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Don't Go Outside Your House To See Flowers. My Friend, Don't Bother With That Excursion. Inside Your Body There Are Flowers. One Flower Has A Thousand Petals. That Will Do For A Place To Sit. Sitting There You Will Have A Glimpse Of Beauty Inside The Body And Out Of It, Before Gardens And After Gardens.

-Robert Bly

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Don't Go Outside Your

Robert Bly

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Don't Go Outside Your House To See Flowers. My Friend, Don't Bother With That Excursion. Inside Your Body There Are Flowers. One Flower Has A Thousand Petals. That Will Do For A Place To Sit. Sitting There You Will Have A Glimpse Of Beauty Inside The Body And Out Of It, Before Gardens And After Gardens.

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If A Man, Cautious, Hides His Limp, Somebody Has To Limp It! Things Do It; The Surroundings Limp. House Walls Get Scars, The Car Breaks Down; Matter, In Drudgery, Takes It Up.

Be Careful How Quickly You Give Away Your Fire.

The Door To The Soul Is Unlocked; You Do Not Need To Please The Doorkeeper, The Door In Front Of You Is Yours, Intended For You, And The Doorkeeper Obeys When Spoken To.

By The Time A Man Is 35 He Knows That The Images Of The Right Man, The Tough Man, The True Man Which He Received In High School Do Not Work In Life.

We Did Not Come To Remain Whole. We Came To Lose Our Leaves Like The Trees, Trees That Start Again.

I Felt A Longing To Compose A Radical Or Root Poem That Would Speak To What Has Its Back Turned To Me.

You Say To Yourself, Well, This Poem Isn't Going To Be Any Good, But I'll Write It Anyway.

The Dead Made This World. We Didn't Make It. They Made The Poetry And The Songs And The Customs.

What Does It Mean When A Man Falls In Love With A Radiant Face Across The Room? It May Mean That He Has Some Soul Work To Do. His Soul Is The Issue. Instead Of Pursuing The Woman And Trying To Get Her Alone, Away From Her Husband, He Needs To Go Alone Himself, Perhaps To A Mountain Cabin, For Three Months, Write Poetry, Canoe Down A River, And Dream. That Would Save Some Women A Lot Of Trouble.

Falling In Love

The Ancestors Are Very Much Invested In The Children, Because The Children Are The Ones Who Are Going To Continue The World That The Ancestors Made.

If You Want The Truth, I Will Tell You The Truth: Friend, Listen: The God Whom I Love Is Inside.

Before I Was A Parent I Was Struck By Rilke, Who, As You Know, Didn't Go To His Daughter's Wedding Because He Was Writing A Poem That Day. That Was The Ideal For Artistic Behavior In 1950. That's The Way I Wanted To Live.

Some People Can't Go Into Church Any Longer To Feel This Longing, But They Still Have The Longing, So What Do They Do? Well, One Thing You Can Do Is What People Do In Prison; They Turn To Poetry.

As The Saying Goes, You Might As Well Be Yourself; Everyone Else Is Taken.

Two Birds Fly Past. They Are Needed Somewhere.

I Use The Phrase 'sibling Society' To Suggest A Culture Fundamentally Without Fathers, Mothers, Grandfathers, Grandmothers, Or Ancestors. The Thinking Is Horizontal.

There's A Quality We Could Call Vertical Attention, Which Is An Attention Upward Toward Ancestors, Spiritual States, Angels, Gods.

The Lead Either Forges An Instant Connection With The Reader, Or The Package Fails.

All Of Japan Once A Year Will Get Up On Their Rooftops, Because That's The Night That The Shepherd Boy From One Side Of The Milky Way Gets To Meet The Weaver Girl On The Other Side Of The Milky Way. They All Get Up On Their Roofs And Watch That Night. So They Long For 365 Days And Then On The 365th Night, They See The Result Of That Longing.

We Know That The Adult In A Certain Sense Has An Attitude Toward Life Exactly Opposite To The Attitude Of Commercials. Commercials Say, 'your Longing For 3.2 Beer Is Very Important. Your Longing For Skin That Doesn't Have Any Wrinkles In It, That's Very, Very, Very Important.' The Adult Says, 'no, I've Got Wrinkles, So What?'

People Tend To Take Stories Literally These Days.

In Some Mayan Villages They Even Have A Stage Beyond The Elder That They Call The Echo Person. They Say That When An Echo Person, Whether A Man Or A Woman, Speaks, The Words Echo Both In This World And In The Other World. That's Why They Are Called Echo People.

The Best Poems Take Long Journeys. I Like Poetry Best That Journeys--while Remaining In The Human Scale--to The Other World, Which May Be A Place As Easily Overlooked As A Bee's Wing

I Am Proud Only Of Those Days That Pass In Undivided Tenderness.

One Could Say The Higher The Spirit Goes, The More Deeply The Soul Sinks Down Into The Waters Of Melancholy And Tragedy. Drowning In That Water Is As Sweet As Rising.

The Sibling Society Is The Flattening Out Of The Previously Democratic Society.

Democratic Society

I Have Daughters And I Have Sons./when One Of Them Lays A Hand/on My Shoulder, Shining Fish/turn Suddenly In The Deep Sea.

Those Of Us Who Make Up Poems Have Agreed Not To Say What The Pain Is.

The Deeper Question... Is Not Whether Ancient Religious Forms Can Reform... But Whether New Forms Of Nature-related Spirituality Might Emerge.

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I Think More And More People Are Recognizing How Much Adults And Elders Are Actually Needed. That's A Gift Of The Sibling Society.

Tragedies Are About The Depths That Call Up To Certain Men And Insist That They Descend.

I Have Spent Many Years Trying To Recover A Common Language, One That Can Cross The Distance Between People.

The Language You Use For Your Poems Should Be The Language You Use With Your Friends.

The World Belongs Primarily To The Dead, And We Only Rent It From Them For A Little While. They Created It, They Wrote Its Literature And Its Songs, And They Are Deeply Invested In How Children Are Treated, Because The Children Are The Ones Who Will Keep It Going. The Idea That Each Of Us Has The Right To Change Everything Is A Deep Insult To Them.

The Body Weeps The Tears The Eyes Never Shed.

Reclaiming The Sacred In Our Lives Naturally Brings Us Close Once More To The Wellsprings Of Poetry.

The Best Presenters Have Conversations With Their Audiences.

Male Initiation Does Not Move Toward Machoism; On The Contrary, It Moves Toward Achieving A Cultivated Heart Before We Die.

A Lazy Part Of Us Is Like A Tumbleweed. It Doesn’t Move On Its Own. Sometimes It Takes A Lot Of Depression To Get Tumbleweeds Moving.

The Distance Between The Adolescent And The True Adult Is About Five Thousand Miles, But The Distance Between The Adult And The Elder Is Almost As Large.

Grief Is The Doorway To A Man's Feelings.

When An Elder Turns To Face The Dead, That Means He Turns Away From Facing The Future And His Own Retirement In Phoenix, Let's Say. He Turns And Finds Himself Facing The Children.

I Was Unfaithful Even To Infidelity.

My Feeling Is That Poetry Is Also A Healing Process, And Then When A Person Tries To Write Poetry With Depth Or Beauty, He Will Find Himself Guided Along Paths Which Will Heal Him, And This Is More Important, Actually, Than Any Of The Poetry He Writes.

An Elder Is Someone Who Understands That The World Belongs To The Dead.

Some Men Live With An Invisible Limp, Stagger, Or Drag A Leg. Their Sons Are Often Angry.

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Every Modern Male Has, Lying At The Bottom Of His Psyche, A Large, Primitive Being Covered With Hair Down To His Feet. Making Contact With This Wild Man Is The Step The Eighties Male Or The Nineties Male Has Yet To Take. That Bucketing-out Process Has Yet To Begin In Our Contemporary Culture.

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In The Sibling Society, Both The Adult And The Elder Get Lost, And No One Knows Where They Are.

If We Call The Young Ones, Say 10 To 30 Years Old, 'siblings,' We Can See They Tend To Be Naturally Ecological. They Regard Whales And Owls As Siblings Too. That's A Great Advance.

The Inner Boy In A Messed-up Family May Keep On Being Shamed, Invaded, Disappointed, And Paralyzed For Years And Years. "i Am A Victim," He Says, Over And Over; And He Is. But That Very Identification With Victimhood Keeps The Soul House Open And Available For Still More Invasions. Most American Men Today Do Not Have Enough Awakened Or Living Warriors Inside To Defend Their Soul Houses. And Most People, Men Or Women, Do Not Know What Genuine Outward Or Inward Warriors Would Look Like, Or Feel Like.

Sociological Prose Is Generally Written Without Images In An Exact Form For An Academic Audience.

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Adolescents Believe That The World Belongs To The Living, Or More Particularly To Living People Their Age, So They Feel Within Their Rights If They Destroy The Canon Or Rewrite The Fairy Stories Or Act Like Red Guards.

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Native American

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Adolescents Are In Just As Much Trouble In Native America As They Are In The White Community.

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The Beginning Of Love Is A Horror Of Emptiness.

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I Saw Sophia Loren - The Italian Woman With Those Wonderful Cheekbones - In A Movie The Other Day. She Must Have Had 24 Face-lifts, And She Looks Like An Alien, As If She Weren't From This World At All. Her Italian Wrinkles Would Have Been A Thousand Times More Beautiful.

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Rumi Is Astounding, Fertile, Abundant, Almost More An Excitable Library Of Poetry Than A Person.

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Vertical Attention Is Not The Same As, And Doesn't Evolve From Nor Imply, Hierarchy. We Could Say That Hierarchy Is Associated With Power, And Vertical Attention With Longing For The Divine Feminine, For The Divine Masculine, For What The Sufis Call 'wine.'

Divine Feminine

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In The Society That Has Replaced The Paternalistic Society, Women Are Able To Develop Their Independent And Social Energies Much More. That Is Good.

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My Life Failed On The Very Day I Was Born.

It Is Surely A Great Calamity For A Human Being To Have No Obsessions.

We Make The Path By Walking.

During The Patriarchal Time, The Men Were Always And Invariably Dominant, Legally And Socially In Marriage, So Now It's Possible To Remodel The Entire House Of Marriage, Put In New Footings And New Joists And A New Sort Of Interior. That Is Exactly What Some Men And Women Are Now Doing.

One Day While Studying A Yeats Poem I Decided To Write Poetry The Rest Of My Life. I Recognized That A Single Short Poem Has Room For History, Music, Psychology, Religious Thought, Mood, Occult Speculation, Character, And Events Of One's Own Life. I Still Feel Surprised That Such Various Substances Can Find Shelter And Nourishment In A Poem. A Poem In Fact May Be A Sort Of Nourishing Liquid, Such As One Uses To Keep An Amoeba Alive. If Prepared Right, A Poem Can Keep An Image Or A Thought Or Insights On History Or The Psyche Alive For Years, As Well As Our Desires And Airy Impulses.

The Older I Get, The More Beauty I See In The Word Renunciation.

A Person Who Discreetly Farts In An Elevator Is Not A Divine Being, And A Man Needs To Know This.

I Wanted To Spend All My Time Writing Poetry. But When I Had Children I Couldn't Do That Anymore.

In Ordinary Life, A Mentor Can Guide A Young Man Through Various Disciplines, Helping To Bring Him Out Of Boyhood Into Manhood; And That In Turn Is Associated Not With Body Building, But With Building And Emotional Body Capable Of Containing More Than One Sort Of Ecstasy.

What You Feel In Japanese Poetry Is Always Entirely Longing.

Vertical Thought Likes To Imagine The Vast Distances Between The Stars.

Adulthood Has Something To Do With Not Choosing Any Of The Pure Points Of View, But Living About Half Of What You Really Want To Live.

Siblings Tend Not To Care Much About Boundaries And Borders. Having Worn Each Others' T-shirts, It's Unlikely That They'd Go To War Over A Border.

Every Noon As The Clock Hands Arrive At Twelve, I Want To Tie The Two Arms Together, And Walk Out Of The Bank Carrying Time In Bags.

I Have Risen To A Body Not Yet Born, Existing Like A Light Around A Body Through Which The Body Moves Like A Sliding Moon.

It’s All Right If You Grow Your Wings On The Way Down.

To Me, The Hope Lies In Adults Forgetting About Their Retirement And Turning Toward The Adolescents And Helping Pull The Adolescents Over That Mysterious Line Drawn On The Ground Into Adulthood. If We Don't Do That, The Adolescents Are Going To Stay Exactly Where They Are For The Next 30 Or 40 Years.

When Anyone Seriously Pursues An Art - Painting, Poetry, Sculpture, Composing - Over Twenty Or Thirty Years, The Sustained Discipline Carries The Artist Down To The Countryside Of Grief, And That Descent, Resisted So Long Proves Invigorating. . . . As I've Gotten Older, I Find I Am Able To Be Nourished More By Sorrow And To Distinguish It From Depression.

Every Breath Taken In By The Man Who Loves, And The Woman Who Loves, Goes To Fill The Water Tank Where The Spirit Horses Drink.

Wherever There Is Water There Is Someone Drowning.

What I Am Trying To Do Is Bring People Into Grief In Relation To The Society We Have.

To Be Wild Is Not To Be Crazy Or Psychotic. True Wildness Is A Love Of Nature, A Delight In Silence, A Voice Free To Say Spontaneous Things, And An Exuberant Curiosity In The Face Of The Unknown.

We Are Living At An Important And Fruitful Moment Now, For It Is Clear To Men That The Images Of Adult Manhood Given By The Popular Culture Are Worn Out; A Man Can No Longer Depend On Them. By The Time A Man Is Thirty-five He Knows That The Images Of The Right Man, The Tough Man, The True Man Which He Received In High School Do Not Work In Life.

But Our Gusty Emotions Say To Me That We Have / Tasted Heaven Many Times: These Delicacies / Are Left Over From Some Larger Party.

There Are Very Few Adults In Our Culture Able To Imagine Any Genuine Life Coming From The Vertical Plane - Tradition, Religion, Or Devotion.

When A Father, Absent During The Day, Returns Home At Six, His Children Receive Only His Temperament, Not His Teaching.

I Want Nothing From You But To See You.

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Every Part Of Our Personality That We Do Not Love Will Become Hostile To Us.

As I've Gotten Older, I Find I Am Able To Be Nourished More By Sorrow And To Distinguish It From Depression.

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