The dates have been announced for the 2011 Redwood Men's Center Annual Conference. Mark your calendar for May 19-22, 2011.

Continuing the evolution of the Conference begun in 2010, the 2011 Conference will be marked by some significant changes: first, the Conference will run from Thursday through Sunday, instead of Friday through Monday as it has in the past. We thought that, jobwise, it will be better for attendees to have a full work week just prior to the Memorial Day weekend, hence the shift in ...

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Conference poetry, part three. These came to the Conference with Brother Bill Denham.

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The Fire in the Song

The mouth opens
            and fills the air
                        with its vibrant shape
Until the air
            and the mouth
                        become one shape.
and the first word,
            your own word
                        spoken from that fire
surprises, burns
            grieves you now
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Looking Forward to the 2010 Conference

by Hari Meyers

Once growth and change is embraced, challenges never cease.  Shortly after our 2009 conference we received word that our beloved Camp Gualala had been sold and would no longer be available to us. We had looked forward to celebrating our 20^th year there.  Now the challenge for us is to release our sense of “home” from a particular place and setting and honor it as a feeling and state created in and by our collective heart.  We will continue to come home when we attend the conference.  Men will still be welcomed home at its opening.  Now, we know the true conscious location of “home” and hope we have learned enough to find it again and again and to return there wherever we happen to meet physically.  

And so our twentieth year has come around and we will gather May 21^st through 24^th, 2010 at the Valley of the Moon campground, and our call goes out once more, “Dear brothers, it is time to once again come home …”                   

[Hari Meyers was an early Associate of the Redwood Men's Center.  He attended all of the Conferences since their inception and was a major organizer and planner on every one of them since 1996.  His primary interest in composing this article was to articulate the essential archetypal passages through which men must pass on their journey to mature masculinity, and all such interpretations and opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Redwood Men’s Center itself.  He is grateful to all who have attended the conferences, but for reasons of confidentiality named only the core organizers and teachers at them.   Although this article is lengthy, it could hardly cover in depth all the contributions made to the success of the conference.  Many individuals, particularly the work of Redwood Men's Center Associates during the Conference's early years, were left out, as were numerous events during and around the 20 years of conferences.  He apologizes for that and asks forbearance.  He would be ungrateful, however, if he failed to acknowledge the contribution of his conference brother and consummate word-smith Bill Denham for all the assistance he lent in reading, providing feedback and helping to edit this history]      

Welcome to the official blog of The Redwood Men's Center. It is essential in life to stop and take a look back from time to time, in order to mark the trail that leads to where we stand today, that we may better understand who we were and who we have become.

This May, we will come together in community within the container of our Annual Conference once more — this time for the twentieth year in a row.

It is fitting then, as we enter fully into our twentieth gathering, to take stock of how the Redwood Men's Center Conference first became manifest and how it has evolved over the years. Taking on that formidable task is Hari Meyers, RMC's acknowledged Master Storyteller, who will, over the course of the next number of blog postings, spirit us into the past to travel once again the path that leads from there to here.

Enjoy!

Alan F., Scribe