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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.

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
Tend
Owls
Regard
Owl
Ones
Siblings
Call
Whales
Young
Sibling
Great
Ecological
Years
Advance
Naturally

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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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Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.
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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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Be careful how quickly you give away your fire.
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Every part of you that you do not love will regress and become hostile towards you.
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I knew this friendship with myself couldn’t last forever.
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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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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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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.
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Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.
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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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A person who discreetly farts in an elevator is not a divine being, and a man needs to know this.
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But our gusty emotions say to me that we have / Tasted heaven many times: these delicacies / Are left over from some larger party.
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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.
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