“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 vi”
Christina Baldwin“With compassion we see benevolently our own human condition and the condition of our fellow beings. We drop prejudice. We withhold judgment.”
Christina Baldwin“How we remember what we remember and why we remember form the most personal map of our individuality.”
Christina Baldwin“Forgiveness is the act of admitting we are like other people.”
Christina Baldwin“Spiritual love is a position of standing with one hand extended into the universe and one hand extended into the world letting ourselves be a conduit for passing energy.”
Christina Baldwin“When you're stuck in a spiral to change all aspects of the spin you need only to change one thing.”
Christina Baldwin“Change is the constant the signal for rebirth the egg of the phoenix.”
Christina Baldwin“The ordinary stories of our ordinary lives have extraordinary gifts coded within them. . .”
Christina Baldwin“Only the broken heart has the ghost of a chance to grieve, to forgive, to long, to transform." Christina Baldwin, author of Life's Companion, Journal Writing as a Spiritual Practice, 1990. Used with author's permission”
Judith-Victoria Douglas, Ariel's Cottage