Christina Baldwin Quotes

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.

Millions of people are joined in the knowledge that writing brings insight and calm in the same way that prayer, meditation, or a long walk in the woods does. They have discovered that writing allows the racing mind to move at the pace of pen and paper or the pace of typing on the waiting screen - that journal writing is a spiritual practice.

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.

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

Forgiveness is the act of admitting we are like other people. We are prone to make mistakes that cause confusion, inflict pain, and miscommunicate our intentions ... The only choice we have is to reconcile ourselves to our own flaws and the flaws of other people, or withdraw from the community.

We need a revolution in the West: not violent overthrow, but a willingness to take responsibility for the course of history being set forth in our names. We need a revolution determined to activate broad, inclusive social change.

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.

Writing bridges the inner and outer worlds and connects the paths of action and reflection.

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

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.

Journal writing is a voyage to the interior.

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

To work in the world lovingly means that we are defining what we will be for, rather than reacting to what we are against.

Spiritual life is contractual. The sacred cannot dialogue with the unresponsive.

Creatures of a very particular making, we need to know the cultural blinders that narrow our world view as well as the psychological blinders that narrow our view of our personal experience.

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.

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

Wonder and despair are two sides of a spinning coin. When you open yourself to one, you open yourself to the other. You discover a capacity for joy that wasn't in you before. Wonder is the promise of restoration: as deeply as you dive, so may you rise.

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

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

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

Every person is born into life as a blank page and every person leaves life as a full book.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Our desires teach us who we are and who we want to become. Our desires shape our stories.

Intuition always has our best interest at heart.

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

Spiritual energy brings compassion into the world.

Spiritual life is contractual.

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.

Perhaps we wouldn't eat so much, or smoke, or drink so much if we were paying attention to ourselves. Perhaps we wouldn't talk so much if we were paying attention to each other. All these oral activities are trying to meet a need, and perhaps the greatest need is to be seen and heard.

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.

My journal is my life's companion.

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

We live in story like a fish lives in water. We swim through words and images siphoning story through our minds the way a fish siphons water through its gills. We cannot think without language, we cannot process experience without story.

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

The spiritual journey is what the soul is up to while we attend to daily living.

Story is the mother of us all. First we wrap our lives in language and then we act on who we say we are. We proceed from the word into the world and make a world based on our stories.

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

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.

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

History is what scholars and conquerors say happened; story is what it was like to live on the ground.

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