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If, in moving through your life, you find yourself lost, go back to the last place where you knew who you were, and what you were doing, and start from there.

Bernice Johnson Reagon

Life’s challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they’re supposed to help you discover who you are.
BERNICE JOHNSON REAGON

Business Motivational Stay Strong
Mothering/nurturing is a vital force and process establishing relationships throughout the universe.
BERNICE JOHNSON REAGON

Establishing Force Process Relationship
I went to a church where you could not sing out loud in the service until you had been saved.
BERNICE JOHNSON REAGON

Church Loud Saved
If we dwell in a community that is comfortable, then it’s probably not broad enough a coalition.
BERNICE JOHNSON REAGON

Community Democracy Enough
At the same time all this was happening, there was a folk song revival movement goingon, so the commercial music industry was actually changed by the Civil Rights Movement.
BERNICE JOHNSON REAGON

Commercial Music Rights Song
If every moment is sacred and if you are amazed and in awe most of the time when you find yourself breathing and not crazy, then you are in a state of constant thankfulness, worship and humility.
BERNICE JOHNSON REAGON

Breathing Crazy Humility
The Civil Rights Movement also reaffirmed me as a singer. It taught me that singing was not entertainment, it was something else.
BERNICE JOHNSON REAGON

Movement Rights Singing
I came out of the Civil Rights Movement, and I had a different kind of focus than most people who have just the academic background as their primary training experience
BERNICE JOHNSON REAGON

Focus People Rights
In fact when Sweet Honey was ten years old it was too big for me to run, and I knew it, but I ran it for another thirteen years because I couldn’t convince other people to really do it. And this year, I’m not running it.
BERNICE JOHNSON REAGON

Running Sweet Years
The first job I had with the Smithsonian was as a field researcher among African American communities in Southwest Louisiana and Arkansas for the festival.
BERNICE JOHNSON REAGON

Community Country Jobs Researcher
I learned that if you bring black people together, you bring them together with a song. To this day, I don’t understand how people think they can bring anybody together without a song.
BERNICE JOHNSON REAGON

People Song Thinking Understand
Personally I discovered that you could go through the academy as a young scholar, come out, and almost immediately have an impact on the academic environment.
BERNICE JOHNSON REAGON

Academic Environment Impact
The Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife, actually, was an effort to put something on the mall in Washington so American tourists could walk through America, and in their minds everything on the mall would be American
BERNICE JOHNSON REAGON

Actually Country Festival Something
If you’re in a coalition and you’re comfortable, you know it’s not a broad enough coalition.
BERNICE JOHNSON REAGON

Broad Coalition Enough
There is nowhere you can go and only be with people who are like you. Give it up.
BERNICE JOHNSON REAGON

Peace People Ubuntu
Today whenever women gather together it is not necessarily nurturing. It is coalition building. And if you feel the strain, you may be doing some good work.
BERNICE JOHNSON REAGON

May Together Work