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There is no hierarchy in Japanese Buddhist poetry.

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
Hierarchy
Japanese
Buddhist
Poetry

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The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.
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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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I knew this friendship with myself couldn’t last forever.
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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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When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching.
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You say to yourself, Well, this poem isn't going to be any good, but I'll write it anyway.
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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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Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.
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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.
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The models of adulthood are disappearing fast. How can two people have a new marriage if neither of them is an adult?
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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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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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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.
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An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.
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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.
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It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.
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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.
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The sibling society is the flattening out of the previously democratic society.
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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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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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