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.
Robert Bly
From: The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: Poetry Anthology
