This Year's Conference Theme:
PICKING UP WOOD FOR THE FIRE
Gather with us for Robert Bly's 37th annual Conference on the Great Mother and New Father.
For decades, we have done the work of connection: explored our souls and mapped our loves. The gift we have received from this work is a community that spans two millennia and countless coasts. This year we focus on that which unites and binds us, links generation to generation, and weaves the tapestry of community that helps us to thrive in our world.
Kabir asks, "Is it logical that you would be walking around entirely orphaned now?" One problem for the human is the tenacious suspicion that we are alone in the darkness, wandering our lives without kith or kin. This belief that we suffer or succeed alone is the temptation of the West made ever more enticing by the modern emphasis on the individual, the solitary hero.
Each year, for 36 years, we have confronted and confounded this emphasis on the solitary person by joining together to laugh and to weep, to grieve and to celebrate. This year we do so again and with purpose. We gather to explore how we are the same and how we are that which makes us strong. We gather to examine how each of our generations folds into the next. We gather, latecomers to the earth, picking up wood for the fire.
During these ten days we will have a taste of what it is like to live in a community of women and men who have already raised their voices in acts of resistance, through painting, poetry, thought and storytelling. The Conference will once again give thanks to many who are gone, including William Stafford, Etheridge Knight, Marie Louise von Franz, and Joseph Campbell. Children are welcome. We have teachers who work specifically with projects for children and teens.
Conference participants who work with the visual arts will have an opportunity to show their work in a Conference gallery.
Rumi wrote:
What was said to the rose
that made it open
was said to me
here in my chest.
(translated by Coleman Barks)
Read the complete poem,
and see Coleman Barks perform a recitation of it!