Projects And Random Thoughts:
An Update On What Is Going On Behind The Scenes At Heron Dance

Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart
And try to love the questions themselves.
Live the questions now.
- Ranier Maria Rilke

Sunday, May 4, 2025

Art of simplicity and minimalism have long interested me, from the poetry of the Taoist hermits of the Zhongnan Mountains of south China to Zen drawings that capture, with a few lines or brush strokes, the essence of the spirit of a bird or mountain. Lately I’ve been exploring different approaches to simplicity in my art. The idea is to create paintings that contribute peace and harmony to the homes where they end up.

Several years ago, I published a book, Wild Waters and the Tao. It quickly sold out and I’ve never reprinted it. For this next chapter of Heron Dance, I’m going to take this work farther. The words will improvise off of the Taoist and Zen poetry I’ve often quoted in Heron Dance over the years, or draw directly from that poetry and writing, and the art will be my effort to combine peace, serenity, gentleness, serenity, harmony in simple images of grace and beauty.

To guide me, and let readers know where this next stage in the evolution of Heron Dance is headed, I’m using the following as my guide:

Art and writing inspired by ancient Zen and Taoist poets.

Wednesday, April 30, 2025

I’ve fallen behind with the publication of the weekly “Journal Meditations of a Working Artist.” Mostly it is because I’ve been painting a lot. The objective is to get a body of worthwhile work together, have an opening event to which I’ll invite readers, local collectors and interior designers. I have finished seventeen new works so far out of over a hundred started and set aside. I’ll schedule the opening when I have 32 in total.

The challenge has been to take the work in a new direction, one that is more abstract and “pregnant with unknown meaning.” Unknown because it represents something that can be sensed but not understood — something representative of deeper realities. Many of these paintings explore in some obtuse way darker realities without that being my intent.

Heron Dance has been struggling lately for several reasons. It has a solid core of support, though one gradually eroding. Tentative efforts at expanding the readership have been unsuccessful, perhaps because of a lack of focus. The market for online “content” is oversupplied and challenging. I’ve been distracted by a couple of minor health issues, and getting the gallery set up and new work completed. The political realities of America are discouraging to many, including myself, and readers and supporters have retreated. This harsh reality seems destined to becoming economic as well as political. And then, of course, all the changes I’ve introduced over the last year. None have been particularly well received, including experiments with journaling, creativity and abstract art.

So where does this leave Heron Dance? I honestly don’t know. The best I can come up with is let’s see how the gallery opening for the new work goes. The way forward should then be clearer.

Sunday, April 6, 2025

I had my gallbladder removed Tuesday, so was low energy this week. I’m doing fine now though.

Heron Dance is struggling. Not financially, but it is suffering from indifference. As mentioned earlier, subscriber numbers are flat. We spent a few hundred dollars to experiment with marketing on Reddit and Facebook, got 70 one-month trial subscribers, and only one became paid.

Ever since Trump took office, Heron Dance has been in the doldrums. It isn’t just Trump of course. It’s also the huge amount of content available to us all. With so much quality stuff — okay, much of it isn’t quality, but much is — out there for free, we don’t want to pay for anything.

I find myself struggling to maintain my internal momentum. I accomplish it by constantly experimenting with the creation of new art. I notice I keep painting dark paintings. It is not intentional. They start out lighter, and I keep adding dark blue for reasons I don’t completely understand.

Heron Dance has gone through lots of dark times over its twenty plus years. It has always been the few whose encouragement and even enthusiasm have kept me at it. Of those I’ve gotten to know, it is their (your) goodness, kindness, that inspires me and keeps me doing the work.

For now, I just need to do enough quality new work to hold an opening in the Hilton Head gallery, and see where we go for there. I’m missing Vermont and the woods of Algonquin Park in Canada.

Every day I read the news and think that civilization — always prone to self-destructiveness — has gone completely off the rails. This article in particular has captured my imagination:

Climate crisis on track to destroy capitalism, warns top insurer

Wednesday, March 5, 2025

I’m starting to wonder if, in the age of Trump, Heron Dance has a role to play. By every business metric: number of subscribers, number of new subscribers, cancellations and lapses, art sales, results from marketing expenditures, enthusiasm for this work by readers has declined significantly. To the extent it is a business rather than a passion, a calling, it is one into which I pore sixty, seventy hours a week with a breakeven result.

Its continued existence depends on the results of my new art among the more affluent population of Hilton Head. I read recently that the economy would be in a recession if not for the expenditures of the top 10% in terms of net worth and income. That has not historically been Heron Dance’s market. In addition, Heron Dance’s loyal subscriber base is aging, not buying art. I get frequent emails from people who tell me that while they love Heron Dance, their failing eyesight no longer allows them to read. And of course, anyone dependent on the federal government for their livelihood has either lost their job or is running scared. That’s not a large segment of the Heron Dance base, but it is a portion.

I think that many who have supported Heron Dance in the past are scared, and looking for opportunities to reduce expenditures. It is a bewildering time. To many of us, the country no longer makes sense. We wonder what our role in it is, what our culture actually is, what the way forward is.

The awake, the openminded, the thinkers, the readers, the kindhearted, are in retreat, in disarray.

Saturday, February 22, 2025

After much debate, I’ve decided to stop offering for free, even twice a month, Journal Meditations of a Working Artist. There are a number of reasons. First, the publication is only marginally viable and isn’t growing. Strictly from a business point of view, it probably makes more sense to offer my work free all the time to everyone and ask for donations — which I did originally — because it doesn’t cost me anything to send out, I’m already doing the work for the Members who support it, and free subscribers do occasionally buy art and books. But I put so much into this work, and am sensitive to the fact that many understand that they need to pay for just about everything else they consume, but think that art should be free and artists happy working for nothing. I want my work to be valued. I need it to be valued to continue to pay the bills, and I need it to be valued to continue to pour as much of myself into it as I do. Very few readers make the transition from free to paid, even those who read every post as soon as it comes out. Many of these people are affluent. Some even send me messages telling me how much Heron Dance means to them. But even readers of limited means can afford $5 a month if they want to.

I will continue to send free subscribers excerpts from my books, invitations to gallery openings and updates on new art, but readers will have to contribute at least something to the upkeep of Journal Meditations to receive it.

In my compulsion to put on paper the abstract images preoccupying my imagination — images of peace and serenity — I haven’t been publishing as regularly as I want or need to. I want to get on a every two day schedule, with some off days devoted to promoting Heron Dance Press books, which have also suffered from marketing neglect. And I’d like to get back to sending at 5am in the morning so it’s there for readers first thing. To accomplish this, I’m reallocating some of my day from painting to publishing Journal Meditations.

I’ve begun advertising a little on Facebook and today, in my feed, I came across the website of acting coach John Markland. He occasionally posts reflections on the creative process — short little notes that make you think. I really like them. Here are a couple of examples:

I like their brevity, their style, and their insight into the creative process. I don’t think he offers these as a subscription, but they can be found on his website, his facebook page and his instagram page. I’d like Journal Meditations of a Working Artist to evolve into new art and short notes more like these.

Intense work continues on the new paintings. In fact, they would probably be closer to what I'm after if I didn’t work at them with so much intensity. It is like the Zen student who asks the teacher how long it will take master Zen.

“A lifetime,” replies the Master.

“How about if I work on it day and night?”

“Oh, in that case, all of eternity. The harder you chase, the more enlightenment retreats.”

But I’m living on Hilton Head Island, don’t really know anyone here, and don’t have much else to do other than work and walk on the beach. And it is my nature to focus single-mindedly on an objective. Also, I want to get a body of work together, reorganize the gallery around it and announce an opening. I’ve accumulated email addresses for the three hundred or so interior designers in South Carolina and Savannah and want to assess the degree of their interest in this new work. I’ll invite them to the opening.

I guess I just have to meditate more, and approach the work from a more relaxed, peaceful, gentle mindset. The work I want to create resides right on the edges of my self-discipline, my self-control; my fingertips are almost touching it. I can almost taste its delicate beauty.

Monday, February 17, 2025

I’m finally making major progress with abstract painting. After well over a hundred attempts, some of which turned okay, better work is starting to emerge. There are two primary characteristics of the images that work:

  1. Aesthetically pleasing. The colors and shapes positively affect the mood of a room. I’m particularly after images that add a feeling of peace to a room or home.

  2. It hints at a deeper truth. That truth may not be clear, and in fact probably shouldn’t be. But there’s something going on with the painting that evokes a seeking, a dreamworld, a mystery that isn’t random but also isn’t defined. It offers a message about ultimate (if hidden) realities.

All worthwhile paintings, even realistic paintings, combine those two elements to a greater or lesser degree. A successful painting will emphasize one over the other, but still combine both.

In my case there’s also a third element — contrast. I rarely scan one of my paintings for upload or reproduction where I don’t think, “This painting could use a little more contrast.” It is where light meets dark in a sea of subdued colors and shapes that the drama, the tension, the focal point of interest, exists.

Thursday, January 30, 2025

The whole thing about art, I’ve decided, is the search for the truth under the truth. The search for the truth that can be sensed but not known. That truth is ambivalent about money. It isn’t against money, but it doesn’t serve money. As artists, we want our work to be sustainable. But if we paint, or perform music, to sell, we miss the point.

The truth is ambivalent about comfort, and thus is ambivalent about politics. Politics isn’t about truth or integrity — if it was, we’d elect completely a different set of characters on both sides of the aisle. Politics is about promising comfort to the perpetually uncomfortable.

The truth is about the comfort under the scariness, the uncertainty, the truth that is represented by vague shapes laughing at the absurdity of humanity, at its self-destructiveness, it obsession with status and power and comfort.

Wednesday, January 29, 2025

A sign I’ve posted above my painting desks to remind myself of my objective with my art:

Peace, Serenity, Gentleness, Simplicity
_______________________________

Minimalism

Sunday, January 26, 2025

A lot happened today. I had planned to do a YouTube video talking about today’s paintings and text, but Substack sent everyone a message saying that their subscription had ended. I had to get a post out as soon as possible to stem the tide of concerned emails I got from supporters. But I do plan to start putting out YouTube videos for most, if not all, posts. I’ll probably talk about the painting or paintings in the post, and maybe have clips of me painting it.

Also, I’m considering steep discounts for members on all original paintings and prints on the website, possibly as much as 80% off unframed originals and prints, and half off framed originals and prints. I want to make room in my gallery for my abstract works since they will be the focus of my marketing to interior designers. I just want to get a few more abstracts finished first. If you support my work, and there is an original or print you are interested in, contact me and I’ll give you a significant discount.

Finally, you may have noticed that I struggle with focus. The reality is I am interested in a huge range of subjects and my mind constantly wanders from one interesting subject to another. Here’s a reminder I posted under my computer screen today in an effort to better keep in mind what I need to do:

Be useful to creatives.
The inner work underlying creative work.
A chronicle of a journey – an artist’s evolving work.
Excerpts from my journals and those of other artists, novelists, poets, filmmakers.

Tuesday, January 21, 2025

I decided to kill off Archibald. Two reasons. I want to focus on abstract art. And I want to write fewer words, and Archibald really needs a story line. Words to tell a story, words to roam. I want to take the ideas that are important to me on this creative journey and condense them to as few words as possible. And emphasize the art. I want to create abstract art that embodies peace, and that brings peace to the homes where my art ends up.

So Archibald, no longer fulfilling any useful purpose, set off for his favorite lake in Algonquin Park, Great Trout Lake (in reality Big Trout Lake), where he sat at the base of one of the huge white pines there on that bluff overlooking that beautiful place, sipped wine and slipped into the next reality.

. . .

Heron Dance is going to start sending out a series of five welcome emails, one per day, to new free Substack subscribers to acquaint them with the work. As things are now, someone might sign up and then not receive anything from Heron Dance for two weeks because free subscriptions are now sent out twice a month. The images from four of those posts are below. The fifth will be a video, not yet finished.

Sunday, January 19, 2025

A friend from decades ago — we were very close in our twenties — but have for decades lived on opposite coasts of the continent — has MS. He has limited mobility and spends much of his day looking for interesting things on the internet and sending them to me and some other friends. Yesterday he sent me an interview of Marc Benioff, Chief Executive Officer of Salesforce. It was interesting on many different levels — his discussion of artificial intelligence and its use in customer support and medicine, the innovative uses of technology that he’s supporting in his extensive philanthropic efforts and, at the end, some closing thoughts on what entrepreneurs should do at the beginning of each year, and review each day.

  1. Get clear about what you want out of your business and your life.

  2. Pursue those intentions with extreme radical focus.

  3. Before you make plans, think through the values and principles that need to determine those plans.

  4. Carefully develop your plans based on your objectives, your focus and your values.

  5. Think through the obstacles you are likely to encounter.

  6. Develop KPIs — Key Performance Indicators — so that you can constantly assess your progress in achieving objectives including financial yardsticks.

    I’m an entrepreneur mostly out of a desire to survive as an independent entity — to stay afloat financially without getting a job. Which I haven’t had since I was seventeen. My takeaways from the interview:

    1. AI is an important tool. As creatives we can tend to think of it as a threat, but it can be important in creative work, such as in accomplishing routine tasks like synthesizing our rough notes into something usable. Author Seth Godin talks extensively in his interviews (on YouTube) of his use of the AI software Claude in writing his books. Claude doesn’t do the creative work, but makes the underlying wide-ranging research and the synthesis of his ideas much easier.

    2. Heron Dance continues to suffer from my lack of focus. Benioff talked about a meeting with his friend Steve Jobs when Jobs was developing the iPad. Jobs had two major ideas that Apple could develop, but he felt that Apple could only focus on one major project at a time, despite the fact that it was by then a huge company. I have too many projects underway and so am not making enough progress on any of them — the new book, the gallery, the online journal. My abstract art. Converting the fourteen books I’ve written into Kindle format. The marketing. Creating YouTube videos of my books and overall work.

      The Benioff interview has me again thinking that I need to narrow the focus of this work to “The inner work underlying creative work.” I want Heron Dance to be a source of inspiration for creatives, and a source of validation for creative outsiders. Which I consider myself to be.

      A week ago I would have said the focus of this work is the quest for inner peace. As creatives though, we find inner peace through the nurturing of the creative impulse at the core of our being. And, in my case, time spent in nature. But the peace that I find in wild nature is also a major element in my creative work. So it all feeds on itself. I’ve simplified the structure of Heron Dance. Now I need to simplify the focus in terms of creative output.

      As far as my painting goes, I want to create abstract work that brings a sense of peace to a home, a sense of refuge from a chaotic, often bizarre human world.

Friday, January 17, 2025

The next book has been completely rethought in the last week. It is now entitled Creativity as a Way of Life: Journal Meditations of a Working Artist. I plan a short summary of the use of journaling as a tool in creative work and in creating a unique life, and then 150-170 pages of inspirational thoughts on the creative process along with abstract paintings. I plan to focus on abstract and abstract impressionism for the next few months at least. Painting vague ideas, emotions, images from my dreamworld — images of feelings and moods — paintings designed to inspire moods — rather than birds, people, animals or things. I’m really excited about it.

Other than that, a number of marketing initiatives are about to launch — Google, Facebook and in particular Reddit. And a letter will shortly go out to potential art collectors on Hilton Head. The gallery made its first sale yesterday.

The main goal for the rest of January, second only to work on the book, is to post a number of YouTube videos of me talking about what Heron Dance does and why — Archibald Campbell, the books, the art.

Tuesday, January 7, 2025

I continue to think through the various themes that Heron Dance has explored lately and wonder which to emphasize going forward. An impartial observer might suggest no focus — my interests are too varied, my tendency to meander off in new directions too compelling, for me to focus long term on anything.

And yet, I feel the need to focus. If what I do is not clear, readers won’t know what they are subscribing to and will thus be reluctant to support it. And also, for my own internal harmony I need to know what I’m doing, focus on something and do my best work.

The three draws:

  1. Creativity as a way of life. What it means to be a cultural outsider in this culture. Artists are often entertaining in a funky off-beat sort of way. And creativity involves inner worlds, a primary area of interest to me.

  2. The hero’s journey. Living on an edge of some sort, in particular a creative edge, where the rules don’t work and you have to live by your wits. Living with unpredictability. Resourcefulness. These are all themes that have been an integral part of my actual day-to-day life for the last 50 plus years.

  3. Peace, internal peace and harmony. Creating work that embodies peace, both in terms of words and images. At the end of the long journey of ups and downs, trials and tribulations, Archibald finds a deep inner peace living in a small cabin on the fringes of Algonquin Park in Canada. The peace of accepting the Great Mystery for all of its contradictions, beauty and tragedy. He reads and reflects on the poetry of the Taoist hermit poets of south China.

I’ve gone back and forth on these three themes in the last few weeks in my journals and meditations. In the end, peace is the avenue most drawing me. Imagining my life, through the vehicle of eighty-year-old Archibald Campbell, living in the woods listening to wolves at night and bellowing moose in the fall. Archibald Campbell, formerly wild artist, devotes his work, his art, to painting images that represent to him peace. He reads poetry and reflects. He lives as I hope I would at the age of eighty, a mere twelve years from now.

Sunday, January 5, 2025

Random notes from my journal this fine January day:

Create work of beauty that expresses your gratitude for the gift of life and for the beauty and mystery of wild nature. Write about the peace you’ve found there, and in life. Beauty. Gratitude. Wild Nature. Peace.

Be as pure as you can be about that. Don’t worry about the money. It will take care of itself. Your standard of conduct, the reasons you do the work, are higher than are expected of most. Get your reward from devoting your life to beauty, as you see it, where you find it, including in others. Well, some others.

Handcrafted, a work of care and love. The world is a wasteland. The world needs work of love, to heal.

Lifestyle objective: Take 180 days off a year and travel around and see National Wildlife Refuges and wilderness areas. Spend time in Algonquin Provincial Park in early June and late September.

Great artists are entirely themselves. They’ve got their own vision, their own way of fracturing reality, and if it is authentic and true you will feel it in your nerve endings. 
     - David Foster Wallace

Pay the price of a life devoted to the beauty of nature. Living simply, quietly, devoted to the work.

An artist and his journal.
Go deep inside, into interior worlds.
Someone who has lived a lot. Seen a lot. Done a lot.
Someone who lives in mystical worlds and can see things that others cannot.
Knows a lot about living on one edge or another.
Resourceful.
Someone who knows rejection.
Someone who views the culture as an outsider: independent thinker
Someone inclined to break rules.
A seeker of peace. I imagine Peace, talk to him, ask for advice. 

. . .

 I walk the woods full of joy,
Thinking back to my youth
Of tadpoles and redwing blackbirds
Of rubber boots half full of water
And marshes full of song.

New life fills these woods today
Even the wind feels fresh and new.
Somehow, in these woods,
I too am full of new life
Leaning back against
A great old tree.

. . .

What questions are at the center of my life? What questions do I really want to explore?

Thomas Moore:  The concept of the value of simple pleasure runs through the entire tradition of thinking about soul. 

Dwell in the land of relaxed thinking, focused on natural beauty.

An artist is someone who completes a work. Intentions will take you part of the way but after that, you need to sit down and work. The chances of creating an imperfect work, an incomplete work, a disappointing work, are high. Nevertheless, you sit down and work.

What personal demons should be included in the work, what excluded? What demons enrich the work, which diminish it?

Wednesday, January 1, 2025

A new year. Things finally feel organized at Heron Dance. The website has been cleaned up and the description of what I do and what the work is capable of contributing to the lives of others is finally clearly stated. The financial model — what free subscribers versus Members receive — clarified. The new book structure and design finalized.

Heron Dance enters the new year with three clear objectives:

  • Get the new book finished.

  • Implement a marketing plan based on the benefits of journaling in terms of creative work and creating a life.

  • Make interior designers and art collectors on Hilton Head Island aware of the new gallery.

Tuesday, December 31, 2024

Change made, decisions made in the last few days:

  • More emphasis on art, less on words.

  • Make the words more punchy, challenging, thought-provoking, useful in a journaling practice.

  • Make the free version available only twice a month, and the paid version three or four times a week.

These changes are designed to achieve two objectives:

  • Improve the financial viability of Heron Dance.

  • Paint more. If the work is going to be only marginally profitable, I want to get more enjoyment and satisfaction out of the work. That I get from painting.

I am aware that one of the reasons for Heron Dance’s marginal profitability are the changes I keep making. These changes are often confusing and/or off putting for readers. On the other hand, continuing to do what doesn’t work well doesn’t make a lot of sense. And I’m creative by nature. When I encounter an obstacle my tendency is to try to innovate my way out.

Another reason, a major reason for its marginal profitability, is no marketing. To put money and time into marketing I just need one more book, and that is well underway. Of course I’ve thought that for a while but I keep modifying the work to make it more interesting and useful. And, hopefully, artistically beautiful. But my vision is now clear and the work should be finished fairly quickly.

Friday, December 27, 2024

I’ve been experimenting today with these ideas:

  • Rougher, more abstract paintings.

  • Questions rather than answers. Questions that make you think. Questions that are uncomfortable.

  • More art, less words.

I’m also thinking once again of offering inexpensive posters of my paintings — $30 or $40 each including shipping and taxes. High-quality printing just not as high quality or archival as the prints currently offered.

. . .

In a way, I’m lucky in that everyone who doesn’t like change has left, disillusioned. Creative work is about experimentation and change. Anyone who has written a novel, made a movie, gone on a trip that didn’t involve a lot of money, knows that.

That makes me free to experiment until I get it right. And I will.

. . .

Ed Catmull is President of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studio and author of Creativity Inc. He was interviewed by Tim Ferris for the book The Tools Of Titans.

Ed Catmull: The final film bears no relationship to what we start out with. All our films to begin with suck. We had to start over internally with Toy Story II. We had to do it with Ratatouille. All of our films to begin with suck.

Tim: Why do you say that? Just that the rough draft is really rough?

Ed: This is the big misconception that people have. That in the beginning a new film is the baby version of the final film when in fact the final film bears no relationship with what you start with. What we’ve found is that the first version always sucks. I don’t mean this because we are self-effacing or modest. I mean it in the sense that they really do suck.

People who can't live with failure shouldn’t be artists, shouldn’t engage in creative work. We need them at the post office, where they do the same thing, day after day, year after year, decade after decade. The creative process is about writing your book for years and then throwing it in the fire one night because you know it is no good. And the creative process is about starting again the next morning and doing it right. And then, when you finally get it written so that you feel okay about it, no one wants to publish it. It gets rejected and rejected. But you keep trying because you believe in it. You believe you have something to say. So yes, there's ego involved. And maybe some alcohol. Maybe you need a little alcohol to believe that the world is wrong and you are right.

Rodney Elrod: Why do you think writers like Pynchon, Salinger, and Faulkner go into hiding for so long?

Harry Crews: This may sound a little hippy-dippy, but all writers of any significance are tremendously sensitive. That is to say, sensitive to criticism, to social pressures, and I think that the people you mentioned do that, though none of them would admit it, because they recognize their own intense vulnerability, which they don’t deal with out there, so they hide.

Talent. Ahhhhh, everyone talks about talent. Talent helps. Listen, get all the talent you can. But writing is guts and its courage. You cannot have a failure of courage. Everybody in the world is telling you you’re no good, and you can’t do it, and it’s not going to work. You’ve got to keep talking to yourself, saying, “Come on, son. Come on . . .”
- Erik Bledsoe, Getting Naked with Harry Crews (Interviews)

Thursday, December 26, 2024

I’ve been exploring different ways to present the material in the next book on journaling techniques. It is almost an instructional manual, and thus dry rather than an interesting creative work.

I’ve been wondering how I can make it into a creative work where much of the material is pointed to rather than stated in paragraph after paragraph of prose. Often, over the last year, I’ve turned to the art journals of other artists thinking I might create something similar. Mostly though those seem so funky and playful that they lack deep meaning. Often they are completely indecipherable to anyone other than their creator. They are entertaining rather than tools to understand one’s life. Understanding my life is a preoccupation of mine, in case you haven’t noticed.

But that doesn’t mean my journal can’t combine the funky graphic design with art old and new and an exploration of questions at the core of a quality life and a creative life.

That idea is particularly interesting as an artist and creator because it would allow for a lot of relaxed art not meant to be hung on the wall, which tends to be my best work. And it would mean that I can justify painting for three hours a day. I don’t paint for anything close to that right now.

Heron Dance makes enough money that I can live a simple life. If that is all it ever is — lots of hard work, minimal monetary reward — the satisfaction has to come from the work, from the joy of creating something interesting. That’s what funky art journals would be.

Tuesday, December 24, 2024

Thoughts on what to concentrate on in this book is still evolving. I have hundreds of pages of notes accumulated over the last fifty years that explore different perspectives on the use of journaling in creative work, in creating and living a life on your own terms and on friendship with one’s inner world. These three subjects are all, of course, closely related.

I’ve spent the day today exploring the use of journaling in finding peace with one’s inner world. It has filled me with a kind of inner joy and satisfaction that I remember from the very earliest days of Heron Dance.

I think I’ll pursue that thread for a while.

I find that developing a cover helps me focus my thoughts and direction. So I put together the following mockup.

Mockup of the Cover of the Upcoming Book:
Using A Journal To Probe Deep
(PDF included in Membership)

Wednesday, December 18, 2024

It’s been almost a month since I last posted here. A difficult month in terms of keeping up with everything that needed to be done. The gallery opened. The online journal simplified. Publishing more regularly. Progress on the book.

Everything I do seems to receive an enthusiastic response from a small group of people, and a tepid response from most. Much of that is likely due to all of the changes. Readers are a little confused about what it is I do, and the common theme, if any. To figure all that out probably takes more effort than the average reader is willing to expend. I’ve been engaged in a variety of experiments trying to figure out what works.

I’ve renamed and narrowed the focus of the book I’m working on:

The Creativity Journal: Tools & Techniques

The most interesting content was that on creativity. It is an area I know a lot about, and one I’ve used in my own creative work for thirty years. Creativity journaling tools and techniques complements my online publication, “The Journal of Archibald Campbell, Wild Artist”, and it simplifies what I do. A maxim of any kind of marketing is offer something that your clients, customers or readers can explain to a friend in one sentence. Heron Dance has come to be about 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 edges of our understanding.

The Gallery

The opening of my gallery on Hilton Head got no response at all. In the next couple of weeks I mail the following flyer/postcard to the 2300 homes on Hilton Head that are both owner occupied and worth over $1 million. All I need is 5-10 customers of those twenty-three hundred for this gallery to be a success. I moved to Hilton Head hoping to get to know five to ten interesting people, though not necessarily people interested in my art. People doing interesting things with their lives, people with unusual perspectives on life. But the idea is to produce a flyer, that, regardless of how little current interest the recipients may have in buying art now, is a work of art that some will hold on to because they like the images.

I still get a couple of calls a year from mailers I sent out twenty years ago from people wondering what happened to me. And to Heron Dance. We’re here, still dancing.

Sunday, November 24, 2024

Heron Dance faces two key challenges in its current stage of evolution:

  1. Time-effective, cost effecting marketing plan. Heron Dance is actually surprisingly successful right now given that it doesn’t have a marketing plan. When I think back over the last thirty years, this is the only time its done well — not that its doing great — but is self-sustaining without doing any marketing. I need to find a coach who can guide me through the intricacies of Facebook and Google paid search, and then I need to put real time into it. Or maybe I can figure out what I need to know watching YouTube videos and reading books.

  2. Archibald Campbell still needs to find his stride. Adopting Archibald as a vehicle for the written side of the two Substacks, and eventually the books, needs further refining and thought to achieve good storytelling. The written content boils down to a question with four elements:

    What is the most interesting, unique, beautiful and useful direction I can take this?

  • Interesting is primarily a function of developing the Archibald Campbell character and his interaction with thought-provoking quotes from books, interviews, etc. And storytelling so that the Archibald is a living, breathing character with challenges, foibles and a life journey that resonates.

  • Unique is the combination of art and words, and the semi-fictional nature of the journal.

  • Beautiful is the dependent on the quality of art I can produce. This is the challenge that makes my heart sing. Of the hundred paintings I do a year that see the light of day, maybe five resonate with my heart and soul in a deep way. Upping that to twenty or thirty would be a supreme accomplishment.

  • Useful is the reason I’ve chosen journaling. It is also the achilles heal of this work — my average subscriber has to be somewhere in his or her early eighties. I’ve found that people over the age of 70, and in particular over the age of eighty tend to have limited interest in journaling. That’s not absolute but common. So Heron Dance needs to find a new audience. Of course that would be true of any work I did, and of any business with a clientele with an average age of over eighty — there is an inevitable erosion of the base due to the vicissitudes of advanced age: death, dementia, deterioration of eyesight, etc. But making a major, important contribution to the lives of readers is the ultimate accomplishment of a creator in this business I’m in, and journaling is capable of doing that.

That is just the facts. I’d rather none of them were true — I wish I didn’t have to engage in marketing and could instead put that time into painting. I wish that creating the Archibald character was less demanding, and involved less experimentation and risk. And I wish that Heron Dance could be sustained, long term, by its current subscriber base. Unfortunately, none of those things are true. So I need to better organize around them.

Wednesday, November 20, 2024

Yesterday’s Creativity as A Way of Life post on Substack was the reintroduction of Archibald Campbell’s private fictional journal. It was kind of subdued, kind of gentle, kind of tepid. It has helped me see the way forward. The great advantage of this approach — an artist’s fictional journal — is that it allows me to weave my own journal with a fictional journal and in the process be more honest than I might want to be if I was publishing my actual journal. I want to explore the difficult questions at the center of a human life — questions that journaling can help us come to terms with — difficult questions, questions we’d each rather avoid.

For instance: What questions at the center of your life are you avoiding because you don’t want to deal with the answer?

It also allows me creative freedom to make things up, and in the process tell better stories.

And I can talk about friends in a way the disguises their identity. And make things up about them as I plumb for deeper truths.

Tuesday, November 19, 2024

Long time Heron Dance readers may remember Archibald Campbell, wild artist and paddler of wild rivers. I embarked on that experiment in the waning days of Heron Dance, and though he was highly popular with many readers, many were put off by his erotic misadventures with nude models. The Heron Dance readership quickly separated into two groups:

  1. Give us more Archibald! He’s fun. He’s flawed but fascinating.

  2. Cancel my subscription. I didn’t sign up for porn, I signed up for the beauty and mystery of nature. And nature art.

I grew tired of the controversy and abandoned the effort, and a short while later shut Heron Dance down for a few years. Nevertheless, the non-erotic content from those days was my best work I think. It was semi-fictional so gave me wide latitude to make things up, and embellish. It was the private journal of Archibald Campbell in which he explored a whole range of subjects in addition to his troubled, volatile relationships with wild women — his life living alone in a remote cabin in the woods, his struggle to achieve financial success with his art, his difficulties with human interaction, the books he was reading that had captured his imagination, canoe trips in northern Canada and the art of other artists that inspired him. Perhaps the most controversial of the Heron Dance issues that drew from his journals was The Song I Came To Sing. I may offer it as a Kindle and as a PDF it along with other Archibald issues next year.

I think I want to experiment a little with Archibald as a way to explore journaling in action. But no erotic content. He’s now eighty years old, semi-retired, still living alone in the woods and reading a lot. In his journal he reflects back on a life fully lived, though one not particularly successful from a financial point of view. He has found peace with all of that, and revels in his deep love of nature, of bird song and explores new creative avenues including abstract painting. He’s totally disillusioned with the art world, with the fakery and pretentiousness of galleries and dealers. He has a few close friends that light up his life but in general he avoids human interaction. So part Thoreau, part Jayber Crow, part Harlan Hubbard, part Edmund Hillary, part Sigurd Olson. And part me.

The primary advantage of Archibald is he gives me wide latitude to make stories up and exaggerate experiences I’ve had, and people I’ve known. I can change names and thus protect the guilty. In the process, I can tell stories with more underlying truth than the actual facts allow. And hopefully be more entertaining and interesting in the process.

A historical note — in the mid-1600s, Archibald Campbell was the MacIver clan’s nemesis in Scotland. As a result, there are many more Campbells in the world today than MacIvers. I remember, as a child of seven, telling my Grandfather that my closest friend’s name was Duncan Campbell. “Aye,” he responded, “a black Campbell. Never trust a Campbell.” He then spit into the ground at our feet.

Saturday, November 16, 2024

I’ll sum up the last month or so this way:

  • Though financially successful, the switch from free, donations requested to payment required for the two Heron Dance Substacks, A Pause for Beauty and Creativity as a Way of Life, was poorly executed.

  • The only activity that makes any money at Heron Dance these days are the Substacks. I need to focus more on them.

  • The gallery in Hilton Head is almost ready for opening. Years ago, when I opened a gallery in Middlebury Vermont people came from all over the Northeast and the paintings in the gallery sold out. Heron Dance was then only five years old, and had few subscribers, but they were devoted. And they were mostly in New England. I wonder what will happen this time.

In retrospect the emphasis I’ve placed on creating books over the last couple of years was misplaced. I should have instead focused on creating two great Substacks and on fully understanding how the Substack platform works. The books absorbed huge amounts of time, wore me out, and involve lots of detail management, which I’m not good at. And require capital for inventory. And fulfillment, which is error-prone. And they haven’t overall, made any money. They only make sense at volume, and as part of a marketing plan, but I’ve not ever gotten around to a marketing plan because I’ve been too busy with too many other projects. The Substacks on the other hand involve no inventory, and while marketing would be helpful is not required.

“Focus, focus, focus, simplify, simplify, simplify,” should be my moto.

But still, projects that I have a lot of time invested in, that are close to completion, should get completed.

I have substantial time invested in the new journaling techniques book, Using an Art Journal to Probe Deep, and it is important to the future of the Substacks, so that needs to continue. The new Meditations on Gratitude book needs some design modifications — basically some of the fonts are so large that they don’t look right — and that will take me only a couple of hours, so that should happen. The kindle versions of these books is finished and just need to be uploaded, so that should happen. The Nurturing the Song Within book needs to be reformatted for Kindle, which will take a day or so, so that should happen.

I’ve done a lot of preliminary work on a new book, Creativity as a Way of Life. That should be abandoned, and the content integrated into the Substack by the same name. Maybe I’ll make it into a book in a couple of years.

And I need to get a lot better, and more prolific, at creating videos for YouTube and for the Heron Dance website.

So the two Substacks, the Gallery and videos. Once I get that working smoothly, publishing each Substack three times a week for a few months, and one or two good videos a week, and the Gallery open, then maybe experiment with Google and Facebook paid advertising. Then maybe the Creativity book.

Focus, focus, focus, simplify, simplify, simplify.

Saturday, October 26, 2024

Accomplished in October:

  • Published a book and a poetry diary:

  • Created a new page on the Heron Dance website with all of the different Heron Dance subscriptions, books, journals and journaling tools here.

  • Moved the two Substacks, A Pause for Beauty and Creativity as a Way of Life from free to paid, and reconciled the checks received to paid subscriptions on Substack. The recurring payments are easy, the checks difficult to reconcile in terms of future renewal dates. As a result, Heron Dance no longer accepts checks for subscriptions. If you don’t get what you signed up for, and sent a check, please contact Rod (rod@herondance.org), and we’ll get things set right.

  • Created a page on the Heron Dance website explaining, with pictures, the cancellation process here. This is a simple, straightforward process but seems to baffle some readers who then ask for my help. It is surprisingly difficult and time-consuming for me to cancel subscriptions in the back end of this website and on Stripe, and people who I do help cancel seem to often get charged again. That never seems to happen to people who cancel themselves.

  • Leased gallery/studio space on Hilton Head Island. Heron Dance takes over the space November 1, and hope to have a gallery opened mid-November. I’ve long wanted a gallery on Hilton Head. I can’t explain why I like it there. It’s kind of a country club; I’m kind of a wilderness person. But I do like it there — the weather, the ocean. It has a kind of laid-back vibe. I have the feeling this may be a new chapter in both my life and Heron Dance. Here’s the address:

17 Executive Park Road, Suite 4A,
Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, 29928.

It is on the second floor of a retail/office building to reduce casual foot traffic. Heron Dancers are welcome to stop by any time.

  • Emailed all subscribers who contributed $150 or more in the last six months that they have a complimentary copy of Nurturing the Song Within (if they haven’t previously ordered a copy before or, if they have) a copy of Meditations on Gratitude, Beauty and Mystery. Copies will start going out today, but the process will take a couple of weeks to complete.

  • Began to offer Heron Dance prints as canvas prints on Amazon here.

  • Created the first Heron Dance YouTube Videos, See an example here.

  • I voted.

The focus in November:

  1. The move to Hilton Head, and setting up the studio/gallery.

  2. Spending more time creating the Heron Dance Substacks, and publishing more regularly.

  3. More painting. MORE PAINTING.

  4. Move back to Canada if Trump gets elected and publish Heron Dance from the backwoods of Algonquin Park. And wait for the end of civilization as we know it.

Saturday, October 19, 2024

I’ve just leased gallery/studio space on Hilton Head Island. I take the space over in a week and a half, and hope to have a gallery opened mid-November. I’ve long wanted a gallery on Hilton Head. I can’t explain why I like it there. It’s kind of a country club; I’m kind of a wilderness person. But I do like it there — the weather, the ocean. It has a kind of laid-back vibe. I have the feeling this may be a new chapter in both my life and Heron Dance. Here’s the address:

17 Executive Park Road
Suite 4A,
Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, 29928.

It is on the second floor of a retail/office building to reduce casual foot traffic. Heron Dancers are welcome to stop by any time.

What Heron Dance most needs me to do right now is review carefully the several hundred pages of notes, and journal excerpts by other artists, filmmakers, etc. that I’ve accumulated over the years on journaling. And the thirty or so books I’ve got on the subject, and organize the material, prioritize it and use that as a framework for the art journaling I intend to focus on going forward. I’m creating a new web page, still under development, to organize all the different aspects of this work into a coherent whole. You can see it here.

When it is done, I’ll make the transition to paid with both Substacks. As mentioned on Join Us, if you want to receive either, or both, but cannot afford $5 a month, just send a quick email to Rod, and he’ll add you, no questions asked.

rod@herondance.org.

Meditations on Gratitude, Beauty and Mystery is off to the printer. I’m waiting for a sample before filling pre-orders.

I plan to send a copy of Nurturing the Song Within to all who have contributed $150 or more to Heron Dance over the last twelve months and who have not previously ordered the book. Those who have will receive the newest book, Meditations on Gratitude, Beauty and Mystery, instead. If you receive a book, unordered, and don’t want it, please give it to someone who might.

Wednesday, October 9, 2024

Ok, so back at work on A Pause for Beauty and Creativity as a Way of Life. I put them aside to finish the new book and get the Kickstarter launched. The Kickstarter so far seems to be not working; the response to the relaunch of the two Substacks to paid got a great response, particularly from “Founding members” so I’ll concentrate on that going forward.

This new phase is exciting and challenging. I need to produce work that is both interesting to long time readers who don’t journal and are unfamiliar with the benefits and useful to readers who do journal and have their own processes. Both groups will be put off, probably, by journal prompts, so I plan to avoid those almost all of the time.

The hope — the art part, including watching me paint — will be engaging to many. Art journaling has the huge advantage of being a kind of art that anyone can do, even people who have never drawn or painted anything.

And then of course are those who journal regularly, know it has had a profound affect on their life and work, and are interested in exploring how others do it, and how to expand their journaling skills.

The first post I’m working on: Creativity as a Way of Life.

Tuesday, October 8, 2024

I just realized that it has been three weeks since I posted here. In that time:

  1. I’ve decided to move the two Substacks from free to paid, and from three times a week to once. This is mostly for my own attitude toward my work. A month or so ago two friends told me how much they both appreciate the work. They don’t support it. They read it regularly — I can see in the back end of Substack opens, clicks by subscriber. They are comfortable financially — big houses, etc. I think it is only fair that people who appreciate the work, read it regularly, and who can easily afford $5 a month, support it. I put my heart and soul into this. People who can’t afford $5 a month, but who want to receive it, just need to ask. There is no screening process or anything like that.

    To complete the move to paid, I just need to complete lists of everyone who has supported the work in the last eleven months to the extent of at least $50 so I don’t put people on the free list who should be on the paid. The free list will get something. I’m not sure what. Maybe just a brief description and a link to the YouTube video on that post. YouTube will become the major marketing

  2. Each post will have a YouTube video and an audio reading of the post and description of it. The YouTube video will have the painting in the post, probably me actually painting it, and I’ll discuss it and why the post was selected.

  3. Both Substacks will move to a once a week schedule because of the amount of work involved in preparing a YouTube video. I’ll get better, and faster, at making them, but it will take time to produce them so that they are more polished, more succinct.

  4. At 2am last night I finished the latest Heron Dance Press book: Meditations on Gratitude, Beauty and Mystery.

    It goes to the printer tomorrow. I have a book designer checking out the bleeds, file formats (RGB vs CMYK), etc. before submitting to the printer. There’s more on the book here. If I wasn’t so exhausted, I’d tell you why is it such an important book.

  5. For the next month I’ll focus on the tools and techniques of journaling in both creating a life and doing creative work. That will form part of a book I plan to publish in a month or so, a PDF of which will go to all paid subscribers to both Substacks.

Finally, this time yesterday, I thought I’d spend this winter in New Mexico. I’m now rethinking that. I’m thinking that all I need is a quiet place to work, a little warmer than Vermont in the winter, with good hiking and a good internet connection. Last winter, driving around, staying with subscribers, I spent some time with a long-time subscriber in North Carolina. Maybe somewhere in that area, in the woods.

Friday, September 20, 2024

Notes from my journal today:

Everything has to work together as a cohesive whole. As October 1 approaches, the date both Substacks switch to paid, the key issue looms.

The message of Heron Dance has to be cohesive, the benefits and insights it offers clear.

1. The benefit of art journaling; its usefulness as a tool in digging deep, in accessing levels of inner wisdom. An examined life is worth living. Perhaps the subtitle of Heron Dance in the header should be:

Art journaling: an examined life is worth living.

Print editions.

Short run print books — runs of less than 2000 — in full color with quality binding printed by a quality printer are not profitable even at expensive prices. I love producing high quality books because I love books, but they are not the future of Heron Dance without a much larger audience.

Use Kickstarter to fund short run print editions. Sell out and offer paperback, less expensive versions. But the real future of Heron Dance is in e-book versions, and e-subscriptions: Substack, Kindle, PDFs. Of those, for now, Substack has to be the main generator of income.

The principles of paid versus free on Substack for Heron Dance:

1. Free are the casual readers — the occasionally curious about what I’m up to next.

2. Paid are the readers who recognize the importance of journaling as a tool in understanding what is working in a human life, and what isn’t. Journaling requires a reader to devote a half hour to two hours a week.

The methods of delivery:

  1. Art and writing via images and words on Substack and the Heron Dance website.

  2. Video — YouTube of my painting, reading, flipping through Heron Dance books on the use of art journaling.

  3. Audio — me reading and discussing that day’s content — basically the audio portion of the YouTube content.

Which should be for paid only?

  • Probably YouTube for free because it is great marketing.

  • Written content and a painting for free.

  • Audio for paid.

  • PDFs around which everything revolves would be included in a subscription. People could also order the print version if they’d prefer.

I don’t like accessing content described as free that gets me only so far and then demands payment. I feel manipulated.

So all written content free except for PDFs of art journals, including art journaling techniques (upcoming book Using An Art Journal to Probe Deep) which would be included in a subscription. Important though — don’t overload readers with too much written content. If I do that, most won’t read anything. Cover the material in small slices.

But if the PDFs — PDFs on journaling, on creativity, on gratitude — are the central content around which everything else revolves — the YouTube videos, the Substacks — that is probably a good, and fair, tradeoff. The free Substack content would be what readers currently receive, except of course, new versions.

So under that plan, all of the content would be free except the PDFs and audio.

Each weekly publication of a Substack would offer two approaches — half hour a week, half hour a day for the written exploration — plus whatever time spent painting. Two a week: one on creativity, one on gratitude journaling. Over time, the gratitude journal could evolve to a Buddhist/Taoist journal, then to a life as daring adventure journal, then to a journal on the role of downtime, relaxation, meditation in living a fulfilled, big life. People could of course cancel any time if the evolution was not of interest.

Sunday, September 15, 2024

There are two major challenges to address in this next stage of Heron Dance:

  1. Create compelling content on journaling without being preachy or suggesting prompts, which can feel contrived and superficial. My plan is to offer my own reflections on subjects explored — why I think the issues covered are important, and sometimes my own journal notes on those subjects.

  2. How to best utilize voice and video in this next stage. I’m even considering making the video and voice content free and the written content for paid subscribers only — the written content being valuable in one’s journaling practice. Or maybe the video and voice content should be for paid subscribers only — that’s how most successful Substacks use voice and video. But that would not allow Youtube for marketing. YouTube has the potential to be the most significant marketing option for Heron Dance.

Saturday, September 14, 2024

Lots of progress this week on the new book, Meditations on the Beauty and Mystery of Life, A Gratitude Journal. More importantly, lots of clarity reached on the focus of this work:

Help readers access deeper levels of wisdom inside themselves through journaling, specifically art journaling. It’s not about thought-provoking quotes by others on the arts of life, or on living the creative life. It’s about finding the answers inside. The challenge is to do that in a way that is preachy or superficial. We’re all on a journey, all succeeding sometimes and all failing sometimes. Me included.

  • It’s about using journaling to dig down deep and figure out what is really going on in our lives, including our creative lives.

  • Where does the energy want to go? Why?

  • What recurring patterns in our lives are helpful? Which are counter productive?

  • What do each of us really want out of the precious, fleeting, gift called life?

  • What role does self doubt play? What are we afraid of? What mental images swish around in our heads that inhibit us from realizing our dreams and potential?

  • How do you describe integrity? How do you achieve your deepest integrity? To achieve integrity with others and yourself, there’s a lot of inner work to do. A lot of things have to be organized in our lives. Out of fear and insecurity — we humans are bundles of emotion and messiness — we go to extreme lengths to avoid the crucial issues at the center of our lives. We’re in denial, and rationalize instead of probe deeply.

    . . .

Those are just subjects. Don’t pose prompts. Journaling prompts can come off as contrived, not relevant to a particular person’s life, superficial, so instead write about the subject -- write about topics to explore and why.

. . .

The main objective for the rest of the month: get ready for a Kickstarter launch early in October. That will include:

New:

  • Meditations on the Beauty and Mystery of Life, A Gratitude Journal.

  • Using An Art Journal to Probe Deep (PDF will also be included with Substack subscriptions, as well as be offered on Amazon as a Kindle and as a wire-).

  • Five original paintings.

  • 10 signed, numbered limited edition prints available only in this Kickstarter

Previously published:

  • Nurturing the Song Within, signed, numbered first editions.

  • Nurturing the Song Within Diary Planner

  • PDFs of Nurturing the Song Within, both the diary planner and art journal.

Of those, the only one currently in doubt, the book Using An Art Journal to Probe Deep. All the preliminary work is done but there’s a fair amount of writing to get finished.

Saturday, September 7, 2024

Readers responded favorably to today’s Pause for Beauty on gratitude. It is interesting to me how much more enthusiastic I get about the work, which seems endless these days, when readers respond positively. That’s the major reason I want to switch to a paid Substack from the current, “pay if the spirit moves you.” I’m naturally, as a person, inclined toward swings of enthusiasm and inspiration. Anything that reduces those swings, anything that supports consistency, is good for me as a creative person.

I feel Christmas bearing down on me like a freight train. I spent the day today reviewing all of the progress on books made in the last several months. I was surprised how much progress has been made, particularly on the Meditations on Beauty and Mystery, A Gratitude Journal book. That’s encouraging.

My main challenges now:

  • Make progress on the journaling book, tentatively entitled Using An Art Journal to Probe Deep. I’m like an army always wanting to fight the last war. Today, for instance, I worked mostly on the gratitude book, not the journaling book. The first transition, the most important transition, is in my own mind. But journaling is the focus of Heron Dance going forward — gratitude and creativity journaling — and preparing a book that outlines the important elements of journaling, particularly as it relates to accessing the wisdom and awareness contained within the depths of us, is crucial to that transition.

  • Get books and limited edition prints finished and off to the printer so that they are available to ship by December 1, in time for Christmas. Otherwise, I can anticipate another year of slow progress growing the subscriber base to a more sustainable level.

I’ve worked seven days a week for almost all of the last year except for a few days of travel. I’d like to take a month off before the end of the year and spend it at the Bosque del Apache Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico. To do that, I have a huge amount of work to finish. Work I enjoy. Interesting painting in particular, but a huge amount to accomplish.

But everything is going great, despite the time and work pressures.

Wednesday, September 4, 2024

Lake Abstract II

Day 1 of the transition to a narrower focus — journaling as a tool to access the deeper levels of wisdom inside us — is now behind me. The response was overall good. I can see the challenge is going to be to relax with this new, informal, rougher art form. I need to make room for the cryptic messages that come bubbling up. I want to encourage others to be relaxed and not self-conscious with their journals so first I have to be that way. More an art form, less an exercise in logic. The deeper levels of our awareness often communicate in fragmentary, half-formed messages that only become clear with the elapse of time. I want to make room for that, give it space to evolve.

I’m already questioning my decision to move to a paid subscription model. Though many take advantage of it, it gives others an opportunity to show their largeness, their generosity. Funded by discretionary donation makes my work a little more of a spiritual journey and less of a business. Part of my changing thinking on this was reading a blog post on the subject by Substack expert Sara Fay. Also a number of people have made one time donations, some in substantial amounts like $500, and I can’t cut them off because they are not making recurring donations. So I’d have to spend time keeping track of all that. I’d rather put that time into the art and design, into creating books. Much of the challenge of this project is putting enough time into the books and Substack posts to create something truly exceptional, a product of imagination and deep perception. Anything that supports that allocation of time is good. And I notice that the way many who handle this aspect of their online publication, like the Marginalian, scatter requests for money throughout their posts. I’ve been reluctant to do that. I don’t like it as a reader. My rule is read something for a month and if you enjoy it, if it adds something to your life, pay for it. If not, unsubscribe. But they are successful constantly reminding their readers of the need to support the work voluntarily, so maybe that’s the way to go.

Which brings up another distraction. I’ve subscribed to Sara Fay’s Writers at Work and Russell Nohelty’s The Author Stack and three other e-newsletters on online marketing, mostly related in some way to ConvertKit. Lots of good ideas there but they all require time and/or money. Obviously. It would be easy to spend one’s entire day first reading and listening to suggestions of how to market content online, and second implementing. I need to put that time into the creation of books and posts. The posts are, in fact, marketing for the books. I need to get tougher on that time allocation. Just pursue the low-hanging fruit and other than that, focus on creating exceptional content.

But, overall, a good first day. Tomorrow I take the day off to retrieve my friend Sally from the Long Trail. She’s been backpacking for the last week and wants to return to civilization. That’s a four hour drive each way. I’m happy to do it. I like being a part of her adventure and want to support it — I really admire her courage and internal momentum. She’s in her early sixties. The Vermont Long Trail is all up and down mountainsides. I spent a week on it in my forties. It wasn’t easy.

Monday, September 2, 2024

Island Abstract - Superior Memories

When you are fleshing out your dream, realize that it is not all going to be pleasant. It is going to have moments when you will wish that you had chosen otherwise. It’s going to have frustration. It’s going to cost you. That's a clear lesson that you learn in the wilderness and on expeditions -- everything comes at a cost of energy or resources or other choices that you cannot now make.
-       Dave Olesen, wilderness guide, Iditarod dog musher, bush pilot. Heron Dance interview.

Focus, focus, focus. Simplify, simplify, simplify. As a one-person endeavor, focus and simplicity are essential. Constantly shift time and resources from projects that generate mediocre results into projects that have the potential to be exceptional in some unique way.

It has been a year and a half since I relaunched Heron Dance. I would describe the response of readers and supporters as restrained enthusiasm. That’s a general statement – there are a few readers who have responded with great enthusiasm and supported the work generously. But overall, based on indicators such as financial support, open rate and click-through rate, Heron Dance is of moderate interest to its readership. And its readership is not growing. It is financially stable but at little more than breakeven. And creatively, I’m ready for new territory to explore. As creative people, we need to be constantly growing, learning, experimenting.

So I’m making some changes. There are a lot of details below that may not interest. Just skip down to the final paragraph. I’ve written them out here mostly for my own clarity. And for the curiosity of readers interested in a behind-the-scenes look at what’s going on.

When planning something like Heron Dance, there are four considerations:

1.     If you could do only one thing, what would it be?
2.     What is the maximum contribution you can make to the journeys, the lives, of others?
3.     How can you best market that contribution?
4.     What can you cut out to get better at the first three?

I’ve thought through the work of Heron Dance from a variety of angles, and considered everything from focussing solely on writing (how to create a unique life, for instance) to focusing just on painting. Painting has been the primary source of whatever modest financial success Heron Dance has achieved to date. But do I want to be a painter exclusively? No. After I shut down Heron Dance ten years ago, I did focus just on painting for a few years. I learned that painting is important to me, but I don’t want to just paint. I want to combine art and words in thought-provoking, useful, compelling ways. I want to explore questions at the center of a well-lived life, in particular life on the fringes of our culture – life as someone who lives according to his or her own values, in their own unique way. Values different from those of the dominant culture.

I’m fascinated by our relationship with our inner world, and how that relationship manifests in a human life. Journaling is the tool that I’ve used to explore that relationship in my own life. I’ve come to know first-hand its power and effectiveness.

Art journaling is an aspect that I’ve not explored or used in my own life. I’ve painted paintings about subjects that mean a lot to me – mostly birds, but also wild animals of all types – mostly to sell. Art journaling is a completely different approach to art. It is, like the written content of journals, a tool for the exploration of inner worlds. Art journaling can be used to explore questions such as, “How do I feel today? What image, however abstract, best represents my mood today?”, “What image first comes to mind when I ask myself what represents this stage of my life?”, “What in my life is trying to manifest right now?”

This next stage of Heron Dance will explore, in an in-depth way, the use of journaling – both written and art journaling -- as tools of self-discovery and change.

The steps in this transition:

  • For the month of September, I’ll continue to publish both A Pause for Beauty and Creativity as a Way of Life on Substack on a “contribute if the spirit moves you” basis. October 1, both will switch to paid -- $5 a month – so that the work is financially viable. All current financial supporters, whether one-time or recurring, will get grandfathered in. If you are not a current supporter, you can do that here.

  • The Substack A Pause for Beauty will continue as a gratitude journal. The content will draw from both The Heron Dance Book of Love & Gratitude, which I recently rescued from a publisher and is the all-time top-selling Heron Dance book, and a book I’ve been working on, Meditations on Nature.

  • The Substack Nurturing the Song Within will become Creativity as a Way of Life (to distinguish from the printed art journal Nurturing the Song Within). It will draw from the journal notes of artists, musicians, poets, novelists and filmmakers, as well as their memoirs and interviews, both those I’ve conducted and those published by others. Their  reflections will inspire our own creative journeys. It will include the work of other artists that I’m turning to for inspiration.

  • Both Substacks will include my journal reflections and occasional journaling prompts.    

  • The art in both Substacks will become increasing abstract – art that bubbles up from deep within. The journals will encourage you to similarly explore the use of rough, unpolished art to explore the messages and moods that arise out of your own inner processes and inspiration.

  • In both of these Substack e-journals, I’ll establish forums where readers share their own, your own, journal entries. I’d like to set up ways for us to learn from each other and support each other’s creative explorations.

  • In the next month, I’ll write out the major principles and techniques I use in my own journaling. All subscribers to either of the two Substacks will receive that guide in PDF form. I’ll also offer it as a Kindle book. It will be an important part of the new, re-envisioned Heron Dance.

  • The Kickstarter launch for the two books previously announced will be postponed for several months. One, a gratitude journal, will merge together the book I’ve been working on, Meditations on Nature, with the now out-of-print Heron Dance Book of Love & Gratitude. It will explore the use of journaling in creating a unique life.

  • Sometime in 2025, I’ll also set up a separate Kickstarter to publish a book on the use of journaling in the creative process.

  • In the meantime, I’ll set up a new Kickstarter to fund a second, revised edition of the book Nurturing the Song Within in both print and Kindle formats. Bonuses will include signed, limited-editions of ten of the most popular Heron Dance art prints, as well as the few remaining copies of the first edition.

If all of this is too much to follow, it’s not important. Heron Dance will continue to evolve as it always has. The new Heron Dance will resemble the old, but with a narrower focus on journaling as a tool of exploration and change.

Tuesday, August 27, 2024

I’m on a one week pause with Heron Dance as I rethink what I'm doing.

I wrote in my journal:

“Much comes down to being useful. Journaling is useful.”

Among the things I’ve done in my life, the skills I’ve acquired, the successes and failures I’ve had, two are relevant to Heron Dance.

  • I’m creative. I can paint interesting images.

  • I journal. I’ve done it for fifty years. I know how to use journaling to better understand one’s life, the potential of one’s life, and how to use journaling to identify recurring patterns, including both patterns that are helpful and patterns that have repeatedly been associated with setbacks.

The challenge with Heron Dance and journaling is how to best combine three different subjects or aspects:

  • Journaling techniques (such as the use of guides, imaginary and real).

  • Excerpts from the journals of others, especially creatives.

  • Journaling in action (reflections on the above, and the resulting prompts — prompts can easily become superficial, contrived).

And, of course, combine those with my art because my art tends to add a uniqueness to the work. And I love painting. So even if it is a neutral, doesn’t contribute much, as long as it doesn’t detract from the overall work I want to do it. For many years, Heron Dance survived on my art. The publication itself, the subscriptions, after all of the overhead broke even before the art.

So the challenges is to combine those three elements — techniques, prompts and my own reflections, and excerpts from the journals of others — in a compelling way that has flow and rhythm.

That’s what I’ll spend this next week thinking through.

Sunday, August 25, 2024

After much thought on the different creative projects Heron Dance is involved in, how to make them work together better, and make them more sustainable financially, Heron Dance has embarked upon the following plan.

A Creative Journey Starts With An Expression of Gratitude

Two books, both of which can be used as the basis of a journaling practice, and both based in part on Heron Dance Substack e-jounals, will be published in the next couple of months.

Meditations on Nature, The Beauty of Wild Places has morphed into the Meditations on Nature Gratitude Journal. It draws from the weekly Substack e-journal A Pause for Beauty and celebrates the beauty and mystery of the natural world. There is more of a description here. It will be published in early October in three formats:

  • A PDF, probably be priced at $25.

  • A wire-o bound book, probably priced at $49, shipping and taxes included.

  • A set of inserts for binders into which you can also insert blank pages for your own journaling. These inserts will probably sell for $39, taxes and shipping included, and each will eventually be a part of a series of six. The custom Heron Dance binders themselves will also sell for $39, and links to less expensive mass-produced polypropylene binders will also be available.

The binders hold standard 11 x 8.5 inch paper, though hole punched for oblong or landscape.

We’ll launch this in early October, as soon as the binders are ready. The images, words and design are about ninety-percent finished.

A Pause for Beauty will remain free with contributions in support gratefully accepted. (Join us here.) Any recurring monthly contribution, past or present, will entitle the Member to receive the PDF of the Meditations on Nature Gratitude Journal.

Rough preliminary mockup of the new Gratitude Journal.

Creativity as a Way of Life

Nurturing the Song Within, Creativity as a Way of Life will become a more or less daily e-journal on Substack. An exploration of the inner work underlying creative work.

  • Each post includes an abstract painting.

  • Published six days a week. An exploration of the inner work underlying creative work.

  • Drawing from Heron Dance interviews and the journals, memoirs, interviews and autobiographies of creative outsiders, I select a daily quote on the creative process of a working artist, author, filmmaker or musician. These quotes are selected based on their insight and potential to spark creativity spark. Each post also includes my journal reflection on that quote.

  • Each post will include a painting.

  • Nurturing the Song Within, Creativity as a Way of Life is currently offered without charge, but will become a paid Substack, as soon as the first Creativity PDF is available, probably in early October 2024. That PDF can be downloaded and printed on standard 8.5 x 11 inch paper.

  • As with the Meditation on Nature book above, in addition to the PDF version, there will also be a wire-o, insert/binder edition.

  • If we get a Kickstarter funded, there will be a hardcover with a Smyth sewn lay-flat binding. Each copy will be signed and numbered.

  • Visit here to receive the Creativity Substack. Example post here.

This is a mockup to give you a rough idea. The actual binder design will be a lot more polished and have more consistent colors on the “Euro hinge.”

Thursday, August 22, 2024

Ultimately, the decision on what to focus on needs to boil down to some simple questions:

How, given my interests and area of competence, can I best serve others? How can I make a unique contribution to others with my creative work? Two options come immediately to mind:

  • A celebration of the beauty and mystery of wild nature though art and words. A significant number of Heron Dance readers get sustenance from their relationship with nature, as I do. Nevertheless it is unfortunately true that the overall level of enthusiasm for A Pause for Beauty, for my nature art and the writing I present in Heron Dance, both my own and that of others, seems to meet with a lukewarm response. This wasn’t always the case. In earlier years, new originals would often sell within minutes of first being posted. The more recent reception may be due to the average age of my readership — they are divesting rather than accumulating art and other possessions.

  • Creativity as a way of life, life as a creative outsider, creating unique work, creating a unique life — these are subjects I know something about, for which there seems to be significant reader interest, and a significant potential readership who is not yet aware of the work of Heron Dance.

A one-man band, like I am, needs to focus. Needs to be really good at one thing. That thing has to contribute something unique and important to the journeys of others. Others need to be willing to carry the torch for the work. If not, the burden, the friction of the journey, will weigh down a creator to the point of exhaustion.

I can put something together more or less daily based on the journals, diaries, interviews, memoirs and autobiographies of highly creative people that will be inspiring to other creatives. I think I can build a community around that work.

It’s taken me a few days to think all of this through. Thank you for your patience. I’ll publish new posts of Nurturing The Song Within and Heron Dance tomorrow.

Wednesday, August 21, 2024

I went into a deep depression yesterday thinking about all of this. A black hole. I’ve never, in my life, that I can remember, experienced that. Sure, once or twice a year I get a little overwhelmed and depressed for a day, maybe two at the most, but never like yesterday. Thankfully it only lasted a couple of hours. I can imagine the misery of people who experience that regularly.

What inspired the depression was questions, self-doubt. A crisis of confidence.

  • What if my readers, people who have supported the work for years, don’t like journaling or do but don’t like my journals.

  • Should I include blank, lined pages, or just my art and words, and readers can either journal online or select their favorite journals for their own writing — Moleskin, inexpensive notebooks, pads? Including blank, lined pages significantly increases both the page count and the cost of printing.

  • Should I offer binders? They significantly complicate inventory management and fulfillment.

  • Can I find worthwhile things to write about day after day, year after year, if my focus is just on journaling?

In other words, how do I make this both really useful and really special?

And the switch — that got me down I think. I have been so focused on the beauty and mystery of nature as a subject lately. And put hundreds of hours into creating an art book on that subject. And now, to head off in a new direction. That is difficult to wrap my mind around.

The more Heron Dance focuses on digital content — blog posts (Substack), PDFs, Kindle — the easier it is to run Heron Dance as a business. Printed books dramatically increase complexity, distracts from the art and increases the risk of things going wrong — orders shipped incorrectly for instance.

. . .

I woke up this morning at 3am and it all was clear to me.

Some people will journal and will love these new journals I’m creating. Some won’t. In fact I lost two recurring supporters yesterday. Both only contributed $5 a month. I lose one of those a week, usually. But if this works, there will be days I’ll lose a hundred or more because I’ll have tens of thousands of subscribers. The only worthwhile offering someone like me can create is something that some people love and some people hate. If everyone likes it, corporate America will produce it. It will be middle-of-the-road, average, mundane. I need to find a small, devoted group of people who journal because it adds, or they realize could add, a lot to their life. Most people don’t want to examine their life, what they devote it to, what they believe and why, at that depth. They are not my audience. In fact, the reality is, much of my current audience is too old to examine their life in great depth. I’ll lose them. That is just the hard reality of transitions like this. I’m losing them anyway to death, to dementia.

Thirty years ago, my average subscriber was 56. Heron Dance grew too big for me to manage so I stopped marketing. My average subscriber now is in their early eighties. Many are in their nineties.

And the trim size needs to be 8.5 x 11 vertical. That size is most widely used because it fits on a desk best. And paper inserts for it are most widely available. The other option, oblong or landscape, words best with my art, but for a writing journal the vertical orientation has major advantages.

As far as including blank lined pages, or completely blank pages for sketching and watercolors, the answer has to be yes. People who want to journal online or use Moleskins or whatever can buy the PDF version — or receive it as part of their Substack subscription. Or ignore the lined pages and just buy the printed versions for the physical presence of the book with the art and words. But in order to be special, to be a journaling book, one centered on the writing of the subscriber rather than on my art and words, the books need blank lined pages. And the binder option allows people to insert pages at will, to use the printed version in the most flexible way possible. The wire-O version allows a more compact journal. So both are needed.

Can I find worthwhile things to write about, day after day, year after year, centered around journaling? Yes, if I study and excerpt from the journals of other artists, filmmakers, novelists, poets, etc. Many have kept fascinating journals. Thoreau for instance. And Jim Harrison. And John Steinbeck. Their self-doubt, struggles, relationships with their imagination, with the inner wellsprings of their creativity, is fascinating to other creative people.

But, while the books are important to the overall plan, mostly because they give me something to market that is unique, the financial driver of the business has to be the daily Substack blog. It has to be the subscriptions of paying readers who find a daily creative journal drawing from the struggles and triumphs of other artists inspiring and encouraging. And worth $12 a month.

And I have to get better at building a community around my work where we share with each other excerpts from our journals. If I can do that, Heron Dance will not only be financially successful again, but I’ll be contributing to the lives of others. A lot.

Sunday, August 18, 2024

Sunday, August 18, 2024

 

Perhaps the greatest challenge in creative work is achieving a clear vision. What are you reaching for? What is most fascinating to you right on the edge of your understanding?  

Another challenge – relaxing into the creative flow. That is closely related to having confidence in your vision. All my life I’ve struggled with trying too hard, and thus getting in my own way, until I achieve a degree of mastery.

Nowhere and never and now and forever
I look for a thing that is looking for me.
     -   Sydney Carter

 

This incarnation of Heron Dance is about eighteen months old. In that time, I’ve published two books and 335 Substack posts. After much experimentation, my vision of where this journey is going is becoming clearer.

That emerging focus – the use of journaling in creating unique work, and in creating a unique life accompanied by semi-abstract, semi-impressionistic art. The questions I’m still thinking through:

·      What format should journals that explore the usefulness of journaling in the creative process take in terms of printed journals?
·      How can that work best serve readers – loosely defined as creative outsiders? How can I best contribute to their lives and creative process?
·      How do I build a community around that work?
·      How do I market it?
·      The work needs to be sustainable financially. How do I charge for it in a way that is affordable for creative outsiders struggling to make it? I want them to be a part of the work, to engage with me, to offer suggestions on how to make it better, make it of more use as they develop. I want a constant back and forth interaction with them.

I have plan, but want to give it a little time to percolate in the back of my mind before committing to it. The plan in its current preliminary form:

 Content:

·      Journaling techniques, with an emphasis on techniques related to developing creative work.

·      Excerpts from the journals and memoirs of novelists, poets, painters, sculptors, filmmakers as they struggle and create.

·      Excerpts from my own journals as a develop my painting in the direction of more abstract work.

·      Some kind of a community forum where readers contribute their own journal entries and images of their work.

Presentation:

·      Print both wire-o bound, and 11 x 8.5 (landscape) inserts for journals. These would be full color, both sides of the sheet, and incorporate both art and words.

·      A variety of pages for journaling would be offered that could be used with standard three ring binders (holes on the longest dimension) or with customer binders I’ll have made (rings on the short dimension). Blank pages of watercolor paper are widely available, for instance on Amazon, so I’d just link to a couple I’ve tried and like. Heron Dance would also offer lined pages for notes and special pages for recording short notes by day, five years per page.

·      Or people could buy their own journals in whatever is their favorite format.

·      Inexpensive PDFs, sheet size 11 x 8.5 so easy for readers to print out.

·      Kindle editions for Amazon.

Building Community

In addition to a more or less daily post on Substack as described above, I’d offer my own journal entries and scans of recent paintings in the forum comment section, and encourage readers to do the same.

Market:

Substack, Kickstarter, YouTube videos (on painting, journaling), paid search (Google, Facebook, Amazon).

Offer on Amazon as well as on the Heron Dance website.

Financial Sustainability:

Charge $12 a month. One post a month for free readers. Include PDF edition in a subscription. No cost for anyone who has purchased art or other items on the Heron Dance website. Minimal (or free) to anyone who asks based on financial hardship (lives in Mom’s basement).

A Pause For Beauty:

Would remain free and be published either weekly or every two weeks. It would be mostly centered on the Nurturing the Song Within Art Journal, at least for the foreseeable future.

Kickstarter:

Postpone the launch, now scheduled for September 2, to September 30? This depends on how many pages the journal will have. 90 – a page a day for a quarter. 180 – for two quarters? 360 – for an entire year? I can easily create, with the content I have on hand (it has been built up over 30 years), 360 pages of high-quality journaling and can design 2-5 pages a day and still paint.

Sunday, August 11, 2024

The response to the concept, the idea, of these journals has been very encouraging. The main challenges will be getting enough time organized to both paint and also design these new books which have to go to the printer no later than October 15 in order to get them back to ship by December 1.

It’s a lot of work but I can do it if I focus.

Thursday, August 8, 2024

Failure is easy to identify and deal with. It is the mediocrities that sap one’s energy and lead to years of wasted effort. It is the projects and products that receive some interest but that don’t generate enthusiasm or excitement, the products that are kind of useful, the products that have no significant positive effect on people’s lives, that drain your time and resources as a creative. You keep working at them, hoping to make them better but they never really make that leap. Well over ninety percent of all products, art, music, services fit into this category — the “me too” category that competes mostly on price.

Recent response to Heron Dance offerings has been muted. Lackluster. The Kickstarter has only 14 followers. Substack free readers are up only 5% over the last year, though order flow has been strong. New financial supporters are minimal. All this despite a very favorable response to the latest Heron Dance book, Nurturing the Song Within, at least in terms of reviews and emails received from readers. But it is expensive at $95 a copy, and so building momentum is difficult.

The challenge doing work like Heron Dance is creating something unique, important to readers and useful. And beautiful. And then do effective marketing.

Some of the problem is that I jump around too much deciding what form Heron Dance will take, and whether or not it is about creativity or the beauty and mystery of wild nature, or both. I am, by nature, experimental and always willing to test a new idea. And I get new ideas, which generally seem great at least initially, every week.

Refocus Heron Dance on Journaling

Journaling is useful, and potentially important. I’ve been journaling at least weekly for fifty years and it has helped me understand my life, its patterns and potential. Putting thoughts in writing, weighing decisions and alternative course of action in my journal, like I’m doing here, adds an element of logic to the process that simply thinking or meditating on those decisions lacks.

Yesterday, I came across the idea of combining five years of thoughts from the same day of the year, on a single page to identify patterns came to me. And then, offering along side what I’ve been offering for years — thoughts on living a quality life, an interesting life — as well as art, has the prospect of ticking off all the boxes. It’s unique, its potentially important to readers (those willing to put time into it), and the art adds an element of beauty and, in its own way, is thought-provoking, particularly to creative people.

The Meditations on Nature book is almost finished. Only ten of 120 pages remain. But then the really challenging work starts — the marketing. It’s important to focus attention and resources. So instead of the Meditations on Nature book, I’m going to offer two series of quarterly journals:

  • A Life Examined Journal

  • Creativity as a Way of Life Journal

They’ll be available in a variety of formats, starting with the least expensive:

  • PDF

  • Kindle

  • Looseleaf hole-punched for a standard binder (the sheets are 8.5 x 11 in size). If you need more room for extensive journaling on any particular day simply insert a widely available lined, punched sheet. Custom Heron Dance binders that can hold the loose leaf pages will also be offered.

  • Double wire-o bound similar to the Nurturing the Song Within Diary.

Each quarter will consist of just over 180 pages — two pages per day — one page art, one page journaling.

Because it will sometime in October before these journals are ready, I’ll begin offering downloadable PDFs of that day’s journaling page in both Substacks, A Pause for Beauty and Nurturing the Song Within.

More here.

Wednesday, July 31, 2024

I announced the pre-launch of my new book, Meditations on Nature: The Beauty of Wild Places, on Kickstarter this morning. Even if it doesn’t raise a dollar, I’ll still go ahead with the printing of this book in late September but the Kickstarter will expose my work to a new and different audience. This is important to Heron Dance. There will be a number of premiums associated with this Kickstarter such as signed first edition copies, signed first edition copies of my last book, Nurturing the Song Within, art prints and posters.

I’m redoing the videos I’ve been working on. I dwell too much on my personal history and not enough on the work. I went down the road of my personal history in an effort to interest podcasters. My background, leaving home at the age of sixteen to fight forest fires in the Canadian north, living with indigenous people, and years later finding myself working on Wall Street, is unique. But it is the work of Heron Dance, and my time in wilderness that inspires that work, that is important to this book. Making videos of course has a learning curve and I’m hoping to get better.

I’ll paint for a few hours now, and then focus on tomorrow’s Substack, Nurturing the Song Within — the work of other artists that is inspiring my evolution into more abstract art.

Tuesday, July 30, 2024

In retrospect, Sunday’s Pause for Beauty was a little underwhelming. It consisted of two pages, one of writing on beautiful places in nature that we encounter as children that inspire us throughout our lives, one a painting of wildflowers in a field. The pages are in the first draft of the book I’m working on, Meditations on Nature. A major issue I’m facing now, roughly seventeen months since I restarted Heron Dance, is whether or not content I’m considering for A Pause for Beauty has been previously used in the last several months. I don’t have clear records of what I’ve already posted and it is all sloshing around in my mind — ideas under consideration and ideas already used.

The original idea, now only a couple of weeks old, was that each Pause for Beauty would contain six pages of content — three paintings and three either narratives of wilderness journeys or quotes from books. I’d been on a long hike Friday with a friend — we were bushwhacking into a beautiful backcountry lake that we used to canoe to years ago — and the terrain was rough. I was tired Saturday so didn’t put the effort into Sunday’s Pause for Beauty that I’d planned. And my friend Sally returned from two weeks seeing her mother who recently broke her hip. So there was a little celebration associated with Sally’s homecoming.

This week though I plan to get back on track with six new pages of art and writing.

Major projects underway:

  • A Kindle version of Nurturing the Song Within. Getting this done will allow me to market the hardcover on Amazon and will resolve some formatting issues with the first edition (it was designed in Affinity Publisher and should have been designed in Adobe Indesign). About 35 hours of work left.

  • Videos for Kickstarter and for A Pause for Beauty. I’m planning three for the Kickstarter. One of me talking about my life and about why I started Heron Dance thirty years ago, and why I do it now. One of me painting and one of a series of my paintings in a kind of montage. The Kickstarter will offer the new book, Meditations on Nature, and twenty signed, limited-edition prints and the remaining first edition copies of Nurturing the Song Within. The first printing of three hundred copies is more than half sold out. New orders are coming in at the rate of about one per day, mostly from previous buyers purchasing for gifts. So inventory on hand about three months. They take a month to get reprinted. There is probably ten hours of work left to do to create the videos. Then I’ll announce the Kickstarter launch date. I’m planning on October 1.

  • Finishing Meditations on Nature. The first edition is still in print and available on Amazon, but I want to do an expanded edition — about three times the number of pages — since this work is so integral to A Pause for Beauty. About twenty hours of work left.

  • Abstract painting. I want to take my art in the direction of more abstract and impressionistic work. To do this, I need to paint at least 15 hours a week. This transition, and the art by others that is inspiring it, is the basis of my new Substack, Nurturing The Song Within.

Excluding time spent communicating with readers, suppliers (mostly printers), and fulfilling orders (mostly shipping sold originals), and marketing (mostly sending out review copies to possible reviewers), I work about forty hours a week. Other than painting, I have about twenty-five hours a week for book design, web design, Substack creation (about five hours a week). So there is about five weeks of work to get these projects done and launched. Say, in reality, two months. End of September.

I leave for the southern US a month later. This year, I plan to head to New Mexico for six months. I hope to take most of the month of November off and spend it with the Sandhill Cranes at the Bosque Del Apache National Wildlife Refuge.

Sunday, July 21, 2024

I’ve been struggling with how often to publish A Pause for Beauty. There are several issues, but most importantly am I inundating people’s inboxes with the frequency?

There are some signs that I am — mostly the subscriber list isn’t growing. I do occasionally receive emails though from readers saying that A Pause for Beauty is the basis of their morning meditation and its frequency is therefore appreciated. In all these decisions, some will like a change more, some less.

Another consideration: whenever I start making lots of changes to whatever I do, the first question is am I working too hard? I tend to complicate things, and embark on major change for minor improvement, when I’m overtired and burned out. And I have been working a lot lately and not feeling that I’m making enough progress, which leads me to work harder. At some point, if I continue to do that, lots of things will start to break down. Am I at that point now? Maybe.

I subscribe to four blogs. Most are published once a week. Only one I think comes out as frequently as mine, and that’s an instructional Substack by Sarah Fay. With Sarah’s I do like the frequency though I don’t read or listen to each post. Some, on the other hand, I revisit multiple times. Her’s probably isn’t a good example or guide to use because I’m trying to gain a basic proficiency with Substack right now. When I’ve done that, I’ll want to allocate, once again, as much of my work as possible to painting and book creation.

That brings me to a primary consideration whenever making a decision, but in particular a major decision: What is the objective?

The overall objective of Heron Dance is to create books of beauty, meaning and quality – books helpful in creating a life of beauty – books that combine art and words a unique way. Given that, and the role of A Pause for Beauty in that, what is the optimum number of times a week or a month that I should publish a new post? What is the optimum number of days devoted to painting a month? To reading? To designing books? To the writing?

Looked at strictly from the point of view of creating the highest quality work, the most beautiful work, probably a week a month devoted solely to painting and reading. One day off a week reading for enjoyment, walking in the woods, meditating, relaxing, sleeping. Two or three hours a day painting in addition to the week a month. The rest divided between book creation, reading, marketing (including Substack). And three weeks a year in one stretch completely away from the work: in the woods, relaxing, thinking, reading fiction, journaling, walking.

Marginalian publishes twice a week, each with a somewhat different approach to content though I can’t remember right off what that difference is. I receive the weekend version. I found twice a week too much. Her weekend post summarizes new content on her website. That would be easy for me to do — as I create a book, I can post on the Heron Dance website the art and text planned for the book, and then link to it once a week from a Substack that summarizes that content.

Decision:

Publish twice a week, once (Sundays) on the beauty and mystery of wild nature, once (Thursdays) on the inspiration I discover in the work of other artists and writers as I take my own art in a more abstract and impressionistic direction. Summarize in those posts the new content on the Heron Dance website and provide links to it.

I’ll prepare the Sunday posts on Saturday and take Sunday off. One week a month I won’t publish at all and instead will focus on painting and reading.

Saturday, July 20, 2024

Over the last few days, I’ve been struggling a little with my future vision of A Pause for Beauty. Do I continue to focus on the beauty and mystery of wild nature?

Wild nature is my source of inner peace, my sense of belonging in the world. The only path forward for humanity is one of harmony with the natural world if we are to survive for more than a brief blip in the geologic timeline of the Earth. All of this comes together in the book I’m currently working on: Meditations on Nature, The Beauty of Wild Places. It is important to say that my vision for Heron Dance isn’t in doubt, just A Pause for Beauty. The role of Heron Dance is and will remain to create books of beauty and meaning, books that combine art and words in a unique way, books printed and bound by high end art printers. Quality books about living a quality life.

My concern with A Pause for Beauty is twofold. First, it is difficult to write about love. For instance, what is it? My concern is that as I grapple with putting my love of wild nature into words, that I become repetitive.

Second, my imagination has been captured by impressionistic, semi-abstract art. This is art that captures something important about the spirit of the subject of the painting (it could be sculpture or poetry or filmmaking too, but I’m a painter and so focused mostly on painting) without being overly concerned about the actual physical appearance of the subject. For years, decades even, I’ve painted realistic paintings, albeit with a impressionistic slant, but now I want to take that semi-abstract aspect of my work farther. I want that impressionistic part of my work to become more interesting, more thought-provoking.

Nature is always in the process of becoming something else. A creative person, in order to maintain their internal momentum, also must always be in the process of becoming, must always be working and thinking where they are most challenged, where their imagination is leading them, where their skill is almost good enough to be realized.

As I struggle to manifest the images that I have captured my imagination, my reading has taken the direction of interviews, journals, diaries, memoirs and autobiographies of highly creative people as they struggle to manifest their visions.

My last book, Nurturing The Song Within, explored the inner world underlying creative work. This next phase of A Pause for Beauty will explore the struggle underlying the development of new creative work.

. . .

As a result of the journaling process described above and just below, I’ve changed the description of A Pause for Beauty on Substack to:

A chronicle of the efforts of one artist to manifest a new creative vision. Roderick MacIver has been a full time artist and author for thirty years. A Pause for Beauty explores the art, reading and ideas of other artists and writers that he’s using to help make the transition into a new phase in his creative work – more abstract and impressionistic paintings.

Friday, July 19, 2024

I have a long list of pressing projects to address, and yet I spent the morning reading old Jim Harrison interviews, which are endlessly interesting, entertaining and thought-provoking. I had a brief acquaintanceship with Jim through a mutual friend. Partly out of person interest, and partly because it is important in the creation of Heron Dance, I’m constantly reading books and online interviews and studying the work of other artists.

My diversion into old Jim Harrison interviews today might have had something to do with Sarah Fay’s interesting interview of Sophia Efthimiatou, Substack’s Head of Writer Relations, about what works on Substack (the interview was from Sarah’s The Substack Success Podcast on Spotify). Sophia’s conclusion — Substacks written by creative people about what interests them work, whether that author chooses to focus on one or on multiple subjects.

I started listening to the interview completely set on the direction of Heron Dance. After listening to Sarah’s podcast, I revisited the perennial questions: Focus on one, narrow area — nature, creativity or journaling for instance — or on anything interesting related to the beauty and mystery of life, including art and creativity in general? Heron Dance isn’t growing, though financially it’s doing fine. Sarah’s podcast got me thinking, once again, “What if?” The more I thought about the possibilities, the more I thought about this idea:

In the preparation of Heron Dance, I cast a wide net. I explore a lot of different subjects: spirituality, meditation, the beauty and mystery of nature and of life, creativity, adventure, journaling, and, I study the art of other artists, successful and unsuccessful. Many obscure, unsuccessful artists produce fascinating work. What if my Substack was an exploration of the art and ideas that I find particularly inspiring?

For the last month or two I’ve concentrated Heron Dance on the beauty of wild nature, a subject I’ve returned to again and again over the last thirty years. The natural world is the source of my peace, the inspiration behind my art. I walk in nature 29 or 30 days out of each month. I sit by rivers and backcountry lakes and think about Heron Dance and about my life. In my work, I find it easier to express that love through art than words. The art I’m attracted to, including nature art, is increasingly abstract and dreamlike.

While thinking this all through, I came across the following from a summer 1988 Paris Review interview of Jim Harrison:

Antaeus magazine wanted me to write a piece for their issue about nature. I told them I couldn’t write about nature but that I’d write them a little piece about getting lost and all the profoundly good aspects of being lost—the immense fresh feeling of really being lost. I said there that my definition of magic in the human personality, in fiction and in poetry, is the ultimate level of attentiveness. Nearly everyone goes through life with the same potential perceptions and baggage, whether it’s marriage, children, education, or unhappy childhoods, whatever; and when I say attentiveness I don’t mean just to reality, but to what’s exponentially possible in reality. I don’t think, for instance, that Márquez is pushing it in One Hundred Years of Solitude—that was simply his sense of reality. The critics call this magic realism, but they don’t understand the Latin world at all. Just take a trip to Brazil. Go into the jungle and take a look around. This old Chippewa I know—he’s about seventy-five years old—said to me, “Did you know that there are people who don’t know that every tree is different from every other tree?” This amazed him. Or don’t know that a nation has a soul as well as a history, or that the ground has ghosts that stay in one area. All this is true, but why are people incapable of ascribing to the natural world the kind of mystery that they think they are somehow deserving of but have never reached? This attentiveness is your main tool in life, and in fiction, or else you’re going to be boring. As Rimbaud said, which I believed very much when I was nineteen and which now I’ve come back to, for our purposes as artists, everything we are taught is false—everything.

Jim was a lover of nature, and he too found himself coming up short when trying to write about it. It is hard to write about love. What is love, for instance?

So today I’ve been thinking over enlarging my field of exploration in A Pause For Beauty from just nature to anything that captures my imagination, whether words or art. Maybe I’ll change the name of A Pause For Beauty to


Images & Ideas From The Edges Of The Human Enclosure


And explore anything and everything that has to do with art in its broadest sense, including the arts of a well-lived life. I have a particular interest in, of course, paintings. Faced with the choice of whether I’d rather be a highly accomplished writer or artist, I’d choose art. No question. The challenge of art captures my imagination in a way that writing doesn’t.

On the other had, words can say things that art can’t.

Writing in my journal what you’ve just read has helped me decide that for a while, at least, Heron Dance will evolve in the direction of an exploration of the art and ideas that underlie the art and books I create. The reading, the strange discoveries, the uplifting, the illuminating, the fascinating ideas and art from others that shape my work, though generally in ways that are subtle.

My watercolor of Jim Harrison.

Tuesday, July 16, 2024

Things I’ve been working on:

  • Significant progress made on the next Heron Dance Press book, Meditations on Nature: The Beauty of Wild Places, in the last couple of days. The book is about half complete.

  • I sent the first of ten planned copies of Nurturing The Song Within to potential podcast and e-journal book reviewers, this first one to Rich Roll. These are long shots, but if someday one of the ten shows an interest, it will be worth it. It’s a swing for the fences. In the meantime Heron Dance inches along in a kind of creative bliss.

  • Speaking of creative bliss, I’ve been doing some abstract painting recently, inspired by the work of Taiwanese artist Chang Cheng Wei.

And the watercolors of Sylvia Baldeva

Saturday, July 13, 2024

After much feedback from readers (thank you!) a decision on the cover for our upcoming book
Meditations on Nature:
The Beauty of Wild Places

has been made.

Friday, July 12, 2024

Below, three covers preferred by readers. Let me know if you have a favorite.
rod@herondance.org

Wednesday, July 10, 2024

Below, covers under consideration for the new book. Let me know if you have a favorite.
rod@herondance.org

Tuesday, July 9, 2024

3am. Cataract surgery today.

Everything progressing well. A wide range of projects coming together. A major question facing Heron Dance: make gradual progress on a variety of projects or get one done, then move on to the next.

Kickstarter

I’ll shortly begin producing videos for a Kickstarter. Heron Dance will offer signed limited edition prints for $75 each plus $15 for shipping. I’ll also offer Nurturing The Song Within. The major objective of the Kickstarter is to introduce Heron Dance to a new audience.

Nurturing The Song Within KDP Digital Version

This isn’t the ideal format for the book — it is designed to be a beautiful hardcover art journal — but it will allow Heron Dance to access Amazon marketing tools that are not currently open to us. Good progress made in the last few days.

New Hardcover Art Journal: Meditations On Nature: The Beauty Of Wild Places

Major progress made this week. Completion is about a month off, then another month for printing.

Painting

Work is finished on the loon commission. I did probably twenty paintings total and really struggled. No more commissions. I need to explore territory that is new to me, that has no guidelines, no restrictions, no objectives other than unique beautiful work.

Marketing

The combination of Kickstarter, Substack and Amazon will ultimately work for Heron Dance. Gradual progress is being made. But Heron Dance won’t thrive until I get better at all three, and at videos. In the meantime we’re dependent on those wonderful donors who support this work with recurring monthly donations. If you are one of those, thank you! The day will come when Heron Dance is not dependent on you, when we have enough work available for purchase — books, art on Amazon — to survive and grow, but in the meantime you are our life line.

. . .

The weekly Zoom Readers group meetings are cancelled for the foreseeable future in order to focus on other projects. Maybe we’ll get them going again in the fall. You can keep up to date on any future plans here.

Sunday, June 30, 2024

Since I started Heron Dance thirty odd years ago, I don’t think I’ve ever been more organized than I am right now.

Major projects underway:

  • Creating a Kindle version of Nurturing The Song Within. This will unlock the marketing features of Amazon, though the book will require major modification for Kindle, and the visual impact of the work will be greatly diminished. It will probably sell for $25 on Kindle versus the $95 for the print version ($71.25 for Members for the month of July).

  • Creating a Kickstarter to offer two series of signed, limited edition prints. These prints will be available individually or in series at discounted pricing depending on quantities ordered. For instance three prints 12 x 17.5 inches in size will cost $60 each versus the $100 each they sell for on the Heron Dance website.

  • The creation of two new books:

    • •        Meditations on Gratitude: The Beauty And Mystery of Life
      •        Meditations on Nature: The Beauty Of Wild Places

  • Both will be available in print format, and via Kindle. In print format, both will be available either as 92 page books, or 194 page journals. In the journal format, half the pages will be blank for readers’s own notes and reflections and bound wire-o for lay flat journaling. The paper I’ll use to print those journals will be Mohawk Superfine, the most beautiful uncoated paper I’m aware of.

  • The creation of a new Shopify website just for framed Heron Dance paintings. This website will interact with both Amazon and the company that makes and ships these eimages. Many of these Heron Dance prints will be available in super larger format and printed on canvas. One example will be the painting that appears at the top of this page that was originally painted 35 feet wide. It will available in a size format of 9 feet and 6 feet wide, printed on canvas and framed.

So lots going on here at Heron Dance. Lots of things to bring to fruition. Being organized and clear around these projects feels great.

. . .

The weekly Zoom Readers group meetings are cancelled for the foreseeable future in order to focus on other projects. Maybe we’ll get them going again in the fall. You can keep up to date on any future plans here.

Thursday, June 27, 2024

What really turns you on? For some it is community. Human interaction. In the “business” I’m in, quantity seems to rule. Quantity and pace. Volume of output. Tik-Tok. Frenetic pace. No time for careful thought. Push content out there.

I hope for a life more oriented around quality. Quality books — beautiful paper, quality binding. And a life more oriented around careful thought. A slower rhythm. A life more oriented around time in nature. Thought before action. And to create a place of peace and beauty for subscribers to visit. And, because I love books, to create quality, beautiful books. The marketing reality is though that I need to also create cheap books via Amazon’s KDP if I’m going to build an Amazon audience.

But a careful balance is required. Not just writing and art, but also marketing. Getting the word out.

The number one skill I lack, and must develop, to make Heron Dance successful is video creation. Telling my story in a way that people can see that I’m a human being not a corporation, not AI. And that I have a story to tell. An outsiders story.

Another important skill is building community. Closely related — building trust, building relationships, adding to the lives of others.

Get those things right and Heron Dance will flourish. Otherwise Heron Dance will struggle along in borderline insolvency.

Sunday, June 23, 2024

I find, once again, that the business imperatives of Heron Dance and the spiritual journey that I’m on, mesh in a strange way that only becomes clear as both evolve. Said in plainer language, as deeply engaged as I am with the natural world, and everything I do grows out of the peace I find there, in my art and words I need to explore all facets of what I think of as the deep mysteries that underlie life. Mysteries of the natural world. Mysteries of creativity. Mysteries of manifesting internal beauty. Mysteries of life lived as an adventure. Mysteries of living with gratitude. Mysteries of meditation and inner peace. Mysteries of the role of failure and the lessons failure offers, the richness it contributes to a life fully lived.

Mysteries of life and death.

I’m confronted with a path ahead that is unclear, uncertain, full of challenge and learning. Endless possibilities. I need that. I need a big canvas. While I often feel a need to focus on a narrower subject area, but whenever I try to do that, I encounter a deviation in the path, a new fascinating direction important to the overall journey.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
- Walt Whitman, Song Of Myself

Thursday, June 20, 2024

Heron Dance is in dire need of an effective marketing plan. One project in the planning stages is a Kickstarter campaign. We plan three over the next three months and just need to decide on which to run first.

  • The creation of a new website, fully synced with Amazon and with an art reproduction company, to offer prints of my work on Amazon. Orders will be automatically routed for printing and shipping to customers. As thank you gifts and incentives, we’ll offer signed, numbered limited edition prints and maybe an original or two. And also maybe signed, numbered first editions of Nurturing The Song Within hardcovers.

  • A reissue of our top-selling book, The Heron Dance Book Of Love And Gratitude, now sold out though used copies remain available on Amazon.

  • A new book, Meditations On Nature: The Beauty Of Wild Places, that will draw from my favorite quotes from Meditations on Nature, Meditations on Silence, and will also include a number of new selections.

These new books will be available in inexpensive paperback editions as well as a premium quality hardcover signed edition.

We’ll probably launch these in the order outlined above and will make a decision later today.

Monday, June 17, 2024

Meditating for an hour in the woods yesterday continues to bring insights and blessings into my life and work.

First, rather than republish all the sold out Heron Dance Press books because that makes good business sense for reasons related to how Amazon marketing works, take from those books the words and art that best represents or conveys a love of wild places. Do “best of” books rather than all books that you know will sell well.

In all aspects of your life and work, emphasize quality and beauty. Convey your love of wild places. Serve that.

Second, driving home afterwards, thinking about work that best communicated a love of wilderness, I thought not of Thoreau or Emerson, though they are giants in the genre, but Sigurd Olson. So I’ve spent the morning revisiting his work and life.

After much meandering and searching for security, he finally settled on his true passion and message — the deep spiritual sustenance he found in wilderness. After he reached that realization, he spent the rest of his life serving that clarity. Clarity can take decades to achieve. Clarity is so valuable. Clarity evolves out of love — where is your love? How can you best serve that?

Sunday, June 16, 2024

The path ahead is now clear in terms of what needs to be done. The challenges are with myself — to remain focused, organized, to get the work done, but not work so hard that the quality deteriorates. To serve the beauty of wild nature — to remain focused on that message.

I’ll work on a new “beauty of wild nature” book, and reissue a number of sold out books that I originally published ten or twenty years ago, paint and execute on a marketing plan that relies mostly on videos. Slow, steady, quality work. Don’t overwork. Enjoy the journey. Proceed with gratitude for all of the incredible support this work receives.

And above all, serve beauty.

Wednesday, June 12, 2024

I’ve been going in too many different directions — putting together ten art journals, editing for republication seven sold out Heron Dance Press books. And trying to market Nurturing The Song Within, which has been neglected and fallen way, way behind. And trying to paint, but have fallen out of sync with it as a result of everything going on.

So I’ve been pondering how to get better at focusing. I’ve been talking this all over with Sally, my close friend whom I live with in the summers in Vermont. She asked me, “Where is your love? Don’t worry about what will or won’t sell. It will all sell. Where is your deepest love?” When I responded to her that my deepest love is wild nature, she said, “We need that if we’re going to survive on this planet.”

A week or so ago, I wrote in my journal:

Create out of the most profound experiences in your life. So I wrote them down.

·       Canoeing alone at parent’s cottage in Quebec when I was a teenager.

·       Hitchhiking at 5am in Banff National Park at the age of fifteen.

·       Algonquin loons in the early morning mist.

·       Wild geese Oxbow in Teton National Park

·       Brigantine National Wildlife Reserve

  • Sandhill Cranes in the Bosque Del Apache National Wildlife Reserve.

So I’ll narrow my focus to one book:

Meditations On Nature: The Beauty Of Wild Places

When I made that decision, a feeling of peace took over, rather than the somewhat desperate, somewhat frantic feeling of not being able to get caught up, to get things under control.

Monday, June 10, 2024

This morning I came across something I wrote a while ago in my journal:

Do something unique. Become indispensable to others.

I am in the business of creating and selling journals that help people understand their lives in a deep way — the hidden patterns and wellsprings out of which we create our lives.

Life if precious; life is fleeting.
Create a life of beauty.

Of the different things I do, what is the most unique, and most important to others? Unique — the combination of art and words. Indispensable (perhaps “important” is a better word since no one is indispensable) to others — the use of journaling to understand our lives — the patterns that are helpful and productive in achieving our objective — living a life of beauty is mine — and the patterns that are counterproductive. In particular, my interest and ability to dive deep.

I came across this interview this morning of ultramarathon athlete Rich Roll. Some excerpts:

It’s understandable to assume that Roll embodies an innate capacity for transformation. Yet that’s far from the case. His path and that of his guests continue to be slow and methodical. Here, he discusses why meditation is his fundamental mindset tool, his ongoing journey to uncouple suffering and achievement, and how he disrupts his routine to discover new possibilities. 

We all have those whispers. We’re all visited with those little tickles on the back of our minds that help guide us in one direction or the other. But, they get muted out by the busy lives we lead and the level of distraction we tolerate and contend with in our daily lives. To be able to hear the voice of your intuition, and be guided by your instincts, requires a certain level of discipline. It’s a push-pull thing. On the one hand, you have to have the rectitude to get quiet enough so that you can hear them in the first place. Then, the discipline to actually listen and put those pieces into motion is a bricklayer kind of discipline that’s demanded to build a life that is in alignment with your innate blueprint. 

Meditation is the fundamental tool. Then, learning that meditation isn’t just your practice during those 20 minutes. It’s something that you need to bring into your daily experiences.

My greatest teacher was my own pain and discomfort. My greatest teacher in human form is and has been my wife. I cannot overstate the extent to which everything that has happened is a result of her conviction in the decisions we were making, which were not exactly welcomed in our social circles. We were trying to do something very hard. There was no blueprint for it and no indication that it was going to be successful. There were many times when I wanted to put my tail between my legs and scuttle back towards the safe law firm experience, so I could pay my bills. It was only through Julie’s courage and faith that I was able to stay the course. 

And, it’s true. It took a long time. The podcast has been going on [for] 11 years. I feel like only now is it starting to reach a threshold level where it’s tipping over into broader audiences [more] than it ever has. It’s a function of being consistent and showing up for it every single day, no matter what. I’ve never missed a week.

Anything that I’ve ever been successful at has taken at least 10 years of hard work and anonymous toil to get to that place. I’m an ultra-endurance athlete as an athlete, but also in the way that I’ve approached doing anything in life. There are no shortcuts to mastery. . . we had to go through a lot of hardship. Financially, it was extremely difficult. Even after Finding Ultra came out, [it was] years and years of not finding a way to pay the bills and bootstrapping the whole thing. Now, to be in this position where everything’s worked out, it’s weird when people think it all just happened. It didn’t happen that way. It happened very slowly over a long period of time.

I’m somebody who’s all over the place and routine allows me to keep my life structured in a way that’s conducive to achieving my goals and being the best version of myself. But I, too, will succumb to a certain routine that keeps me stuck. So, I’ve learned to periodically question these patterns. The way I do this is through daily journaling. I do Morning Pages every day, and that keeps me connected to the patterns that are serving me and the patterns that aren’t. Being in a constant practice of humility, like: What if everything I’m saying is wrong? Let’s look at it from a different angle—[is] a practice like meditation or exercise. 

Ultra-endurance athlete Rich Roll explains the practices that fuel transformation by Jenna Abdou in the magazine Fast Company.

So the questions we each need to ask ourselves:

  • What do we want out of life? In my case: How do I create a life of beauty?

  • What habits or patterns in my life support that vision?

  • What habits or patterns stand in the way of that vision?

  • Is the balance between focus and entertaining new ideas right in my life? Everything important, mastery for instance, evolves out of focus, particularly focus on points of leverage, but total focus means not seeing new ideas, new possibilities, new opportunities.

I’m going to redouble my journaling on those questions.

Saturday, June 8, 2024

Sometimes seeds sprout in the the most unlikely of places. I’ve seen mighty white pines grow out of small crevasses in huge granite rocks along windswept shores of northern lakes.

It occurred to me today that I’m in the business of planting lots of seeds. Some sprout in the unlikeliest of places. Some seeds I plant that I thought would turn into mighty white pines don’t sprout at all. Or die young.

A lot of the trick of keeping Heron Dance going is planting lots of seeds, and then, rather than sitting around watching them grow, plant more seeds. Because you just never know. People who rejected me and my work sometimes come back to become huge fans and supporters. And fans and supporters sometimes turn against the work. Maybe something offended them, or called into question something that they’ve based their lives on. The work didn’t seem relevant to their lives. Or it bored them. We live in a fast-paced culture and that pace is accelerating. Slow work about beauty is boring to many.

The whole point is to keep going, keep moving, keep planting art and words. Because you just never know.

Thursday, June 6, 2024

Cataract surgery Tuesday so have been struggling the last couple of days.

Some important things have remained undone at Heron Dance for over a month. It is time to face and deal with that reality. And reorganize around it.

Keeping Heron Dance going is more and more about the question of what to allocate time to. Anything that doesn’t add to readers’ lives, and particularly the lives of those that support the work, needs to get set aside. Heron Dance means a little to a lot of people and a lot to a few people. Spend time finding more of those few people. Serve them.

No matter how much thought you put into it, a percentage of the day will be wasted — wasted on projects that go no where, wasted with suppliers who are disorganized or who have other priorities. Many are on a constant search for expending the least effort and thought to gain the most financial reward. Few care about quality or creating something unique and beautiful. True quality, deep quality, integrity don’t mean much to most. Don’t get bogged down in negativity. Refocus on creating something beautiful, something uplifting, something useful. Constantly refocus. Simplify, simplify. Simplify and focus the words of Heron Dance. What can I add to the lives of others? In the end, the challenges are mostly with myself — thought control, discipline, faith in a spiritual path, faith in myself, in the beauty inside. Manifest that, and everything else will take care of itself. Don’t worry or think much about what others do or don’t do, say or don’t say. That’s their trip. The world is a mess; the world is beautiful.

Make time for painting. Make time for solitude, for reflection. Carefully think through even time spent with friends and family. I find myself sitting with an old friend for an evening and regretting the time spent. Wishing I had it back to paint. On the other hand, I am sustained by a couple of friendships that light up my life. Those need to be protected and preserved. But sacrifices need to be made. I need to say no more often, even to things I’d like to do.

Time is precious. Time is fleeting. Just like life itself. Time spent painting most precious of all.

Saturday, June 1, 2024

So much of this journey I’m on is about having faith in silence, in quiet, in the beauty of wild nature, in peace, acceptance, gratitude. Are those principles, those ways of working, of being in the world enough?

These thoughts this morning are inspired by a reader who wrote me from South Africa asking about Nan Merrill. Nan was an old friend and the woman who founded the gentle, obscure little newsletter Friends of Silence. It was a publication based on faith, inspired by faith. She’d send it out from the tiny apartment she lived in above her son’s garage in Vermont. It was supported solely by donations. No website, no email address. She’d take a pile of spiritual and religious quotations each month — quotations on peace, acceptance, love, faith — pray over them, throw them up in the air and depending on where they landed and how they landed, identify what would go in the next month’s single-page, double-sided newsletter. A substantial number of reads were inmates with whom she’d maintain a regular correspondence. Despite her meagre resources, she was a financial supporter of Heron Dance I’m proud to say. And in a gesture of generosity that puzzles me to this day, she gave me the 5500 person mail list of her readers so that I might grow Heron Dance. It worked.

The primary message of Nan Merrill — and there were many — was that faith is difficult but faith is enough. Faith that goodness in the end has a special power and will prevail. Faith in the power of silence. Faith that we all are, ultimately, on a spiritual path.

Thursday, May 30, 2024

I’ve considered today’s Nurturing e-post for a couple of years but hesitated to use it because it deals, in part, with using journaling to enhance one’s business career. Nevertheless, I often think of it and consider it valuable and insightful, and so this morning decided to go with it.

My priority for the next few days — set up Heron Dance to take advantage of the low-hanging marketing fruit offered by Amazon, Facebook and Google. The places were a little time and money might generate disproportionate results. I keep putting off marketing for new readers, and Heron Dance suffers as a result. Time to get serious about it. And consistent. A few hours a week should suffice.

Also, I am working on improving my video production skills. I’d like videos to play a role in the Substack posts, on this website and also I’d like to post a bunch of videos on YouTube. Content will include me painting, walking in the woods to a backcountry lake or quiet stretch of river and reading a favorite poem, and finally slide shows of my paintings.

Another marketing idea I came up with this morning — to encourage recurring monthly supporters, I’ve been thinking of offering, as thank you gifts, PDFs of the Art Journal and Planner. Recurring monthly donations, even modest ones, make it possible to put time and thought into the books, to work and rework them until they carry their message with power and beauty.

It is up to me to make a meaningful contribution to the lives of others, and, in turn, for those to whom Heron Dance makes a positive difference to support it.

Tuesday, May 28, 2024

The Zoom Readers’ Group Sunday evening was the best yet. I read the introduction from my new book, Nurturing The Song Within, which explores, in part, the role journaling has played in my life. During the discussion afterwards I was asked about the starting point for someone new to journaling. I responded with the thought that first came to mind:

“I think that in all these subjects the first question is ‘What is the objective?” For me, the objective is to give the quiet voice on the edge of my understanding an opportunity to offer its wisdom. I want to see what might come bubbling up.” From there we talked a little about combining meditation and journaling, and the use of imaginary guides — entities we respect who may be friends, people we’ve encountered and whom we respect or characters contemporary or historic whose wisdom inspires us — asking them questions and recording the answers.

I’ve since given more thought to the question, and have explored in my own journal, random thoughts. Here are a few:

Journaling helps us understand opportunities and uncertainties as they present themselves. Journaling helps us understand the patterns, hidden and obvious, the currents of subconscious thought that underlie each of our lives, and the myths that guide us without us realizing it.

Journaling helps us understand the wisdom and insights, however vague, that lurk where our conscious and subconscious minds meet. Journaling can give that quiet, wise voice an opportunity to say what it wants to say.

Reach for the wisdom that lives where our conscious and subconscious minds encounter each other. That voice is shy, and requires nurturing. You offer it respect and an opportunity to say what it wants to say in its own time and in its own way.

That voice speaks from the other side of ego, anger, fear, desire. It seeks to serve, and not just serve others. It seeks to serve the greater good, the positive energies of the universe. It seeks to serve beauty, and in particular to manifest the beauty within.

I think a lot, in the creation of Heron Dance, about the role that my belief in the power of journaling should play in what I write about. At one extreme — don’t mention journaling, but make Heron Dance the product of, the beneficiary of, my journaling. At the other extreme — make journaling the primary focus of Heron Dance including frequent excerpts from the journals of creatives and those who have made the world a better place.

. . .

We had high winds here in northwestern Vermont last night and the power went out for a few hours. I had planned to prepare for today’s Nurturing e-journal but since I couldn’t work on my computer, I dug out of my pile of unread books Wild Idea by Fritz Hull, a book he sent me a few months ago. I carried it around with me on my trip around the southern U.S this winter but didn’t get to it (or the roughly fifty other books I carried around). I didn’t read much this winter because I was focused on finishing the Nurturing The Song Within Art Journal. So last night I found a headlamp, and Fritz’s book. Within the first couple of pages I was totally captivated by his story of the early days of The Chinook Learning Center and its successor The Whidbey Institute. It was a dream that became reality. Without resources, but with faith and love and hard work a devoted group of young idealists turned an old abandoned farmhouse into a focal point for discussions that inspired work to create a better world.

I interviewed Fritz fifteen or twenty years ago at The Whidbey Institute, and in the subsequent years I’ve frequently returned to his words for encouragement and clarity. You can read some excerpts here.

When I finish Fritz’s book, I’ll offer more complete thoughts on his work, both the book and the Center he was instrumental in founding, but here are some quotes Fritz includes in the first few pages that have captured my imagination and are the basis of today’s e-journal post (“We live immersed in a sea of energy.”).

We are not lacking in the dynamic forces needed to create the future. We live immersed in a sea of energy beyond all comprehension. But this energy, in an ultimate sense, is ours not by domination but by invocation.
-   Thomas Berry  

Through many dangers, toils, and snares I have already come;
‘tis grace has brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.
-   From the song Amazing Grace

If you want your dreams to be
Take your time, go slowly,
Do few things but do them well
Heartfelt work grows purely.
-   Donovan, The Little Church

 I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.
-   Henry David Thoreau

The first version of today’s post included three of the four quotes above. Then I was thinking: “Any one of these, if thought about carefully, has the potential to affect the quality of a human life. Including three might lead to none of them being carefully considered. Too overwhelming.” So I published one, the first one, by the amazing Thomas Berry, and will offer the others over the next few days.

Sunday, May 26, 2024

The 2024 Heron Dance Creativity Planner (Digital), and the accompanying appeal for recurring monthly support, received almost no response. It is easy to get discouraged over things like that, but that is a part of the life I’ve chosen. Some things I do work, some don’t.

Focus on contributing beauty to other people’s lives and forge ahead. There are good days and bad days, and one seems to follow the other.

They keys now — get the book up on Amazon, launch the Kickstarter campaign. And paint.

When I get down, I go to the front page of the Heron Dance website and just look at it, at the image of the flock of birds, Oxbow Blue. That always cheers me up.

Friday, May 24, 2024

I was very sick last night — ate something I shouldn’t have — so didn’t get the Creativity Planner announcement out to recurring supporters and to those who have purchased the Diary Planner print edition. I plan to today as soon as a get a Nurturing post finished.

The big thought on my mind today:

If my objective is to create the most beautiful series of journals possible, and journals most useful to understanding the underlying currents of one’s life, and most useful to creating a life of beauty, a life centered around the beauty and mystery of life and of wild nature, what would those journals look like?

There is a special power in having a clear objective and being excited by it.

Thursday, May 23, 2024

The Heron Dance 2024 Creativity Planner

The planner is done! Later this evening or during the night I’ll send all recurring supporters of Heron Dance a link to download their planner and the instructions. I’ll also record a video explaining how it works — interacts with Google or Apple Calendars, and how to move around inside the planner which contains thousands of embedded links. In addition to keeping appointments, the planner has a journaling section that contains pages of my art and inspirational or insightful quotes on the creative process.

Today’s Post, Nurturing The Song Within

A little late but we’ll get on track with a 5am morning publication time most days, probably starting tomorrow. I was preoccupied with the final touches on the Planner, and so am just getting to the Nurturing Within post now.

Wednesday, May 22, 2024

Life is finally getting back to normal after months of day and night work, of struggling with a long list of important stuff not addressed. The feeling of “okay, this is what my life is really like” is a good one.

The 2024 Heron Dance Digital Creativity Planner

We’re redoing it in different software. Should only take a couple of days. The colors in the images of paintings wasn’t right. This will go for free to all who support the work on a recurring basis, or who order the print edition of the planner.

A Series Of New Art Journals

Work has begun on a series of new journals that combine art, reflections on the beauty and mystery of wild nature and of life, with room for your on journaling. Printed on a beautiful premium paper, the journals will be designed as a tool to help us better understand the important flows and patterns of our lives, both hidden and apparent.

Videos

Work has begun on a series of videos centered around three subjects:

  • Walks to beautiful locations in the woods where I’ll read a poem or reflection.

  • Me painting.

  • Video slide shows of my art and me describing the message of Heron Dance.

Sunday, May 19, 2024

Ideas of a series of journals have continued to bounce around in my head — journals that combine thoughts that are important to living a quality, unique life — serving others, adventure, creativity — with room for readers to make their own notes, reflect on their own lives, explore their own potential. Friendship with oneself. Harmony with oneself.

Journal Possibilities:

  • A creativity journal.

  • The Wisdom Of The Backwoods Wanderers — Thoreau, Emerson, Muir, Sigurd Olson, Aldo Leopold, John Burroughs.

  • A poetry journal.

  • The poems and reflections of the Taoist/Zen mountain hermits of China and Japan.

  • Life As Daring Adventure; Life As Journey; The Journey Itself Is Home

  • Love, Gratitude And The Beauty Of Wild Places Journal

  • Silence, Simplicity, Solitude — A Relax The Mind Journal

Below, a couple of ideas I’m experimenting with. Envision a wire-o binding. The actual dimensions will likely change — I have message into the printer asking what trim size minimizes paper waste. The size below reflects the Metamorphosis Sketchbook which seems an ideal size in terms of journaling and room on my desk to fit it.

Mockup for a possible two-page spread from a future Creativity Journal.

Finally, work is almost finished on The Heron Dance 2024 Digital Planner, although it has morphed into a Creativity Planner. Work may be complete today.

You can view here.

This will be offered as a thank you to all who support this work on a recurring basis, or those who purchase the Print Edition of the Diary Planner, which can be viewed here, including, of course, all current recurring supporters.

Saturday, May 18. 2024

In the wee hours last night I added to the Heron Dance website the definition that appears above.

Then, in the night, in my sleep, I envisioned a series of journals combining my art and key insights on living a big beautiful life, from myself and others with space for readers’ own notes on the same subjects. I envisioned a series of books with quotes from Zen hermit poets, from backwoods wanderers (Thoreau, Emerson, Sigurd Olson, etc.), artists, activists, adventurers with the quotes they use or used to guide their lives, any one of which, if absorbed and thought carefully about, could change the course of a human life for the better. And poems.

I woke up excited.

Thursday, May 16, 2024

Things are finally starting to fall into place at Heron Dance after months of hard work. The reality I had to work my way out of was the huge number of online publications and Substacks and blog posts that have come into existence in the last few years. For these reasons, and due to the average age of Heron Dance readers, roughly about eighty years old (that number was 56, on average, when I started Heron Dance thirty years ago), Heron Dance was not financially viable as an online publisher. We had to morph into something else — and that something else is book publisher.

Books are highly competitive too of course. I read somewhere that 400,000 new books are listed every year on Amazon. My response is to offer books that are truly beautiful, unique and useful on what it means to create beautiful work and a beautiful life. And then become an expert at marketing them, just as I was once an expert at direct mail back in the heyday of Heron Dance when it was a print publication.

That marketing mindset is completely different than the mindset required to create Heron Dance, which is one of submerging myself in the peace, equanimity and beauty of wild nature, of close friendship. Life as a fleeting and precious gift. So to succeed, I need to develop and maintain a somewhat schizophrenic personality and work process. One is constantly searching for and taking advantage of opportunity, and the other relaxing into the beauty and mystery of life. If schizophrenia is what’s required, schizophrenia it shall be. My whole life has been an adventure, an experiment, with all of the profoundly deep rewards and failures that such a life entails.

Projects

The 2024 Heron Dance Digital Planner and Journal

Work is complete on the Google Calendar edition. By the end of the day it should be complete on the Apple Calendar edition. We’ll provide it as a thank you to all who support Heron Dance with a recurring donation, and all who ordered or will order the print Planner and Diary. The journal combines my art and reflections, as well as those of others that I find particularly inspiring, with a fully interactive planner. I’ve used a variety of planners and journals over the years, both self-designed and purchased. I love being organized. I’ve incorporated all my favorite features into this planner.

More here.

Nurturing The Song Within

The book is finally back from the printer. Other than orders placed yesterday and today, all who ordered it should have received it by now. It is, surprisingly, taking about two days in the mail. We’re getting it up on Amazon and will shortly start promoting it there. I’m also looking forward to appearing on podcasts if anyone has any ideas. And I’ll approach all who ordered the book and ask them to review it on the Heron Dance website, on Amazon and on Goodreads.

The book combines my art and reflections on the gentle arts of life with those I found particularly meaningful from artists, adventurers, activists and those who serve others from the hundreds of interviews I’ve done over the decades and from books. It is as beautiful as I could make it — a hardcover, printed by a quality art book printer on expensive paper, with Smyth sewn binding, and a dust jacket.

Description here.

The More Or Less Daily Blog Post That Is No Longer Daily

It is going to be five or six times a week again very soon. Within a couple of days. As soon as I get these books up on Amazon and get a virtual assistant to help me run the Amazon marketing, and get the new digital planner distributed to all who would like it and who support this work, my focus will shift to the truly important work — painting and writing — and, as part of that, publishing the Nurturing blog.

Monday, May 13, 2024

The emphasis this week is getting the diary planner done and offered, and getting the marketing underway for the new book now back from the printer. Books with content as beautiful, useful and unique as I can make it, with high quality bindings and printed on beautiful paper, is the future of Heron Dance. Yes, the cost is high but no more than a good dinner out for two people. This is a work of love and I opted to create a book quality in all respects.

Updated Description

Reading books on book marketing, and talking to experts in the area, has led me to prepare a more complete description of the Art Journal and Planner Diary, which can be viewed here.

Digital Planner Diary

First prototype 80% complete. Now working on the Journal Notes section, which combines blank pages for your notes with my art and inspirational quotes.

Tomorrow I’ll get the rest of my contribution to the Digital Diary Planner done and switch to getting the Kickstarter campaign underway.

And I’ll get a Nurturing blog post up.

Friday, May 10, 2024

The Nurturing The Song Within Art Journal Hardcover

Copies arrived from the printer yesterday. All the pre-orders wend out Friday.

Digital Planner Diary

A designer was hired today and work has begun. I’m hoping for a prototype early next week and a final product in about a week. The planners will cover the period May 1 to December 31st, 2024.

I plan to offer these as a bonus to anyone who orders or has ordered the print planner, Nurturing The Song Within, or who supports Heron Dance with a recurring donation in any amount. They will have plenty of my art and quotes on creating work of beauty and a life of beauty.

If the response is favorable, I’ll publish a 2025 digital planner in January.

From my journal notes today:

10pm after exhausting week. The two primary challenges:

  • Recognizing that you are on a spiritual journey and relaxing into that.

  • Your job is to create beauty. To guide people toward beauty, toward an awareness of beauty, and toward the peace that they can find in the beauty of wild nature.

On a spiritual path, exhaustion is not required. In fact, it is counterproductive. 

On a spiritual path, things fall into place. You have enough. Doors open that wouldn’t open for anyone else.  You can relax into the belief that you will be taken care of.

On a spiritual path, everything that happens should happen.

On a spiritual path, the ante keeps going up. Behavior that was good enough yesterday isn’t good enough today. You keep getting tested.

Your faith is constantly tested, including your faith in your work. But especially your faith in yourself.

Wednesday, May 8, 2024

Focus Of Heron Dance Going Forward

I’ve been going through notes this morning, separating out subjects and notes that are not related to creating beauty, experiencing beauty, living a life of beauty. My thinking is that power comes from focus and clarity. Send Heron Dance readers something every day that uplifts, that celebrates the beauty and mystery of life. And produce books that explore beauty and mystery in all of its multitude of manifestations. And create out of the most profoundly beautiful experiences of my life — the experiences, almost all of which were experienced in wild nature, that filled me with feelings of peace and harmony. And spend at least half a day a week sitting in the woods, generally by a backcountry lake or isolated stretch of river, meditating, thinking, writing journal notes and just appreciating the scene.

The Nurturing The Song Within Art Journal Hardcover

The printer tells me the books will ship today or tomorrow. It should get to the fulfillment house Thursday or Friday. They’ve promised to turn this around within 24 hours. Thank you to all who pre-ordered for your patience. It is greatly appreciated. I did everything I could to get your book(s) to you by April 1, but there were a series of unforeseen setbacks and printer probems.

The Nurturing The Song Within Art Journal Softcover

The softcover version — to be available on Amazon and through bookstores — is in the final file submission process. It is my hope to price it at $49 a copy, or about half the price of the hardcover. Everything about this edition is lower quality — the paper, the binding, the color rendition — but at least acceptable. Typical Amazon /trade press quality. It also will be available worldwide.

The Digital Planner Diary

I’ve looked at hundreds of digital planners, mostly on Etsy, and talked to a number of designers and software developers. A plan has emerged of a functional and beautiful planner. I hope to hire a designer today with a view to offering a planner for the rest of 2024, and then another in a few weeks time for 2025. It will have a section for appointments and priorities — 2 pages per day — and another section for art, journaling and random notes.

I’ll know more about what is possible tomorrow.

The Challenge of Heron Dance

With the Art Journal back from the printer, marketing will take on a new importance at Heron Dance. Our subscriber numbers and financial support have stagnated at a breakeven level. I noticed back when Heron Dance published a print journal that the publication did well whenever I paid attention to marketing, and put time and money into building the readership. Whenever I didn’t do that, Heron Dance didn’t do well. We were always either growing or shrinking.

The challenge now is to get the word out on multiple levels from press releases to asking readers to post book reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, and their favorite platforms.

Said another way, the challenge is to make people who believe in the power of beauty, in creating a beautiful life, aware of the book. That’s our tribe.

Getting Back On A Regular E-Journal Publishing Schedule

Heron Dance needs to get back on a 4-6 times a week publishing schedule to thrive. Travel, the final modifications of the new books, the design of the digital planner have all stood in the way of that but it needs to become a priority. It is the preliminary work on the next book.

Sunday May 5, 2024

I’m mostly recovered after my trip north. I slept most of the day yesterday. The few days away from Heron Dance, though tiring from all the driving, hours of it in bumper-to-bumper traffic, were helpful in terms of getting perspective. What is Heron Dance about? I ask myself that all the time. It is about the the subject I know the most about — living a big, beautiful life — and the subject that most challenges me, that I most often fail at — taking time for downtime. Downtime is the source of our creativity, our wisdom, our internal power and clarity. That’s mine. You may have a completely different struggle.

At the center of all of our lives there exists a push and pull between what we’ve achieved and what we’d like to achieve, between who we are and who we want to be. There’s an inherent contradiction there. One we ever resolve? I hope so. Anyway, out of that contradiction in my own life, a lot gets done, some of it wonderful, some of it a disaster. I learned interviewing hundreds of people that the contradictions are where the juice lies, where the most interesting aspects of a human life hang out.

When I think of that struggle, my mind wanders to the quiet backcountry lakes that have played a role in my life. The lakes with one campsite. The lakes where deer or maybe moose wander into your camp in the pre-dawn darkness. The lakes where few go because it involves humping your stuff over considerable distances. The lakes where loons float by apparently oblivious to you. The lake where coyotes howl at night, and in Canada the northern lakes where wolves howl and moose bellow.

You struggle and sweat to get there, and then, in the silence, in the solitude, you sit by the lake and think. In the dark of night sleep comes deep.

Why do I find setting aside time for that downtime so difficult? I know it makes my life and work more powerful. I meditated on that yesterday. The answer I got back was unsatisfactory — because you always think that you haven’t accomplished enough. And the reason you don’t accomplish more is because your efforts don’t have the power of downtime behind them.

Friday, May 3, 2024

I’m back home in Vermont. There’s a woodthrush singing outside my window. Ada was ecstatic to be home last night, get her belly rubbed by Sally and reconnect with the cats. She spent part of the night in Sally’s bed upstairs, and part in mine burrowed under the covers. It is great to be home.

Major new project

This morning my thoughts are very much preoccupied by a new project — the creation of a digital creativity planner diary. Ideally it would be interactive with Google Calendar and Apple Calendar. It would have a different painting for each day of the year (I’ve got to paint more!), an inspirational quote on the creative process, and room for journaling notes, appointments, attitude and mental health checkin, ongoing projects, objectives, major questions and opportunities. It would be a source of inspiration, planning and inner thoughts for creative insiders. Heron Dance would offer it on a subscription basis. There would be a community forum for subscribers to exchange suggestions, thoughts on the creativity planner and on any Heron Dance subject, perhaps on Facebook.

It would also be a place to post new paintings for the preview of supporters before they are offered to the general readership of Heron Dance.

Marketing

I’ve got to get the marketing organized for the new book. Press release, Amazon paid search, maybe Facebook and Google paid search. Substack. The new book, Nurturing The Song Within, gives Heron Dance something unique to market. Heron Dance needs new supporters, new readers. I’ve retained an advisor for four one-hour weekly consultations — Julie Schoerke of Books Forward — who is an expert in book releases. These art journals, and the calendar mentioned above, are the future of Heron Dance.

Delivery Date, Nurturing The Song Within

The printer now says May 13th. That’s a disappointment though only ten days away. I began working with this printer, Superior Packaging, April 20 on the representation that they were running a week or two out. Some of that delay was due to our own struggles to get the files to meet their specifications, but that may have absorbed a week. I guess when you add 7 days to April 20, then another 14 per their estimate, May 13 is not that far out. We’ll get them in the mail within a day or two of receipt.

Heron Dance Content

The next stage — read and select the most thought-provoking thoughts from three hundred memoirs, autobiographies and published journals of creatives. I’ve probably read three hundred or more of these over the last thirty years. It is time to double my reservoir of creative thoughts.

Thought Of The Day: Mental Health

It is so easy, when you have a lot of projects underway and tend to operate at the limits of your energy, to have things go wrong, to have people not meet their commitments through incompetence, normal friction that all life encounters, through dishonesty or laziness. The key is how one reacts to that. If you let it get you into a downward spiral, everything in life starts to take on a frustrated, negative tone. The last few days of packing to leave Myrtle Beach, get the bare minimum of work done, and the drive through bumper-to-bumper traffic in Washington and Baltimore, definitely got me down. A good night’s sleep though and the world looks much more wonderful and opportunity-filled.

My thought: write every day in my journal about my mental health. How would I rate it today? How would I rate my positivity, my happiness? Am I a good person to be around, to do business with? Am I looking for the good in life, in opportunities, in others, or am I mired in fatigue and negative thoughts? How would I rate my energy reserve today?

Wednesday, May 1, 2023

I’m on my north somewhere south of Richmond VA. I saw Sy Safransky last evening, the founder of the Sun Magazine. He lives in a strikingly beautiful but modest-sized home outsider of Chapel Hill, NC. He’s dealing with Alzhiemher’s and these meetings are profound. He’s very cogent and aware as he confronts an uncertain future, and contemplates his intellectual past.

Driving, thinking about the focus of Heron Dance and how to best describe it. I was at a social gathering a few days ago attended by art patrons. As I was leaving I was asked about my new book. I described it as an exploration of the inner work that underlies creative work. That seemed to capture the group’s imagination. I’m going to go with it. It offers more creative latitude than does just my own approach to my own work — the internal and profound peace I find in wild nature, although that can be a big part of my exploration of the overall subject.

I finished a couple of loon paintings yesterday. I’m finally back in the groove of painting.

Monday, April 28th, 2024

I leave Myrtle Beach early tomorrow headed north for the summer. I leave a little worn out from two or three months of day and night work on the new book, but full of ideas for the future of Heron Dance — ideas having mostly to do with an exploration of the deep peace I find in wild nature, and the inspiration that provides my creative work.

And I leave with a new book done, finished, about to be printed. Maybe printed today. I’ve poured everything I have into that book. It is the most beautiful and deepest book in terms of meaningful content I’ve done, but a little scattered in terms of the territory it covers. It is not a focused work. It is more random thoughts from a variety of creative outsiders on the creative process and in particular on the inner work that underlies their (and to a lesser extent my) creative work.

The next stage of Heron Dance will be more about my own processes and search for peace out of which to create. It will be more about the beauty and mystery of wild nature, of backcountry lakes and wild rivers. Will I be able to stick to that subject? Or will I branch out again in new directions when a new idea captures my imagination? Focus would be good for Heron Dance but I’m not sure I’m capable of it.

Saturday, April 27, 2024

Painting

My main objective for the day is to spend a few hours painting, which I was able to find time to do last night. I’m working on a series of loon paintings for a reader who is involved with a loon conservation nonprofit.

The Nurturing Art E-Journal

During the night tonight I plan to publish a post for tomorrow. Something to do with the quiet core out of which we can best create art and create our lives.

The Next Nurturing Art Journal (Print)

Work has begun on Book Two. I’m working with Velin (see below) and look forward to a smoother process with the lessons of Book One now under our belt.

The Nurturing Art Journal Book One Hardcover

All proofs were approved late yesterday. Printing is the next step! I’ll keep this page updated when I get a timetable.

The Nurturing Art Journal Book One Softcover

This is to be printed by IngramSpark and offered on Amazon. The proof copy was received Thursday of this week. We’re replacing four pages. The new version should be available on Amazon early next week. The softcover edition will be less expensive than the hardcover, and the quality substantially lower. Standard Amazon quality — certainly acceptable but not a work of craftsmanship like the hardcover. It will be available worldwide while the hardcover will be available just in the United States.

The Nurturing Diary Planner

I’m focused for now on creating a digital planner for the entire year that will also incorporate my art. I’m talking to potential partners to help me with this.

Forum For Our Zoom Group

Participants in our weekly Zoom meeting have asked if we can set up a forum where we can communicate with each other and exchange ideas. I’ve looked into a variety of platforms and decided on Slack. I’ve hired someone to set it up. She’ll talk to us tomorrow evening and show us how to use it. It will be linked with our Zoom account.

Friday, April 26, 2024

Going forward, these will be much shorter. As the first though, there’s a bunch of things to cover.

The Art Journal

I received the hardcopy proofs yesterday. It is a surprisingly beautiful book. In terms of print quality, all the images were adequate, most were very good, a few were exceptional. It was interesting that the printer sent the proofs to me overnight without me asking. That’s very rare. Every other printer I’ve ever dealt with, and I’ve dealt with ten or twenty, and spent well over a million dollars over the years on printing, sends them only on request and often reluctantly and at substantial extra expense. This printer, Superior Packaging (I know, a strange name for a book printer) included them in the price and sent them without me asking. That’s quality.

On the other hand, despite repeated attempts, they couldn’t get the measurements of the dust jacket right. It is simple math. That’s amateurville.

I’m dealing with a great guy there — Paul Parisi — a guy my age who sold his company to Superior. I get on his nerves sometimes I think but he’s taking good care of us.

I replaced two of the two-page spreads overnight. Minor image problems but it won’t slow the project down so I took advantage of the opportunity. I’m hoping it reaches the press early next week. Printing and binding should be pretty fast.

This is my first book in ten years. The major lessons I learned this time around:

  • Pay a premium for a good printer who is organized and focused on quality and has good customer support. Mixam, the first company I was working with, is a total disaster and slowed the project down by weeks with their incompetence. Mixam offers Smyth Sewn binding, the absolute highest quality binding available, and important for my books because they will layflat and not loose strips of my art in the gutter. I got sucked in by that. Superior also offers Smyth Sewn though at considerably higher cost. My first sign of trouble with Mixam was disorganized customer support who gave me half answers and sometimes deliberately false answers. By then I’d already paid for the job. Ultimately I threatened to sue them and they gave me my money back.

  • Pay a premium for a good graphic designer. In the past I’ve done my own design and it worked fine. This time though the print-on-demand digital processes that have evolved over the last ten years are more sophisticated and easy to get wrong. I’m working with Velin in Bulgaria. Headstrong and difficult at times but a good guy to have on my side. He compliments my weaknesses in the area of detail management.

The Diary Planner

It came back from the printer — Papergraphics in Merrimack, NH — about three weeks ago. Great people to deal with and they did a great job. To save money on postage and fulfillment, I was planning on shipping the planner with the Art Journal — most orders are for both — but with the continual delays on the Art Journal, I had the diaries sent out Tuesday of this past week at an added cost of several hundred dollars.

There are seveal problems with these diary planners though. They are expensive to produce and ship — so much so they barely breakeven. And that’s at a price way higher than anything comparable sold on Amazon. And my planner is quarterly, so to get all four quarters costs about $200 a year. The problem is all the full color art in them, and the resulting printing cost.

I’ll explore an ebook version in the next couple of days. I’m talking to a woman in Indonesia who’s done several ebook planners.

The Daily Emails That Are No Longer Daily

I hope to get back on a more frequent schedule soon. For months I did these six or seven times a week. But even working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, the publication of these two books has absorbed all my time. Important things are not getting done as a result. The daily ejournals, my income taxes, painting, reading.

And with all of the stress related to these books, I’ve been drinking way too much. I cut it in half yesterday, and had a much better night sleep. Will cut it in another half today and should get down to zero over the weekend. Don’t work so hard. Meditate instead of drink.

The General Direction Of Heron Dance

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about the central message of Heron Dance. Overall, the objective is to create beautiful books out of the most profound experiences of my life and out of related interviews and reading. Almost all of those experiences relate to two subjects: time in wild nature, mostly alone, and friendship.

Thinking this over, led me to go back and review my collected quotes on Taoism, and the poetry of Taoist hermits living in the remote mountains of China. A central concept in Taoism and in their poetry is the notion of the power of water, its softness but ability to wear down rocks and even mountains, and the notion of muddy water becoming clear through settling. Expressed simply, Taoism is about finding inner peace through relaxing the mind and letting it settle. Quiet mind — to find it you need to sacrifice some distracting but common things, some desires for trivial things, some ego things.

Over the last week, thinking about the times of deep peace I’ve experienced in wild nature has led to plan an experiment with Heron Dance. I’ll start taking a video camera — a GoPro or something like that — into the woods; I’ll sit by a lake or river, and read a poem or excerpt from a Nurturing The Song Within e-journal post. Maybe once a week. And posting it on YouTube and for Heron Dance subscribers. Maybe I’ll include in those videos short sections on me painting.

Weekly Zoom Meetings

Participants have asked if we can set up a forum where we can communicate with each other and exchange ideas. I’ve looked into a variety of platforms. The one that makes the most sense to me so far is Slack, which can be combined with Zoom although I’m not yet sure how. I’ll try to look into this more, and implement it if it seems like a good idea, before Sunday’s next Zoom meeting at 7pm. More here.

Next Week

Tuesday morning I head back to Vermont for the summer. I’ll be traveling for 2 or 3 days so won’t be publishing and responses to emails will be sporadic.

The image above is how the same image might look in the Creativity Journal, although I wouldn’t use the same image in two different Journals. But just to give you an idea. In fact, when I think about it, Evolutionary Dance would fit better. It was painted from memory a couple of days after working with a nude model.

So if there was a layout like this, the next two pages would be blank for your notes. These Journals would contain the same number of blank pages as pages of art and inspirational quotes.

Love, Gratitude And The Beauty Of Wild Places

. . . Visit here for past Nurturing The Song Within and Pause For Beauty posts.

Visit here to receive email notification each time new Art Journal pages are published.