Monthly Cambridge Dances of Universal Peace

GREAT MOTHER CONFERENCE – May 16 – May 23, 2025

Abraham and Halima will be guest teachers at the Great Mother Conference at the Camp Wavus | Jefferson, Maine. LEARN MORE

An annual pilgrimage for poets, storytellers, artists, musicians, dancers, and seekers of images arising from a deep well of imagination. Fifty years ago, Robert Bly and a circle of kindred spirits set the fire and invited others to sit beside it. Since then, year after year, the embers have been tended—through poetry and music and story, movement and silence, myth and memory. The GMC, in all these forms, continues to call many of us back year after year, and welcomes newcomers or those who arrive from time to time.

The GMC is a place for poets, dancers, dreamers, and musicians. For mythologists and seekers, for those who have spent years working with ancient stories and those who have just begun to sense the pull. Some come for the poetry and story. Some come for the arts and movement. Some come because they are standing at a crossroads and need to hear an old story to make sense of their own paths ahead. You might come as an artist, a teacher, a therapist, or simply as a human looking for something beyond the edges of ordinary conversation. For the hundreds of people who form the GMC community, whether they attended once or they attend year after year, the result of taking seriously the forces inside of story, poetry, art, dance, and music has challenged and deepened their imagination.

The GMC has seen Robert Bly and Martin Shaw as guiding voices during different points of its fifty plus years of existence. Notable artists, dancers, thinkers, poets, and musicians such as Tony Hoagland, Coleman Barks, Ann Igoe, Joseph Campbell, Robert Sadin, Gioia Timpanelli, Marion Woodman, Rita Schumaker, Cornelius Eady, James Hillman, Doug Von Koss, William Stafford, Mary Ruefle, Terrance Hayes, Jane Hirshfield, Aracelis Girmay, Ilya Kaminsky, and Martín Espada have shared their gifts as teachers. And our guiding stories have included the Odyssey, Parsival, The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Gráinne, Gilgamesh, The Mabinogion, selections from Fionn mac Cumhaill, and so many others.

Each year, a new theme unfolds—sometimes emerging from the old stories, sometimes from the time we find ourselves in, sometimes from the quiet voices inside us all. In 2025, we will gather again, listening for what needs to be spoken, sung, and welcomed into being.

If your heart leaps at the idea of myth, imagination, and embodied storytelling, you belong here. If you are someone who wants to challenge and deepen your own creative impulses, if you believe that myths and fairytales are not just dusty old stories but living energy that moves through us, if the land and the water call you, we invite you to spend an unforgettable week with us in May.