Quotes by Robert Bly

If a therapist doesn't dive down to meet the Wild Man or Wild Woman, he or she will try to heal with words. The healing energy stored in waterfalls, trees, clay, horses, dogs, porcupines, llamas, otters belong to the domain of the Wild People. Therapists will have understood this when they insist on doing therapy with a cow in the room.

That attention to what is below encourages us to follow our own desires, which we know are not restricted to sexual desire, but include desires for the infinite, for the Woman at the Edge of the World, for the Firebird, for the treasure at the bottom of the sea, desires entirely superfluous. James Hillman praises this paragraph by William James as great words about desire:

"Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities. His preeminence over them lies simply and solely in the number and in the fantastic and unnecessary character of his wants, physical, moral, aesthetic and intellectual. Had his whole life not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have established himself so inexpungeably in the necessary. And from the consciousness of this, he should draw the lesson that his wants are to be trusted, that even when their gratification seems furthest off, the uneasiness they occasion is still the best guide of his life, and will lead him to issues entirely beyond his present powers of reckoning. Prune down his extravagances, sober him, and you undo him."

What is a scar? The native Americans have a magnificent tradition about scars, which Lame Deer alludes to briefly in his autobiography. I have heard the tradition said this way: "When you die, you meet the Old Hag, and she eats your scars. If you have no scars, she will eat your eyeballs, and you will be blind in the next world." That story moves awfully fast but it certainly defends the value of scars.

Only when a man's interior warriors are strong enough can he go into the joy of display.

With this strength he can also enter into the delight of form. Shapeless clothing, verse that is sloppy, chaotic furnishings: all are linked in secret ways to shame. The universe is not ashamed, and it delights in form. The sun rising over the ocean and setting in the ocean, the moon's lonely shinings and hidings, the leaves unfolding and falling are its displays.

Poetry is a form of display. The poet bird repeats vowels and consonants in order to widen his tail. Meter and counted syllables make up a peacock tail. The poem is a dance done for some being in the other world.

Biologists once thought that herons and geese created their puzzling ritual dances for fertility or survival reasons, that they were, in the word we use about ourselves, practical. But biologists in recent years, after extensive observations of herons, deer, geese, peacocks, and so on, have concluded that some ritual dances have no particular value for survival-they amount to display. Display embodies beauty and expressivenesses often united with a zany grace. Human beings tend to display at the front end; we emphasize the beauty in the face, and the face becomes emotionally expressive. Deer, however, display at both ends: white-tailed deer show beauty in the facial area and in the anal area with their gorgeous tails. Heron dances, peacock strutting, stag processions can all be considered as artistic or superfluous displays.

Longing is expressed, beauty, high spirits. The energies that are caught there, held in a formal moment, activate something in other birds or animals watching. So the displays are activating dances. The events are meant to be seen.

The passion in our nature urges a human being to choose "the one precious thing," and urges him to pay for it through poverty, conflict, deprivation, labor, and endurance of anger from rejected divinities. It is the warrior that enables the human being to decide to become a musician only, or a poet only, or a doctor only, or a hermit only, or a painter only. It is the lover in a man or woman who loves the one precious thing, and tells him what it is; but it is the warrior in Rembrandt or Mirabai who agrees to endure the suffering the choice entails.

When we look in the mirror, someone looks back questioning, serious, alert, and without intent to comfort; and we feel more depth in the eyes looking at us than we ordinarily sense in our own eyes as we stare out at the world. How strange! Who could it be that is looking at us? We conclude that it is another part of us, the half that we don't allow to pass out of our eyes when we glance at others-and the darker and more serious half looks back at us only at rare times.

If a human being takes an action, the soul takes an action. When a hair enters the water, the soul adds gold to it. That is what the soul is like, apparently. This spring water, with gold snakes and fish in it, is the soul itself which does nothing if you do nothing; but if you light a fire, it chops wood; if you make a boat, it becomes the ocean.

When a man welcomes his responsiveness, or what we sometimes call his internal woman, he often feels warmer, more companionable, more alive. But when he approaches what I'll call the "deep male," he feels risk. Welcoming the Hairy Man is scary and risky, and it requires a different sort of courage. Contact with Iron John requires a willingness to descend into the male psyche and accept what's dark down there, including the nourishing dark.

The cultivated heart, imagined then as a house with many rooms, or an alchemical vase able to sustain high temperatures to assist creation of new substances, or imagined as a walled garden with rare flowers, order, solitude, place for intimacy with another, disdain of ordinary chaotic life, represented immense effort. It still does. Male initiation does not move toward machoism; on the contrary, it moves toward achieving a cultivated heart before we die.