Knowing that we can be loved exactly as we are gives us all the best opportunity for growing into the healthiest of people. - Fred Rogers

[Dr. McFarland] once invited a well-known sculptor from the faculty of Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) to come to our nursery school. Dr. McFarland said to him, 'I don't want you to teach sculpting. All I want you to do is to love clay in front of the children.'

And that's what he did. He came once a week for the whole term, sat with the four- and five-year-olds as they played, and he 'loved' his clay in front of them. The adults who have worked at the center for many years have said that not before or since have the children in that school used clay so imaginatively as when they had those visits from the sculptor who obviously delighted in his medium.

When I think of solitude, I think of an anecdote from With the Door Open: My Experience by the late Danish religious philosopher Johannes Anker Larsen: “The most comprehensive formula for human culture which I know was given by the old peasant who, on his death bed, obtained from his son this one promise: to sit every day for half an hour alone in the best room.

We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It’s easy to say, “It’s not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem.” Then there are those who see the need and respond. I consider those people my heroes.