Righteous Babe

Ani DiFranco On Music, Politics, And Staying Independent

You have to practice tuning out the noise of the culture to hear the messages transmitted from your gut and your heart. You have to become like a bird-watcher and be vigilant and develop the skills to spot and name the quick flash of awareness in yourself.

Let It Shine

A Tribute To Stephen Levine

[Love] is not a dualistic emotion. It is a sense of oneness with all that is. The experience of love arises when we surrender our separateness into the universal. It is a feeling of unity. You don’t love another; you are another. There is no fear because there is no separation. It is not so much that “two are as one” as it is “the One manifested as two.” In such love there can be no unfinished business.

A Merry Little Christmas

I wonder if my relationship with my mother will improve as her dementia progresses. It would make both our lives simpler. I also wonder how long it will be before I forget what a mango is. Before my home is festooned with post-it notes. Before all my mother’s deficiencies become mine.

Every Moment Is An Act Of Faith

You have faith you’re alive, no? You have faith you’re sitting here having a conversation with me. That I’m listening to you. Or maybe you don’t. Maybe you believe none of this is real. Maybe you believe in nothing but an endless void. But that’s still a kind of faith.

Torpedoes D’Amour

While my contemporaries wailed in the throes of romantic and copulatory obsession, I suspected that every form of adult intimacy, sex especially, was less like the delivery of a vital and sophisticated pleasure than it was a sleek torpedo you never really saw coming until you were struck broadside and blown to smithereens.

The Dog Misses You

The dog goes out to look for you. She circumnavigates the / yard. She has been practicing saying, I love you, in every / language.

The Empty Chair

Waiting for the poetry reading / to get started, I turn around / to apologize to the man / sitting diagonally behind me / for blocking his view.

Cause Of Death: Fox News

Toward the end he sat on the back porch, / sweeping his binoculars back and forth / over the dry scrub-brush and arroyos, / certain he saw Mexicans