Creative people live a rich, vast life under their work. Heron Dance explores that inner life.

For thirty years, I’ve traveled around North America asking artists (painters, sculptors, filmmakers, poets, novelists) about their lives. I ask them what most occupies their imagination, what fascinates and perplexes them about life. I ask them about inspiration and discipline, about rejection and persistence. I want to know about their spirit spark -- their dream world, their spirituality or meditation practice. I want to know where their work comes from -- what they do to relax, to find a core of peace -- a basis from which to create. I want to know what they strive to accomplish with their art.

Creative people are above all else people of ideas because all art is the expression of an idea. Creativity is a tasting of the water of our own essence. What has amazed me most about interviewing dozens of artists is the diversity of their interests, the breadth of their reading and life experience in areas seemingly unrelated to the medium they've chosen.

Whatever you give your heart and soul to will transform your life, whether it be creating art, sailing alone around the world, working in a soup kitchen or a famous Paris restaurant or raising children. The juice in life comes from giving wholeheartedly. It isn’t easy.

We may worry about death but what hurts the soul most is
to live without tasting the water of its own essence.  
- Rumi

As creatives, we get energy and inspiration from each other. We learn from each other.

. . .

Heron Dance explores the hidden wellspring, the murky waters of deep imagination, the inner work that inspires creative work.

Your creative work grows out of a relationship, a friendship, with your subterranean world.

Heron Dance seeks diverse views on the creative process. It contains perspectives from artists in the bowels of New York City and from Taoist hermit poets
in the remote mountains of South China.

The objectives:
Do creative work. Create a unique life.

. . .

Nurturing The Song Within

There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual -- become clairvoyant.  We reach then into reality.  Such are the moments of our greatest happiness.  Such are the moments of our greatest vision.  At such times there is a song going on within us, a song to which we listen.  It fills us with surprise.  We marvel at it.  We would continue to hear it.  But few are capable of holding themselves in the state of listening to their song.  Intellectuality steps in and as the song within us is of the utmost sensitiveness, it retires in the presence of the cold, material intellect.  It is aristocratic and will not associate itself with the commonplace -- and we fall back and become our ordinary selves.  Yet we live in the memory of these songs which in moments of intellectual inadvertence have been possible to us.  They are the pinnacles of our experience and it is the desire to express these intimate sensations, this song from within, which motivates the masters of all art.
- Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

            "Art emerges out of a disequilibrium in search of a new equilibrium. The creative act itself is the emergence of something new. That is why it is so important to create. That is why the artist is always at the margin. Nothing creative ever happens at the center. The artist revels in the ultimate disequilibrium of things. . . Artists have something in them that is wild, something guided and inspired ultimately by imagination.”
- Thomas Berry, Heron Dance Interview. Berry was the author of Dream Of The Earth and The Great Story among other books.

Every poet, every artist is an antisocial human being.  He's not that way because he wants to be; he can't be any other way.  Of course the state has the right to chase him away, and if he is really an artist it is in his nature not to want to be admitted, because if he is admitted it can only mean he is doing something which is understood, approved, and therefore old hat -- worthless. 
Anything new, anything worth doing, can't be recognized.  People just don't have that much vision. 
- Picasso

Set fire to the art school and abolish the estampille (the art school’s, the learned judges’, stamp of approval).
      - Rodin. Read the interview from which this quote is taken here.

. . .
No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation. 
- Walter Bagehot
. . .

Man does indeed know intuitively more than he rationally understands. The question, however, is how we can gain access to the potentials of knowledge contained in the depth of us, how we can achieve increased capacities of direct intuition and enlarged awareness. . .

Just as an acorn contains in its unconscious the dream of the oak tree and that dream expresses the coming into being of the oak tree, working with a person, we have to have a method of drawing forth what is in the seed of the person, the unlived potential.
- Ira Progoff, At A Journal Workshop

An acorn contains within it the dream of a mighty oak.
A life journey, a creative journey, grows out of the seed of one’s song.
Creative work is like an iceberg in the sense that ninety percent of the total mass is hidden.
Creativity depends on, feeds on, that hidden world.
. . .

What in your life is trying to unfold?

The objective is clarity. Clarity doesn’t just happen. It’s a process, a practice.

. . .

There are two e-journals, a weekend and a weekday edition.
These e-journals are the preliminary work, the first draft, of the books described below.

Weekend edition: Published each Saturday and Sunday. Free, though contributions in support are gratefully accepted. Sample issue here, including a little of the background and thinking behind Heron Dance. Sign up here.

Weekday edition: Published three to four days a week. Available to all who support Heron Dance in any form in any amount including a one time donation, recurring monthly support, the purchase of an art print or original, notecards, a poster, etc. When you make a contribution or order something from the website, you’ll be automatically signed up. Support Heron Dance here.

Example issue here.

Weekly Online Meetings

Each Sunday at 7pm, Rod MacIver, Founder of Heron Dance, hosts an online meeting with Heron Dance readers. All are welcome.
More here.

Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance,
And there is only the dance.
-   T.S. Eliot

There are many pathways in this life and it doesn't matter which one you take, for they all have a common destination, and that is the grave. 
But some paths give you energy and some take it away.
- Cervantes