In the far upper corner of my altar is a photo of Joan Crawford in her most fierce Mommy Dearest mode, just to remind me of some of the cost of everyone's hard-earned sweetness and light.

The animals of the planet are in desperate peril... Without free animal life I believe we will lose the spiritual equivalent of oxygen.

It's better to have your blackness taken away than to stand and lie about who you actually are.

Eventually I knew what hair wanted; it wanted to be itself ... to be left alone by anyone, including me, who did not love it as it was.

What hurts the most is being misunderstood. They tell me that's an Aquarian trait - that that's the thing we don't like.

A writer's heart, a poet's heart, an artist's heart, a musician's heart is always breaking. It is through that broken window that we see the world.

It just seems clear to me that as long as we are all here, it's pretty clear that the struggle is to share the planet, rather than divide it.