Christina Baldwin Quotes

The reason I spend thousands of lifetime hours creating something 99 percent of which no one else is likely to ever read is that writing itself is the gift.

Spirituality is the sacred center out of which all life comes, including Mondays and Tuesdays and rainy Saturday afternoons in all their mundane and glorious detail ... The spiritual journey is the soul's life commingling with ordinary life.

By its simple shape, circle includes everyone without distinction, welcomes and invites all to participate, and creates equality among those gathered.

Meaning drives us from despair to wonder, from confusion to clarity, from hesitance to confidence. And the only place to find meaning is in the importance of small things.

Wonder is not a Pollyanna stance, not a denial of reality; wonder is an acknowledgement of the power of the mind to transform, to notice, to decide what experience shall mean.

Forgiveness is the act of admitting we are like other people.

Writing makes a map, and there is something about a journey that begs to have its passage marked.

Intuition always has our best interest at heart.

Most of us have developed a fairly extensive vocabulary for describing pain, as though the journal were a doctor requiring much detail to make the correct diagnosis. The roundness of the spiritual journey cannot be expressed without developing an equally extensive vocabulary for talking to ourselves and others about the nature of wonder, joy, ecstasy, love, transfiguration.

Ritual is the way you carry the presence of the sacred. Ritual is the spark that must not go out.

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the ordinary.

We make our lives bigger or smaller, more expansive or more limited, according to the interpretation of life that is our story.

Curiosity restores is a state of heightened awareness. Culturally, this has been considered a child's activity. By the time we're grown, we're supposed to know enough not to get bogged down in life's miraculous detail. But the spiritual journey reactivates our sense of miracle and invites us to pause again, squatting over the sidewalk cracks, to ponder the lives of ants and stars.

When you choose to write using yourself as the source of the story, you are choosing to confront all the silences in which your story has been protectively wrapped. Your job as a writer is to respectfully, determinedly, free the story from the silences and free yourself from both.

When you're stuck in a spiral, to change all aspects of the spin you need only to change one thing.

Journal writing is a voyage to the interior.

Contact with the sacred occurs in the stillness of the heart and mind. If there is any real destination to the spiritual quest, it is this point of silence, the middle of the spiral, the center of the self ... The only map that does the spiritual traveler any good is one that leads to the center.

My journal is my life's companion.

Spiritual energy brings compassion into the world.

In the midst of overwhelming noise and distraction, the voice of story is calling us to remember our true selves.

My real journey had very little to do with traveling Europe, and a whole lot to do with traveling my own mind.

As long as we share our stories, as long as our stories reveal our strengths and vulnerabilities to each other, we reinvigorte our understanding and tolerance for the little quirks of personality that in other circumstances would drive us apart. When we live in a family, a community, a country where we know each other's true stories, we remember our capacity to lean in and love each other into wholeness.

I have read the story of a tribe in southern Africa called the Babemba in which a person doing something wrong, something that destroys this delicate social net, brings all work in the village to a halt. The people gather around the "offender," and one by one they begin to recite everything he has done right in his life: every good deed, thoughtful behavior, act of social responsibility. These things have to be true about the person, and spoken honestly, but the time-honored consequence of misbehavior is to appreciate that person back into the better part of himself. The person is given the chance to remember who he is and why he is important to the life of the village.

I want to live under such a practice of compassion. When I forget my place, when I lash out with some private wounding in a public way, I want to be remembered back into alignment with my self and my purpose. I want to live with the opportunity for reconciliation. When someone around me is thoughtless or cruel, I want to be given the chance to respond with a ritual that creates the pos

Words are how we think; stories are how we link.

The purpose of life is not to maintain personal comfort; it's to grow the soul.

Despair is our chance to wrestle with fire and come through.

Friendship has no civil, and few emotional, rights in our society.

Story is the mother of us all, for we become who we say we are.

We are living in a renaissance of personal writing. People are rebalancing the impersonalization endemic to modern society with an increase in personal introspection. We have enough common psychology under our belts to know that psychology doesn't explain or heal everything and that it isn't the fulfillment of awareness, but its beginning. We are undergoing a shift in paradigms in which we are trying to develop new models for humanness and human responsibility. This is no small task. Our individual lives are placed under increasing pressure to respond adequately to both inner and outer change.

In writing we live life twice: once in the experience, and again in recording and reflecting upon our experience.

Surprise is the practice of accepting the unexpected interruption, and the practice of leaving enough space in the day for something to happen that isn't on the list. Surrendering to surprise is the practice of balancing structure and openness.

This unceasing interplay between experience and narrative is a uniquely human attribute. We are the storytellers, the ones who put life into words.

Spiritual empowerment is evidenced in our lives by our willingness to tell ourselves the truth, to listen to the truth when it's told to us, and to dispense truth as lovingly as possible, when we feel compelled to talk from the heart.

Ritual consists of the external practices of spirituality that help us become more receptive and aware of the closeness of our lives to the sacred. Ritual is the act of sanctifying action - even ordinary action - so that it has meaning. I can light a candle because I need the light or because the candle represents the light I need.

We cannot think without language, we cannot process experience without story.

With compassion, we see benevolently our own human condition and the condition of our fellow beings. We drop prejudice. We withhold judgment.

How we remember, what we remember, and why we remember form the most personal map of our individuality.