The inner boy in a messed-up family may keep on being shamed, invaded, disappointed, and paralyzed for years and years. "I am a victim," he says, over and over; and he is. But that very identification with victimhood keeps the soul house open and available for still more invasions. Most American men today do not have enough awakened or living warriors inside to defend their soul houses. And most people, men or women, do not know what genuine outward or inward warriors would look like, or feel like.

Every modern male has, lying at the bottom of his psyche, a large, primitive being covered with hair down to his feet. Making contact with this Wild Man is the step the Eighties male or the Nineties male has yet to take. That bucketing-out process has yet to begin in our contemporary culture.

One man wrote me, saying, 'You know who you are? You're nothing but a Captain Bly pissing up a drainpipe!'

We make the path by walking.

Every part of you that you do not love will regress and become hostile towards you.

It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.

What you feel in Japanese poetry is always entirely longing.