Music is just a word for something we love largely because it consists of things that words can't express. Likewise, the heart is just a word for something in us that music sometimes touches.

Everybody gets jolted. You, me, before we die we’ll all get nailed, lots of times. But that doesn’t mean we’ll get turned into witches. You can’t avoid getting zapped, but you can avoid passing the mean energy on. That’s the interesting thing about witches, the challenge of them-- learning not to hit back, or hit somebody else, when they zap you. You can bury the zap, for instance, like the gods buried the Titans in the center of the earth. Or you can be like a river when a forest fire hits it--phshhhhhhhhhhhh! Just drown it, drown all the heat and let it wash away.

I started having doubts right on top of my certainty.

To me, it's a great day every time I receive a letter from somebody who climbed inside one of my books, inhabited it for a while, learned a little something, and emerged grateful.

I'd trapped myself in a script.... But to be scripted at all is to be prepackaged, programmed, pinned to a page. Only the unwritten can truly live a life. So who I was, what I was, had to be unwritten.

The bad thing about falling into pieces is that it hurts. The good thing about it is that once you're lying there in shards you've got nothing left to protect, and so have no reason not to be honest

Our lack of community is intensely painful. A TV talk show is not community. A couple of hours in a church pew each Sabbath is not community. A multinational corporation is neither a human nor a community, and in the sweatshops, defiled agribusiness fields, genetic mutation labs, ecological dead zones, the inhumanity is showing. Without genuine spiritual community, life becomes a struggle so lonely and grim that even Hillary Clinton has admitted "it takes a village".