Art is born from struggle and touches an anonymous center. Art is inexplicable and has a dream power that radiates from the night mind. It unleashes something ancient, dark, and mysterious into the world. It conducts a fresh light.

– Ed Hirsch

The “night mind” that Hirsch identifies in The Demon and the Angel has the capacity to guide us not only in our creative work but in our daily lives. Darkness has a mysterious power which can, paradoxically, bring us into what Ralph Waldo Emerson called “ferocious light.” Grief has often been a theme we have wrestled and walked with at this conference. Joy is not separate from grief; they are intrinsically intertwined.

It’s hard to grasp how much generosity
Is involved in letting us go on breathing
When we contribute nothing valuable but our grief.

– Robert Bly

This year we will work to explore the concept of “joyful darkness,” entering into a larger dance which includes both grief and joy, root and branch, light and darkness and the twilit music that sings beyond all opposites. There is a word that comes from the Roma, duende, that “creative, mysterious and dark” power and force coming not from above but from below. Duende requires us to encounter the cthonic–beneath the soil metaphorically and perhaps sometimes even literally–to find the strength, creativity and insight which we seek. 

 “Joy is what emanates from us,” the poet Ross Gay has written, “as we help each other carry our sorrows.” This year we will work to carry and live into both the sorrow and the joy of our times, honing our night vision, drinking from the darkness around us, and seeking to find in it a nourishment able to carry us forward into a future as yet unwritten and unknown.