This year we place a renewed intensity on a subject that has often interested us-the Sufi road.  Sufi culture has always had two sides: the wandering lovers and the harshness of the scholarly mullahs.   This double-sided life eventually flowered into the poems of Hafez and Rumi.  This year we have the good fortune to host the finest scholar of Sufism in the West, Carl Ernst, to guide us through the abundance of the Sufi tradition.   His publications include Sufi Martyrs of Love and a new book Following Mohammed:  Rethinking Islam in the Contemporary World.  Sufis offer practical ways of experiencing the power of the nafs, or the greedy soul.   Sufi's regard the nafs as a donkey who repeats its journey over and over.  Rumi says: "For years you have been the donkey's slave."  A helpful book is The Psychology of Sufi by Dr. Nurbakhsh.

 In our sessions, Caroline Casey will open each morning with her take on the current political and celestial weather. Poet Tony Hoagland will read his poems that comment on D. H. Lawrence and other figures, and the brilliant young Russian émigré poet Ilya Kaminsky will join us.  Li Young Lee will share his poetry with us again. We will have music by the Frantzich Brothers, dawn music singing with Doug Von Koss, and Halima and Abraham Sussman will lead the community in traditional Sufi dancing.  Gioia Timpanelli, the Reviver of Story, will give us stories in the morning.   David Whetstone will play sitar and Marcus Wise tabla.   Robert Bly and Coleman Barks will provide a Hafez poem and a Rumi poem each morning. We are also pleased to announce that Janet Fredericks and Tom Verner will be presenting several Art and Dream workshops over the span of the conference. Janet and Tom have been working hard to develop this workshop for this year's conference and we think it will be a valuable addition to the many conference events.

The Conference of the Great Mother and the New Father was begun by Robert Bly and has met annually since 1975 to consider a wide variety of poetic, mythological, and fairy tale traditions.   Its aim is to create an environment in which men, women and children are able, for a time, to slip out of our commercialized or corporate culture. 

The conference wants to encourage a culture made from diverse ethnic backgrounds, and mythological and ritual traditions. It takes a certain wildness for each person to break into new forms of creative expression.

The conference's aim is to pay attention to the soul of the world, so it has encouraged ecstatic music, making art with our own hands, reciting one's own poetry, creating dances, and honoring translation, particularly of Middle Eastern, Indian, and European languages.   Each year we learn more of the subtle music of Islam, the complex poetry of Rumi and Hafez, the voices of tabla and sitar, the fragrance of fairy tales, and the harsh reverberations of our national political life.

Stealing Sugar from the Castle

We are poor students who stay after school to study joy.
We are like those birds in the India mountains.
I am a widow whose child is her only joy.

The only thing I hold in my ant-like head
Is the builder's plan of the castle of sugar.
just to steal one grain of sugar is a joy!

Like a bird, we fly out of darkness into the hall,
Which is lit with singing, then fly out again.
Being shut out of the warm hall is also a joy.

I am a laggard, a loafer, and an idiot. But I love
To read about those who caught one glimpse
Of the Face, and died twenty years later in joy.

I don't mind your saying I will die soon.
Even in the sound of the word soon, I hear
The word you which begins every sentence of joy.

"You're a thief!" the judge said. "Let's see
Your hands!" I showed my callused hands in court.
My sentence was a thousand years of joy.

copyright ©2005 — Robert Bly