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The sibling society is the flattening out of the previously democratic society.

Robert Bly

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Robert Bly
Age: 97
Born: 1926
Born: December 23
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Madison
Minnesota
Robert Bly
Robert Elwood Bly
Flattening
Previously
Sibling
Democratic
Society

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I was unfaithful even to Infidelity.
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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.
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Vertical thought likes to imagine the vast distances between the stars.
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The best presenters have conversations with their audiences.
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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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It's good to have poems that begin with tea and end with God.
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An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
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People tend to take stories literally these days.
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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.
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The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.
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We did not come to remain whole. We came to lose our leaves like the trees, Trees that start again.
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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.
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Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person.
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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.
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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.
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A person who discreetly farts in an elevator is not a divine being, and a man needs to know this.
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Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.
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I use the phrase 'sibling society' to suggest a culture fundamentally without fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers, or ancestors. The thinking is horizontal.
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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.'
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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!'
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