Melissa Etheridge:”And I got to lie still, and I stopped being a rock star. I stopped working, I stopped striving, I stopped everything. And I was completely still . And being still is the best thing you can do for yourself. I mean it. We just don’t do enough of it in our lives , and it is so important. And I just laid still, and I finally got to the point where my brain stopped chattering. It stopped waking up and wandering, and I started dreaming again. I started dreaming of what I wanted the rest of my life to look like .”
RB: “With the diagnosis of breast cancer, you still could make plans for the future even before you completed chemotherapy and radiation ?”
ME:” Oh my gosh , I want the rest of my life ! No no no, I’m not done at all, I’m just beginning . And with that new excitement, I started looking at what I had created , what I’m creating now, and what I wanted to create. I started reading like crazy , I started reading everything from cosmology to quantum physics , string theory, agnostic gospels, Buddhism, everything ! And everybody is saying the same thing , this simple thing : that we’re all here to create, to be happy, and to love. You know, give me the peace signs and all the gooey stuff, but that’s really what I started feeling.And when I started thinking ,’Oh my gosh , I want to write a new album ‘ , I had this joy behind it . I had this great desire to put my experience down and to ignite people and light ’em up and say , ‘Look , you can do this too . We don’t have to do it this way ‘. ”
RB: What attitudes and behaviors should we all look at ?
ME: Today , right now, we have a choice .We have marketed ourselves into a little bitty corner of sound bites and fast food , and we think we can sustain ourselves on this . We think we can go to McDonald’s every day , eat in our car , and be fine . We can just download that one little song that sounds just like that other song . They’re little pieces . If you want to live your life on just little pieces of life , okay , that’s your choice . But I think that there’s a large bunch of us who really want more , who really do believe that the best food comes from the earth ; that it grows up out of the dirt ; and then you eat it and it nourishes you . And that music is made channeled through an artist . They craft it , they put it down in a certain place , and you can enjoy it for three minutes , or an hour , or you can even go to a live concert and enjoy it for three hours . Imagine giving yourself that time ! But I think our society needs to take a breath and step back , and get off this wheel that we’re on of faster , faster , faster . I do .”
