The History:
Zen Mountain Journal and its Predecessor,
the Heron Dance Art Journal
Initially, in 1995, Heron Dance was a newsletter of interviews of people who lived interesting, unique lives in service of some concept of a greater good. It evolved out of a book, the working title of which was “Free Spirits”, that no one was interested in publishing, at least in the form I had in mind. I had spent two years traveling around the country doing interviews.
In the beginning it had minimal art. There were a few photographs, a few sketches of interview subjects, but mostly it was interviews presented as close to what was actually said as space would permit. I offered little in the way of commentary or reflection. The first subscribers were mostly ministers of Unitarian Universalist congregations. I’d heard a joke on Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion to the effect that instead of burning a cross on your front yard the Universalists would burn a giant question mark. I thought, “That sounds like my group — people with more questions than answers.” I got a directory of their church addresses — I had only ever been once to a UU service — and sent a sample of the first issue free to 1100 ministers. The idea was that these people had wide circles of influence and if they liked what they saw they’d spread the word.
The first article on the first page of the first issue was an interview of Frédéric Back, an artist who had made several animated films about living a simple life in close connection with the natural world, and about industrial man’s destruction of nature. I saw one, The Man Who Planted Trees, which had won an Oscar, contacted Frédéric, and he immediately agreed to an interview. A few days later I was sitting in his living room with a cassette recorder. He became a friend and supporter of Heron Dance and would come to visit me in Vermont. He was a kindhearted man with a fierce will and a resolute determination that humans could do better.
Before I started Heron Dance, I had gotten to know a bird hospital near where I lived in Basking Ridge New Jersey, The Raptor Trust. Len Soucy and his wife Diane, founders, treated sick and injured birds — thousands of them a year, some flown from across the country — on forty acres on the edge of the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge. They too became friends and supporters of the work. The general common denominator of all of the interview subjects in those early issues was work that served some concept of a Greater Good. There was a priest who worked with young people who had lost their way in Fort Apache the Bronx. People who worked to protect wilderness, worked for peace or, serving long prison terms, worked with younger inmates to help them envision a more positive future. I volunteered in prison. Somewhere along the way I had become a Quaker. I volunteered in the Quaker Alternatives to Violence program at the Woodburne medium security prison in New York. A couple of years before I started Heron Dance I had been diagnosed with a slow growing but incurable cancer, non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. I had no money. The whole thing was a magical journey on which I often felt guided and supported by forces I didn’t understand. One step ahead of the posse, but still the bills somehow got paid.
Over the sixteen years of its existence Heron Dance expanded its areas of interest to creativity — art as a way of life — then to wilderness travels and living in close connection with the natural world, later to the role of questions and journaling in living a meaningful life, and then what it means to live a life of gratitude and surrender. During all of this, I put together sixteen books and one book arts collection of my art, writing, poetry and the quotes from others that most inspired me.
Searches, sometimes for adventure, sometimes inner peace, took me out to the hinterlands — the outer edges of the human enclosure and beyond. Immersing myself in wild nature was a major part of my journey. I lived alone for years in a cabin deep in the Split Rock Wildway Nature Preserve in New York’s Adirondacks, and went on long canoe trips in the Canadian north and along the north shore of Lake Superior. Most often I paddled alone.
As part of my exploration of what it means to live life in your own way on your own terms I interviewed hundreds of people who had a unique vision of what they wanted to get out of this precious gift called life — painters, writers, jazz musicians, wilderness travelers and backwoods wanderers, craftspeople, monks, people who volunteer in homeless shelters, refugee camps and prisons. I asked them, in one form or another, the same questions: What is a life well-lived to you? Have you found inner peace? What have you learned about where inner peace comes from? What has this life you’ve lived cost you? And always, in these interviews I tried to plumb the depths. Their spiritual practice, and, to the extent they were willing, the contradictions. And the cost because every path requires a price, and the paths lived by some of these interview subjects involve real risk. I met gentle people who did beautiful work; I met some angry people who did beautiful work.
Still today, their answers feed this journal, alongside a couple thousand quotes I’ve collected from books I've read. The ancient Zen and Taoist hermit poets. Thomas Merton in his hermitage. Helen Keller. Soetsu Yanagi on the quiet beauty of the Zen craftsman of old. Calvin Rutstrum building a cabin on a remote northern lake. Louise Dickinson Rich on leaving the city to live with a new husband deep in the Maine woods. Thoreau at Walden Pond. Different times, different continents, the same search — to, as Thoreau put it, suck the marrow out of life. And, in a dark place, after my marriage broke up — my wife had become an important part of the work — I wrote the semi-fictional private journal of Archibald Campbell, wild artist, who lived in a cabin deep in the woods and cavorted with his nude models to the extent they would let him. Archibald was the most popular work I’ve done, but also the most unpopular. I got hundreds of letters of support and hundreds of letters of hate mail. Discouraged, I shut Heron Dance down for several years and just painted.
Together we navigate a chaotic world. Despite the darkness, we are nevertheless surrounded by an incredible beauty.
The Search, as the Mountain Hermits Lived It
During all of this I developed an increasing interest in the ancient poems of Taoist and Zen mountain hermits. Mostly, I think, their work resonated with me from my own connection to wild nature and my retreat into the woods and solo canoe trips after my marriage broke up. The first result of that work was my book, in 2013, Wild Waters and the Tao. Also, my book arts collection, The Journey Itself is Home, leaned heavily on the haiku poetry of Bashō (1644 to 1694).
Beginning centuries before Christ, Chinese Taoist mountain hermits, and later Zen monks, gave up comfort and financial security to search for inner harmony in solitude, nature, and meditation. Out of their search emerged beautiful and mysterious poems — spare, ambiguous, luminous. The best known is the Tao Te Ching, but there are thousands of others, many equally beautiful and mysterious.
The peace I have found in wild nature is the same peace they wrote about. I sit with an ancient poem, meditate on it, go down deep, and offer what emerges in art and words.
Li Po: Peace That Can't Be Explained
You ask
why I perch
on a jade green mountain
I laugh
but say nothing
my heart
free
like a peach blossom
in the flowing stream
going by
in the depths
in another world
not among men.
— Li Po (Kenneth Rexroth translation, One Hundred Poems From The Chinese)
My interpretation:
I roam these mountains
Alive, alone, in love with life.
Strange to some, yes
I don't try to explain
I can't explain
The feelings I have here
In this land of no men
Of mountain ranges and rivers.
My mind empty, my heart free.
— Li Po, Zen Mountain Journal interpretation.
Ikkyū: Peace Comes When Striving Stops
Studying Zen, focused
sitting meditation, reaching
for enlightenment
clouds the clear mind.
Meanwhile a lone fisherman
hums a simple song to a darkening river.
Rain softens the dusk,
moonlight slips through clouds
—nothing to explain,
the river sings itself into night.
— Ikkyū (Japanese Zen monk, 1394–1481), Zen Mountain Journal interpretation.
The fisherman, singing to the dusk and rain, represents the purity of mind that comes when one stops striving — including striving for enlightenment. The best way to know peace is simply to be, living in a way that your life sings itself. Ikkyū was a rebellious monk, disdainful of the rituals and hierarchy of Buddhist temples, though he was an abbot himself, with a proclivity for wine, women and song.
Ikkyū provided the quote I've taken on as the mantra for my work, both art and writing:
“I never get lost because I don't know where I'm going.”
Contemplative Journaling
Out of this same well a journaling practice has risen — sitting quietly with an ancient poem, inspirational interview or book excerpt and letting it open into reflection that bubbles up from down deep. Inner peace isn't something you read your way into. Quiet reflection is the price of admission. Exploring sometimes difficult questions is the work.