliefs on which you have based your life? Have they served you well?

• The book explores meditation techniques and their use in combination with journaling.

• It explores the use of guides imaginary and real, again in the context of journaling.

• The role of story in our lives – we are defined by the stories we tell ourselves.

• The relationship between art and truth.

• An acorn carries within itself a dream of a mighty oak. The book asks what in your life is trying to manifest.

• The book compares art that is realistic versus art that is a product of imagination, that is created out of something deep but not fully understood.

• It examines the role of persistence, grit and determination in creating a unique life or unique work.

• The shadow, which each of us has, and what we can learn from it.

• The role of self-discipline and self-mastery in creating a unique life.

• The role of money and a financial reserve.

• A theme the book continually comes back to is Work of Love and its role in a life of meaning.

• The relationship between silence and wisdom.

• The achievement of clarity about oneself, and how difficult that is.

• The role of imperfection in beauty and art.

• The role of belief in oneself.

• Surrendering to a call. Staying with it in times of unhappiness. Riding out the storms, the times of bewilderment, and hanging on. It requires a wholeheartedness.

• Our moods, our anxiety and what it tells us.

• The role of simplicity and simple living.

• When you live outside the norm, you can make people who live inside the norm uncomfortable. The way you live can call into question the widely held assumptions. Magic likes to live outside the norm.

• All creative projects suck in their early stages. The final product rarely bears a resemblance to the first draft in a creative work.

Those are about half the subjects explored in the book, but that will give you a good idea. I’ll close with a reading from the book from the pages entitled “Focused energy.” The theme of energy recurs throughout the book. Some paths, some work, some people, some relationships give us energy and some take it away. Life seeks conduits for its energy where it can grow maximally. It seeks relationships and people and places where its energy can be enhanced, can grow and multiply. The book explores the concept of being constantly on the alert for paths, for work, for people where your energy gains momentum, where 1+1=3.

Life is a desperate struggle to be in fact that which we are in design.
- José Ortega y Gasset

The power from energy comes from our ability to control it.

Focused Energy

The way of nature is to take energy from the surrounding environment and use it in a unique way to support growth and reproduction. Trees do it one way, frogs another, birds in their own unique way. As living entities, we too take energy and transform it. We hold energy temporarily and focus it in a way unique to ourselves. We are conduits.

Focusing is the operative word. It is difficult to focus. The tendency is randomness, the dispersion of energy. Focused energy is powerful; dispersed energy is weak. On some paths, your energy will grow, on some it will dissipate.

Part of the process happens on a molecular level, part on a spiritual or metaphysical level. On one level we engage in work to survive, to eat. Taken to an extreme, that is life in the Wasteland where people trade their freedom, their time, their lives for basic needs. They trade their lives for security. They work to avoid life and the risks life entails.

The other kind of work is work of love. Love energy is special energy, capable of transformation. Love energy, when focused, is capable of creating beauty —- transformative beauty that adds to the lives of others. Work of love grows out of our relationship with our inner world. It grows out of a connection with the current that underlies our lives. To focus love energy, that relationship needs to be nurtured. We need to respect and listen to what our inner world has to, wants to, tell us. Our inner world is the reservoir that supports our resourcefulness, our ability to evolve and adapt. Our ability to create.

Journaling can open a portal into our inner world. We open a door and invite that world to help guide our lives. It is shy. It responds to relaxed silence, to gentleness. It often communicates in vague images, part thoughts and glimpses of truth. Patterns emerge over time. Sometimes. Sometimes journaling offers a path ahead that is crystal clear. Sometimes it suggests a path that is not what we want to hear.

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Journaling Questions:

• In a state of deep, relaxed awareness, imagine energy as an entity. Sit with it in silence. Wait for it to gain sufficient comfort to say what it wants to say.

• Ask your energy where it wants to go to grow. On what path, what way forward, will your life force gain momentum?

You can order the hardcover, first edition of Nurturing the Song Within here. It is currently on sale for $77.

You can order the diary/journaling edition (softcover, wire-o bound) here. $49.

You can order both together at the discounted price of $99 here.