Don't wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you've got to make yourself.

I always have felt that elders are really important. I think it's because, in my little Southern black culture, elders really were respected. Everybody listened to them. They may not have agreed - that's a whole different story - but they would totally listen and consider what the elder had to say.

So the best thing is to really work on yourself and opening your own heart and just letting all that stuff [worrying] go. And it is possible. It's sometimes takes a lot of time; it's not easy. And a lot of sitting with yourself and trying to work with your own heart.

Activism pays the rent on being alive and being here on the planet.

In search of my mother's garden, I found my own.

My parents taught me service - not by saying, but by doing. That was my culture, the culture of my family.

You're not here just to be a clone. You're not here to be a copy. We have enough of those. You don't have to apply. You don't even have to go there to be absolutely yourself - real, here, now, on this planet.