Nudes A Pause for Beauty 317

Dear Heron Dancers,

Beauty is character and expression. Now, there is nothing in nature that has more character than the human body. It evokes through its strength or its grace the most varied images. At one moment, it resembles a flower: the bending of the torso imitates the stem, while the smile of the breast, head, and gleaming hair corresponds to the blooming of the corolla. At another moment, it recalls a supple liana, a shrub with a fine and daring camber .... At another time, the human body curved back is like a spring, like a beautiful bow from which Eros aims his invisible arrows. Yet another time, it is an urn. I have often had a model sit on the floor and turn her back to me with her legs and arms drawn before her. In this position, only the silhouette of the back, which narrows at the waist and widens at the hip, appears, and this forms a vase with an exquisite contour: the amphora that holds the life of the future in its flanks.
.........- Rodin in an interview with Paul Gsell, circa 1900.



So we’ve launched our new website—Nude and Erotic Watercolors (www.eroticwatercolors.com). The site has no direct relationship to Heron Dance. It shares a common artist, is all. Me. I’ve been painting nudes for about fifteen years, but not offering them for sale.

Initially I wanted to get out on the edge of my creative comfort zone. After fifteen years of Heron Dance, I had run out of inner momentum, creative momentum. In response, I started writing fiction for the first time in my life—a wild artist who loves wild rivers and wild women. Painting nudes seemed to fit well in that scenario. A wild artist working with nude models is dramatic territory for a writer. The new issue, which will mail this week, explores this territory just as it does efforts to live a spiritual life, and sometimes failing.

I consider myself to be pretty relaxed around nudity and sexuality, but it is interesting to me that the only worthwhile paintings that I’ve done since beginning this project are either of models’ backs or based on photographs I take of them. So maybe I’m not as relaxed, at least deep down, as I think I am.

Here’s an excerpt from the next issue, which mails this week.

My studio is in the country, hidden from the road. Young women respond to an ad I’ve posted. They don’t know me at all. They drive up and take their clothes off and I paint images of them. In the past, I had only painted nudes of girlfriends and in group life drawing sessions.

So when a woman shows up—so far they’ve ranged in age from 19 to 40—and we’re all alone in the room, there is a lot of energy swirling around, bouncing off the walls. Some of it is sexual energy, some of it is just plain nervousness.

Nervousness. When I started to do these paintings, I was really nervous. I still am with a new model on her first night, particularly during the first hour. It is getting easier though. What if the paintings are poorly executed and amateurish? What will the model think? That I just lured her up here to look at her nude?

Truthfully, there is an element of that. I do like to view women naked. That’s just the way it is. I’m not tired of painting nature, but I want to paint other subjects too, explore other passions. In different ways, nature, art, introspective writing and the female form are my passions. They are energy sources.



I’m aware that the subject matter of this new website will be somewhat controversial among Heron Dancers. Like a lot of my work lately, some will like it and some will profoundly dislike it. Sexuality is a touchy issue, so to speak. Running Heron Dance based on fear is not a way to produce interesting creative work. Running my life based on fear is not anything I’m interested in either.

This work to me has its own beauty and sense of peace and harmony.

In celebration of the Great Dance of Life,

Roderick W. MacIver

Zen Heron - A Pause for Beauty 316

Dear Heron Dancers,

Dear Heron Dancers,

It was heron morning the other morning out on the river. This year, we’ve had a bumper crop. During a two-hour paddle I saw a dozen of the stately big birds. All were juveniles, I suspect. They were the same height as adults, but smaller of body. And they were fishing too close together to be adults. Adult herons like lots of space, except during mating and nesting. They are pretty independent.

Sometimes I get emails and letters from Heron Dancers suggesting that I named the publication after herons because I share some similar characteristics. Herons, and people of the heron totem, one wrote, share the qualities of aggressive self-determination and self-reliance. That letter contained a photocopy of a couple of pages out of a book entitled Animal Speak. It went on to say:

…those with heron totems are wonderfully successful at being the traditional “jack of all trades.” This ability enables them to follow their own path. Most people will never be able to live the way heron people do. It is not a structured way, and does not seem to have a stability and security to it. It is, though, just a matter of perspective. There is security in heron medicine, for it gives the ability to do a variety of tasks. If one way doesn’t work, another will. This heron people seem to inherently know.
Herons do not seem to need a lot of people in their life, nor do they feel pressure to “keep up with the Joneses” or be traditional in their life roles. The only time they gather in colonies is during breeding season. They stand out in their uniqueness, and they know how to snatch and take advantage of things and events that the average person would not even bother with.

I’m not sure what I think about all that. I named the publication after a photograph I took at the Ding Darling Wildlife Refuge in Florida (visit here to see). I probably have a greater affinity for ospreys and their incredible flying and fishing skills. That morning though, I identified with herons, felt particularly close to them. One stood still, just along the river bank, until I was within twenty feet. That’s unusual. Another took off out of a large tree and, just as it did, the branch it was standing on broke and fell into the river with a crash. Herons were everywhere that morning, and I was glad for that.

Their grace, their huge wings powering down the river through the grays, blues and browns of the early morning river, lifted my spirits and reminded me of the amazing creatures that live on the borders of our lives. They remind us of a different reality.

In celebration of the Great Dance of Life,

Roderick W. MacIver


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To receive The Song I Came to Sing, the next issue of The Heron Dance Nature Art Journal, please visit here.

The Boquet, Early Morning: A Pause for Beauty 315

Dear Heron Dancers,

In the last week or two, friends have been asking me if I’m sad. No, just coming to terms with my own inadequacies and recurring negative patterns. Sure, there is a sadness there, but there is also a feeling of deep peace. On the other side of a wild, adventurous life, a life out on the edge of one’s limits, a life of big successes and big failures, lies the quiet beauty of simple, peaceful things. The concentric rings of my life are getting smaller.

Heron Dance used to have a director, Michael Shaw, who when faced with a challenge or problem, would first wonder if the problem wasn’t a design flaw. Heron Dance has a basic design flaw: its structure and strategy have failed to recognize that like most artists and writers, I’m not particularly good at people management. Abysmal in fact. Heron Dance came pretty close to imploding as a result. It needs a simple structure to produce good work. It needs simple ambitions, simple objectives. Recognizing that feels great. It feels peaceful.

Sixteen years ago I interviewed an Outward Bound instructor in Leadville, Colorado and I remember her telling me that the secret to a successful marriage, she’d found, was low expectations. Maybe the same is true of life in general: low expectations mean fewer disappointments. Expecting less out of yourself and others leads to a higher quality life.

Living a wildly sexual life is fun for a while, but it gets confusing and energy draining. Unlike the fantasy, you end up having a lot of mediocre sex. It feels empty. Empty, empty. After a while of that, solitude feels good.

Will Steger, one of the world’s greatest explorers, said to me in an interview, “Give in, give in, but don’t give up.” He was talking about fundraising to finance his next great adventure to the North or South Pole. He described the fundraising as being more difficult than the multi-thousand-mile walk in the cold.

So I tell myself, give in to the realities of life, to recognize the patterns that recur despite my best efforts, but don’t give up. Get smaller, get simpler, get gentler, but don’t give up.

In celebration of the Great Dance of Life,

Roderick W. MacIver

Up on Trickle Creek - A Pause for Beauty 314

Dear Heron Dancers,

Tao arms with love those it would protect.
- The Book of Tao, FJ MacHovec

Ten years ago, on a trip to Wichita, Kansas, Balbir Mathur asked me to define love. When I stumbled through an answer, he challenged it. If I remember correctly, he suggested that love cannot be defined and therefore may not really exist. Balbir is from India. He founded Trees for Life, an organization that has helped rural villagers plant millions of fruit trees in India and other countries. He’s a practical guy. He’s a spiritual guy. He can be provocative. I think I read somewhere in Trees for Life literature, something to the effect that Trees for Life plants love one tree at a time.

This morning, I’d like to give Balbir’s question another try. Love is a combination of positive energy and enthusiasm for life, or some aspect of life. Love is a celebration of life. Of all of the negatives that one can focus on—pain, suffering, adversity, violence—love is an affirmation of the beauty that nonetheless exists. It is a choice that despite the downers, life is good. Love is a vote for the beauty and mystery that surrounds us. It is a triumph. Love is a choice.

I’ve had a lot of love flowing through my life lately. I was sitting around my kitchen table with three friends the other evening, and there was so much love in the air you could taste it or feel it or something. Each person at that table had at the core of their lives something that they loved—a wilderness, an art form, a calling in life. There was the love that comes from friendship, the laughter of friends.

It was pointed out that I’ve got a serious plumber butt problem. I had my defense prepared in advance based on similar previous allegations. Under the prevailing legal framework in the Adirondacks, there are two important, related statutes. One, plumber butt is illegal. Two, it is illegal to look at plumber butt. Therefore, I’m not the only one with a problem. Therefore, I’m off the hook.

From there we went out into the woods and built a fire and cooked dinner and celebrated life and love and friendship. As the sun set, first one wood thrush, and then another, sang their songs from the woods surrounding us.

In celebration of the Great Mystery of Life,

Roderick W. MacIver


To start receiving A Pause for Beauty by email, visit here.

To receive The Song I Came to Sing, the next issue of The Heron Dance Nature Art Journal, please visit here.

Sunset Heron - A Pause for Beauty 313

Dear Heron Dancers,

The seat placement in canoes is designed so that the stern, or back of the canoe, rides lower in the water than the bow, or front of the boat. This is for maneuverability. As you paddle down a river, the current exerts more pressure on the stern than on the bow because it is lower; and when you stop paddling, the current forces the canoe to swing so that it is facing upstream.

The river near my cabin is fifty to seventy feet wide. Depending on the elevation drop and the number of rocks on the river bottom, the current fluctuates from mild to strong to waterfall. Three or four weeks ago, out with a friend, we encountered a large merganser family that swam frantically twenty yards or so in front of the canoe for a mile or two. We stopped paddling to allow them to rest and hopefully shelter until we could pass. As we were doing that, our canoe swung around so that the bow was facing upstream.

Ever since that day, when out alone, I let the bow swing around upstream in the sections where the current is strong but the rocks few. Then I start doing big circles in the river by sticking my paddle in the water. I go slowly down the river turning gently around in big, lazy circles. I’m not sure why I like that so much. I see the entire river I guess rather than just what is in front of me. I see the banks — every so often a muskrat will slide into the water or a cliff swallow will dart out from a hole in the bank. I see where I’ve just been, I see where I’m going.

Anyway, I was doing this yesterday and I began to think of the ancient origins of the human mind. We evolved in a completely different scenario than the one we live in now — the one we’ve created for ourselves. We evolved out there among the rivers and lakes, the animal migrations, the changing seasons, the ice ages, the snowstorms, the droughts, the famines and the times of plenty. Much of the world we’ve created for ourselves we’ve created to avoid the extremes of life close to nature. But our minds — our minds are the product of life out there.

I was thinking about this, and thinking about the extremes of thunderstorms versus the tranquility of a wilderness lake on warm, calm summer mornings. There are roots of all of our mental states in nature: huge storms and human anger, the peace of a backcountry lake and the settled state of a human mind in meditation, and everything in between. There’s both violence in the human psyche and deep peace. There is the beauty of a wild iris and the beauty of which a creative human mind is capable.

It is all there inside our psyches because that is where our roots are.

In celebration of the Great Mystery of Life,

Roderick W. MacIver

This Place is My Place: A Pause for Beauty 311

Dear Heron Dancers,

I’ve been deep, deep into a fictional world these last few days, imagining the sights, sounds and sensations so I can write about them. In order to dream the wild artist, a friend Bob Lewis — a friend from when we were in our twenties, young men with a lust for life — has been sending me links to poems and videos of Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller and Tom Waits. Thanks Bob. You add a lot to my life.

The part that’s missing from those films is a deep, abiding relationship with wild nature. For that, my thoughts have turned to a meeting I had about fourteen years ago. I was on a canoe trip with my son Will and about fifteen other children and their parents. In the early evening, at the end of a long portage, I encountered a forest ranger. He lived nearby in a cabin, a cabin with no road, no electricity and no running water.

He was probably about forty, long beard, and was as gentle a man as I’ve ever met. He was at peace with his life in the woods, with his solitude, with himself. He had found his place. He was submerged in a sense of wonder, he was submerged in his surroundings. Yes, he sometimes felt lonely, he said, but overall the beauty and peace, the waterfall near his home, the birds, the great books he read, filled his life with a deep sense of peace.

We talked no more than three hours. It may have been only one hour, I can’t remember, but he had an impact on my life. I find, as I write this fictional work, that my memory of him is shaping it. I’m imagining life through his eyes.

I embody in my own psyche and personality elements of both the wild artist and the gentle forest ranger. But to write this work, I find that imagining life through another’s eyes, someone I don’t know but who has captured my imagination, is giving me a route into the work that I wouldn’t have if I were writing just about my own life.

In celebration of the Great Dance of Life,

Roderick W. MacIver

Morning on the River: A Pause for Beauty 310

Dear Heron Dancers,

What a weekend. What a beautiful weekend. I was out on the river three times with three different friends, including my friend John. We shot some rapids without major mishap. On quiet stretches of the river, we saw three barred owls and a bittern. When the river touched a road, we pulled out and walked together in the woods the few miles back to my truck. I love being on the water and in the woods with John.

I woke up this morning a changed man. I hope. I’ve been taking life so damn seriously, but this morning, when I woke up, the whole catastrophe flashed before my eyes as a dramatic comedy. I’ve had all of these fun things coming and going out of my life lately. This work is exciting me. The response to our recent appeal was great. A couple of publishers are interested in what we’re doing. I’m working with two great guys. I’ve got two fine young men as sons, one in college and one who just graduated high school. A new friend I met through Heron Dance will join me soon on a river trip. I’m working with a couple of great models, courageous young women with sunny dispositions who are a joy to be around. I’ve got wonderful, wonderful deep friendships in my life. I have so much to be thankful for, to celebrate. And yet I spend time obsessing over what’s less than perfect.

It’s illogical. Spiritually, I believe that life is essentially mysterious. No one really knows what’s going on around us. Whatever else it is, life is beautiful. And as deeply as I believe that, and live that in the woods, in the human world I lose touch with the mystery within a few minutes of re-entry. I descend into my own dark little intense world. Wake up! Wake up! Lighten up! Get happy. Count your blessings, mister! You are sooooooooooo lucky.

I’m reading several books right now, but the one that has captured my imagination is Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kasantzakis. The book kept coming up in conversations and emails with subscribers, and when that happens I pay attention. Maybe life is trying to send me a message. An answer. Years ago, I read another book by the same author, Report To Greco, and it was a wonderful book.

Here’s an excerpt:

So happy did we feel in the courtyard of the Mohammedan monastery, we could not bear to leave.
Other dervishes emerged from the surrounding cells. The younger ones had pale faces and fiery eyes; they seemed in desperate pursuit of God. The old ones, who must have found God, were red-cheeked, their eyes filled with light. They squatted around us. Some unhooked chaplets from their leather belts and started to tell their beads tranquilly, gazing with curiosity at the Christian monk. Others brought out their long chibouks, half closed their eyes, and began contentedly, silently, to smoke.
"What joy this is," whispered the abbe. "How brightly the Lord's face shines here too, behind all these faces!"
He touched my shoulder in an imploring way.
"Please, the dervishes are a religious order. Ask them what their rule is."
The oldest of the group, a man with a long white beard, laid his chibouk on his knee.
"Poverty," he answered. "Poverty. To own nothing, be weighted down by nothing, to journey to God along a flowering pathway. Laughter, the dance, and joy are the three archangels who take us by the hand and lead us."
The abbe turned to me again. "Ask them how they make themselves ready to appear before God. Is it by fasting?"
"No, no," answered the young dervish with a laugh. "We eat, drink, and bless the Lord for giving food and drink to man."
"Well then, how?" insisted the abbe.
"By dancing," replied the oldest dervish, the one with the long white beard.
"Dancing?" said the abbe. "Why?"
"Because dancing kills the ego, and once the ego has been killed, there is no further obstacle to prevent you from joining with God."
- Nikos Kasantzakis from Report to Greco.

If Report to Greco, a memoir, is a wonderful book, then Zorba the Greek, a novel, is a masterpiece. It is a celebration of life and friendship and adventure and sexuality. It explores the most difficult issues at the center of a really full life and it does it with humor and lighthearted gusto. Here’s an excerpt:

“Zorba,” I said and I had to restrain myself forcibly from throwing myself into his arms, “it’s agreed! You come with me. I have some lignite in Crete. You can superintend the workmen. In the evening we’ll stretch out on the sand — in this world, I have neither wife, children nor dogs — we’ll eat and drink together. The you’ll play the santuri.* (a stringed instrument similar to the dulcimer).
“If I’m in the mood, d’you hear? If I’m in the mood. I’ll work for you as much as you like. I’m your man there. But the santuri, that’s different. It’s a wild animal, it needs freedom. If I’m in the mood, I’ll play. I’ll even sing. And I’ll dance the Zéimbékiko (the dance of a coastal tribe of Asia Minor, the Hasapiko (the butchers’ dance), the Pentozali, (Cretan national warriors dance) — but, I tell you plainly from the start, I must be in the mood. Let’s have that quite clear. If you force me to, it’ll be finished. As regards those things, you must realize, I’m a man."
“A man? What d’you mean?”
“Well, free!”
I called for another rum.
“Make it two,” Zorba cried. “You’re going to have one, so that we can drink to it. Sage and rum don’t go very well together. You’re going to drink a rum, too, so that our agreement holds good.”
We clinked our glasses. Now it was really daylight. The ship was blowing its siren. The lighterman who had taken my cases on board signaled to me.
“May God be with us,” I said as I rose. “Let’s go!”
“God and the devil!” Zorba added calmly.
He leaned over, put the santuri under his arm, opened the door, and went out first.
- Nikos Kasantzakis from Zorba the Greek

So Heron Dancers, let’s celebrate life, and friendship and adventure together. And, for those of us inclined, let’s celebrate the gift of sexuality too! All of the gifts of life! The whole catastrophe. The whole shebang.

Let’s dance! I feel like dancing!

In celebration of the Great Dance of Life,

Roderick W. MacIver