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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.

-Robert Bly

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The Inner Boy In

Robert Bly

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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.

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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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I Got About Half The Time I Wanted To Write Poetry. I Got About Half The Time I Needed To Be A Father. So There Is Something In Adulthood That Has To Do With Accepting The Half Of Things, Allowing A Renunciation Of The Other Half, Accepting Half A Basket Instead Of A Full Basket.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Every Part Of You That You Do Not Love Will Regress And Become Hostile Towards You.

People Tend To Take Stories Literally These Days.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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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.

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

Transcendence Or Detachment, Leaving The Body, Pure Love, Lack Of Jealousy-that's The Vision We Are Given In Our Culture, Generally, When We Think Of The Highest Thing. . . . Another Way To Look At It Is That The Aim Of The Person Is Not To Be Detached, But To Be More Attached-to Be Attached To Working; To Be Attached To Making Chairs Or Something That Helps Everyone; To Be Attached To Beauty; To Be Attached To Music.

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.

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There Are Years From My Childhood That I Cannot Remember And I Cannot Forget.

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

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

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One Man Wrote Me, Saying, 'you Know Who You Are? You're Nothing But A Captain Bly Pissing Up A Drainpipe!'

It's Good To Have Poems That Begin With Tea And End With God.

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

There Are A Lot Of Men Who Are Healthier At Age Fifty Then They Have Ever Been Before, Because A Lot Of Their Fear Is Gone.

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As A Parent You Have To Do Some Renunciation.

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

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The Body Weeps The Tears The Eyes Never Shed.

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My Life Failed On The Very Day I Was Born.

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

Two Birds Fly Past. They Are Needed Somewhere.

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

I Think That Poetry Is Important When You Are Shipwrecked, When The Ordinary Structures That Hold You Up Are Gone.

I Want Nothing From You But To See You.

The French Still Offer Sartre And Derrida Rather Than Pascal.

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.

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

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

The Roman Catholic Church Early On Simply Adapted The Hierarchical Structure Of The Roman Empire And Confused The Whole Thing. Vertical Attention And Hierarchy Were So Entangled, That When The French Killed The King During The Revolution, They Lost Much Of Their Vertical Attention Too.

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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.

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.

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

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.

We Spend Our Life Until We’re Twenty Deciding What Parts Of Ourself To Put Into The Bag, And We Spend The Rest Of Our Lives Trying To Get Them Out Again.

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

Sociological Prose Can Tell You Everything, But It Can't Point Out The Grief.

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