Robert Bly

Yeah, that's so beautiful and so well said.

I know you've read Robert Moore and Robert Bly and I think it's Robert Moore I first learned this for.

It's like for a man, it's the shift from competition to creation.

Like competition destructs eventually, right? If you think about give them...

Yeah.

You came up alongside Robert Bly and James Hillman in the 1980s with this book, The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, which is one of the first ones that I was familiarized by.

to come to know your work.

And I think since then you've moved well beyond that into more of a broader multicultural and intergenerational frame.

Great.

Book came out like 20 or 25 years ago, Meeting the Shadow, you know, you know, Robert Bly, you know, the whole gang, you know, and this book was put out by, um, you know, Connie Zweig, who's written more about this, and Jeremiah Abrams, who I think was the, you know, a torture.

And, you know, this book extensively works with Bly's sense of shadow, which I believe is fundamentally wrong, right? And what's wrong with the shadow literature.

So, you know, Bly has this thing called The Little Book of Shadow.

So I act out.

i've lost access to the fullness of my era so i act out in pseudo eros in other words shadow qualities contraction bitterness jealousy right so shadow qualities are the acting out of a a collapsed unique self right, seeking to cover over the emptiness because the vital aliveness has been emptied.

That is completely different than what Robert Bly is describing that got canonically adopted by New Age idiocy, right, you know, across the spectrum and therapists adopting New Age idiocy across the spectrum for several decades and ruining an unimaginable amount of patients.

And that's therapy is a broken field today.

Which brings me to the flowers, the nosegay.

This reminds me of a fairy tale that Robert Bly popularized some years ago called Iron John.

There are a number of common elements between these two stories.

A prince in disguise as a common person who enters a contest to win the hand of a princess and receives magical help, who appears three times with red, white, and black horses in gear and slips away until his third appearance when he's wounded and subsequently discovered through the persistence of the princess who is an active agent in her destiny.

... serious young man, serious young poet.

And, uh, I was involved with a lot of Robert Bly's work around grief and men's work and things, and it was all about grief, you know? So I was going to write my long epic on grief.

And, uh, uh, but after just a few lines, I came across this image, and I didn't want to look at it.

Not because I was afraid of, of the revelation.

What belief is underneath it? What are you protecting? And is that thing, that image, that story, that version of yourself actually in danger? Or is it simply being asked to make a little room for something more complicated and more true? Defensiveness is not the enemy, but like anger, it's a signal, and what it's usually pointing toward is somewhere we haven't yet looked.

I conclude this episode with some beautiful words from the poet Rilke, from The Book of Hours, translated by Robert Bly.

It's a poem I like to read to help me lighten my attachment to any fixed idea of who I am, and to open the door to wonder.

Here it is.

[clears throat] And that's how the process of, of transformation happens.

I, I mentioned, uh, that Robert Bly quote.

Did I mention that Bly- Robert Bly quote here? It was from that book.

It said, "Every part of our personality that we do not learn to love or to embrace will become hostile to us." So whatever it is for you, make friends with it.

Make friends with your humanness.