Painting: Gliding (watercolor).
For years, Zen Mountain Journal’s predecessor, the Heron Dance Art Journal, explored gratitude as a spiritual practice and as a philosophy of life. I want to weave that back into this current work — a celebration of the beauty and mystery of wild nature and of life. It is an antidote to the often dark and discouraging news we encounter daily. Joanna Macy, a friend of Heron Dance, was one of the bright lights that helped us find the path celebration.
Above, a page from the Heron Dance Book of Love & Gratitude, the most popular book Heron Dance has published to date, now out of print. It will shortly be republished as a gratitude journal, available both as a wire-o bound softcover and as a section of the Journal Meditations binder. You can read more about the Journal Meditations binder here.
If you have difficulty reading the page image above, here are the words:
To love means never to be afraid of the windstorms of life: should you shield the canyons from the windstorms you would never see the true beauty of their carvings.
- Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, M.D.But authenticity, and beauty, include brokenness and darkness and death. In moments of darkness and uncertainty, we encounter the depths of our desire that life go on. And, paradoxically, it opens us up to gratitude for this moment — our chance to breathe the air, feel our heart beating, look into the eyes of another being.
In times like that, what’s trivial or tawdry gets stripped away. And the stark grandeur appears. A grandeur that reaches down into our hearts.
- Joanna Macy from a Heron Dance interview, Issue 23
To view on the Zen Mountain Journal website, visit here.