I like to say that before we can create an external space in which to receive people, we have to create an internal space in which to receive them.

Humility is the only lens though which great things can be seen--and once we have seen them, humility is the only posture possible.

Connection and connectedness are other words for community and communion.

If we want to grow as teachers -- we must do something alien to academic culture: we must talk to each other about our inner lives -- risky stuff in a profession that fears the personal and seeks safety in the technical, the distant, the abstract.

Here, I think, is another clue to finding true self and vocation: we must withdraw the negative projections we make on people and situations - projections that serve mainly to mask our fears about ourselves- and acknowledge and embrace our own liabilities and limits.

Mentors and apprentices are partners in an ancient human dance, and one of teaching's great rewards is the daily chance it gives us to get back on the dance floor. It is the dance of the spiraling generations, in which the old empower the young with their experience and the young empower the old with new life, reweaving the fabric of the human community as they touch and turn.

Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you.