Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Reclaiming the sacred in our lives naturally brings us close once more to the wellsprings of poetry.
I felt a longing to compose a radical or root poem that would speak to what has its back turned to me.
Hierarchy, as in the Catholic Church, has to do with power, and vertical attention has to do with longing.
One man wrote me, saying, 'You know who you are? You're nothing but a Captain Bly pissing up a drainpipe!'
I have spent many years trying to recover a common language, one that can cross the distance between people.
As I've gotten older, I find I am able to be nourished more by sorrow and to distinguish it from depression.
I think that poetry is important when you are shipwrecked, when the ordinary structures that hold you up are gone.
The models of adulthood are disappearing fast. How can two people have a new marriage if neither of them is an adult?
When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching.
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.
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.
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.
Male initiation does not move toward machoism; on the contrary, it moves toward achieving a cultivated heart before we die.
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.
There's a quality we could call vertical attention, which is an attention upward toward ancestors, spiritual states, angels, gods.
I think more and more people are recognizing how much adults and elders are actually needed. That's a gift of the sibling society.
But our gusty emotions say to me that we have / Tasted heaven many times: these delicacies / Are left over from some larger party.
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.
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.
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.
There are very few adults in our culture able to imagine any genuine life coming from the vertical plane - tradition, religion, or devotion.
The deeper question... is not whether ancient religious forms can reform... but whether new forms of nature-related spirituality might emerge.
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.
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.
In the society that has replaced the paternalistic society, women are able to develop their independent and social energies much more. That is good.
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.
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.
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.
Myth and poetry represent a reservoir of vertical thinking, which we could also call longing and gratitude to ancestors. We need that gratitude desperately.
You have an utterly sincere glance when you look around after you are shipwrecked. You weep a long time on an island when you realize what's happened to you.
I use the phrase 'sibling society' to suggest a culture fundamentally without fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers, or ancestors. The thinking is horizontal.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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
One out of three black men are in the criminal justice system in some form. Their despair is beginning to resonate through the entire culture; that is why suburban children want rap music.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
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 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.
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.
If you want to know what it will be like when we are more deeply into the horizontal, simply go to one of the Indian casinos. The Native Americans, who stand for vertical thinking more than anyone else in our culture, have been setting up totally flat casinos for honkies.
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.
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.