In every story I have heard, good teachers share one trait: a strong sense of personal identity infuses their work.

The winters will drive you crazy until you learn to get out into them.

I now know myself to be a person of weakness and strength, liability and giftedness, darkness and light. I now know that to be whole means to reject none of it but to embrace all of it.

I don't do a lot of top-down teaching.

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.

Leadership is a concept we often resist. It seems immodest, even self-aggrandizing, to think of ourselves as leaders. But if it is true that we are part of a community, then leadership is everyone's vocation, and it can be an evasion to insist that it is not. When we live in the close-knit ecosystem called community, everyone follows and everyone leads.

People are always asking, "Is this person in front of me the same on the inside as he or she appears to be on the outside? Is there congruence between what's within that person and the words and actions I'm viewing and hearing externally?" Children ask that about their parents; students ask it about their teachers; parishioners ask it about their pastors and priests; employees ask it about their bosses; and in a democracy, citizens ask it about their political leaders.