Myth and poetry represent a reservoir of vertical thinking, which we could also call longing and gratitude to ancestors. We need that gratitude desperately.

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.

Male initiation does not move toward machoism; on the contrary, it moves toward achieving a cultivated heart before we die.

An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.

Poetry keeps longing alive.

During the patriarchal time, the men were always and invariably dominant, legally and socially in marriage, so now it's possible to remodel the entire house of marriage, put in new footings and new joists and a new sort of interior. That is exactly what some men and women are now doing.

There's a quality we could call vertical attention, which is an attention upward toward ancestors, spiritual states, angels, gods.