Hi. Before we get started, I wanted to give you a heads up that this episode contains brief mentions of trauma, abuse, and suicide. I want to ask you if Fred Rogers were here today and you could sit down with him, and he sat across from you and said, Hi, Actually, it's nice to meet you. I'm Fred. I want to know what you would ask him. I mean, it wouldn't be one question. I would want to sit and listen to Fred Rogers talk about the people who he's loved in his life. I think there's so much to learn from listening to people talk about the people who make them feel a certain way. This is Ashley c Ford in our first episode. I talked to her about a very bad day, a bathtub and rediscovering Mr Rogers as an adult. I would love, love, love for him to talk to me about his love of his wife, his love of close friends, of pen pals, how he appreciated the parts of them that you know, it's not just set them apart, but gave them joy. I feel like Mr Rogers never really needed anybody to to be different. In an interesting way, he understood that we are fascinating creatures all our own and there are people who when they speak of passion, when they speak of themselves at their best, you learn so much about what happiness can create in a person. It's so beautiful and it's so wonderful. And I think that very few people appreciated and respected the concept of love like Fred Rogers. There's so many things to know and to wonder about in this world, and there's so many people who want to show and tell you all they can, people who want to help you to learn and to be brave and strong and interesting and loving. That's the best part of living, loving, and I love being with you. I'm carved a Wallace and this is Finding Fred, a podcast about Fred Rogers from Fatherly and I Heart Media in partnership with Transmitter Media. We spoke to Ashley Seaford in our first episode because she reminded us that as adults, it's possible to return to Mr Rogers and feel affirmed and accepted. But then she also took time to consider what Fred might have been asking of her as a small child, and might still be asking of her now. I've been following her example, wrestling with what grown up things there are to learn from this children's entertainer for a long time, I've been trying to talk about feelings in a serious way, and I think at times I've been dismissed because of that and definitely thought of as soft or lacking and intelligence. And I think that what Mr Rogers in the Cultural Conversation is doing right now is offering a lot of people a chance to reparent themselves in one way or another by listening and realizing that while their feelings aren't facts, their feelings are powerful, and feelings change things whether or not we want them to. And we're not going to solve anything, change anything, um progress on some of the issues we want to progress on if we continue to act as if emotions and feelings are not having real consequences in our society and in our culture and in our everyday lives. We define love differently all across this country. Like for me, love includes accountability. There's no such thing as love without accountability. And some people think of love as active and some people think of love as a nothing emotion. Like what what could love possibly add to this conversation? What could love possibly help in these trying times? We aren't talking about what love means, and we are acting like figuring that out isn't a worthy conversation, and we're going to pay for it, And so the idea that love would be useless. Right now, I'm like, oh no, oh, no, Love changes everything. For a long time, I thought love was just a stronger version of like. But Fred said love is an active noun, like the words struggle. To love someone, he says, is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is to accept ourselves as we are right here and now. That has nothing to do with liking people. It's about something else, something requiring time and patience and quiet, things that may seem hard to come by today. Time and patience and quiet seem especially lacking in the place where many of us do most of our noisemaking. Online. The Internet is a kind of manic modern neighborhood where outrage changes to laughter, changes to vanity, all in a few seconds and seemingly out of our own control. That's when I start feeling like a video game and somebody else has the joystick, And in that case, all the people on my timeline have the joystick, and I'm letting them move me in different directions, and I've lost the plot. I've lost control, and I don't like to feel that way. I was talking to my therapists in the early stages of making this show and thinking out loud about what makes Fred Rogers interesting and important today, and she stopped me and she said, the thing I've always thought about him is that he leads with self. This, of course, made no sense to me. So she broke out the markers in the paper and she drew a big circle, and on the outside of the circle, she labeled all of these selves, these roles that we take on when we interact with the world. That protect herself, who makes sure that nobody is hurting me or my family, The self that needs to prove its worth, the fearful self, the prideful self, the needy self. She wrote all these selves around the circle, and I pointed to the empty center of it, and I said, so, then, what's that? And she said, that is what we are. That isn't anger or fear or shame or worthlessness or a loneness. That is the true self. And when I watched Mr Rogers, it's clear that this person has done the work necessary to lead primarily with that self. The other parts are there, but there in the back seat he can be in dialogue with them, but they don't run the show, or, as Ashley would say, it's the true self that has the joystick. I recently went and saw Celene Dion perform UH in concert, and one of the first songs she sings is the Power of Love. Now, I remember when it came out. I used to go all nights skating with my cousins and my brother at roller Dome South in Fort Wayne, Indiana. And when I was a kid at all night skate rolling around the skating rink, and the Power of Love would come on right to skate two, and I would just throw my hands back behind me and skate as quickly as I could. And there's that part that she gets to, you know that, because I'm y'allt and I when she would get to that part, that's when I would stop skating, and I would just let the momentum of my body push me forward with my arms back and my eyes closed, singing at the top of my lungs. And the DJ would get on the microphone and would say, Ashley Ford, once again, this is a couple's skate, and I could not care. I was going to skate to that song. I feel like the person I was in that moment was and is my core self. I feel like there was this deep understanding of myself in that time of what I wanted, what I valued, how to just feel my body and enjoy it for what it was doing, for the movement, for the fun, how to like dream about big love and what love could be like, and be surrounded by people and still feel like I was my own and I couldn't care what they thought about me. I couldn't care if I was going to be in trouble. All I could think was who I am right now is like good, Like this is good. And it wasn't good because I was doing anything for anybody else, And it wasn't good because I was trying to be anything else. It's about a way of being and putting myself at the center, not because everybody else should put me at the center, but just because I am worthy of being at the center of myself. I'm glad I'm the way I am. I think I'm fine. I'm glad I'm the way I am. The pleasure's mine. It's good that I look the way I should. Wouldn't change now if I could, because I'm happy to be me. Aren't there times that you feel that way that you're just glad you're the way you are? Good for you if you know those times, yes, sir, I'm proud of it. When you can feel that way. Ye. Hope for ourselves and hope for our relationships our communities depends on our ability to find our center, to stay in touch with it, and to act from it. Fred Rogers spent his life creating television for children that was shaped in part by this new understanding of what we need in order to flourish. Mr rogers Neighborhood was less about learning a B c S and more about sorting through and managing the enormous feelings that move through you as you grow and Actuley says he did that by making time and space for the little feelings, just listening to them, and that is something a lot of us have forgotten. The problem is is that we think the extreme feelings are the only feelings that should motivate action, and I think think that we have to stop relying on the idea that certain feelings will compel us to act a certain way, and instead notice our feelings, no matter how mild they are, and choose to do something with them. And I think, unfortunately what we've done is encouraged a real lack of imagination for what can be done when you feel something that is not as strong. I think it's a lack of imagination. The first time we talked, one of the questions that people seem to really respond to is and want to ask you what do you do with the mad that you feel? And in this conversation, we've talked less about mad and more about love, And so I'm going to ask you what some may think is the inverse of that question, though I don't know that it is, what do you do with the love that you feel? I keep what I need and I spend the rest, and there's always more. It's it's abundant. I I'd like to honor people and love people with my presence and with being president with them, because not enough of us get that, and I'm good at that. And if that's the gift I got to give, then that's what y'all gonna get. Hi. My name is Risa and I've never called it for a show before, but I was fired by you guys. We asked you you who've been listening to share stories about people who showed you how to be helpers. But that's really a question about love too. Hi, mom saw that we each walk around with a bokay of flowers and walk down the street. If somebody says hied you with smiles and there giving you a flower, and you have a choice. You can smile back and say hi, give them a flower back, or you going to take their flower of human And so the trick is to keep your okay healthy. And so if you're always giving away your flowers and not accepting other people's flowers and return, you're going to run out of flowers. Whereas if you're always accepting other people's flowers but you're not getting out yours, and you're gonna find them with a little huge out of sorts. Okay, So to tricking, you know, to find that balance. More stories from you After a quick break, h Ashley says she takes the love she needs and gives the rest away. That feels most natural when we're giving it away to our family or our friends. But when we give it away to strangers, we're not doing it because we think we might get something back. We may never even see them again. We're doing it because we to be good neighbors, high carvel. My name is Benny Delgado. What a profound question. Who taught me what it means to be a helper? And you know, I distinctly remember my mother. We were driving down the road. It was snowing. It was really cold that day, and we're coming down a busy street and there was a mother and her children that were walking against the wind with the snow hitting them and carrying bags of groceries and uh and immediately she pulled over, rolled down the window and offered to give these people a ride. And immediately she asked us to move over. There was several kids and the mother. Mother got in the front seat and we all squished into the back. She got out, help get the groceries and its the trunk of a car and took them to wherever they were going, way past our house. And you know that that memory is ingrained in my mind. Hello, my name is Justin sweeton Um from Texas and two thousand and sixteen, I was homeless and on drugs and needed to make a change in my life. So I walked to uh Conro, Texas, met a man there by the name of Luke Reatas. He invited me into the men's transitional home called the Freedom House. He basically just instructed me on good ethics through the lens of Christianity. A few months into the program, the guy who was running the Corner House of Prayer, he was stepping down after seven years. I just felt the urge and I wanted to step into that position, and I wanted to be a part of this, this community to help homeless people get back on their feet. And uh Luke was absolutely on board with it. He gave me a key to the church. He gave me basically all authority over the place. You know, somebody who had only been sober for a few months. And for the next two years I impacted people's lives like I wouldn't believe, you know. I went from someone who was in search of help to suddenly giving help. It was the most important two years of my life. Ki grovel Um. When I was in the third grade, I was a painfully awkward kid and had glasses and I had a big backpack, and I got picked on a lot by this one girl in particular. I was just I was so afraid of her. And I had this teacher, Mr. Lebron, who paired us together. We had a writing assignment and he said, she needs some help, and I think you would be really good at helping her with this writing assignment, and you need some help with your presentation because you're not good at speaking up. And she's really brave and really strong, and it it changed my whole life. I became friends with this girl. We realized that we needed each other. She taught me how to speak up for myself and how to not take bullying from other people. And it helps me relate to people that I wouldn't otherwise relate to. And I just mister Brown, if you're out there, I think value all the time, and thank you so much. When I was in my twenties, I went through a crippling depression. It was as if all the unprocessed trauma from my childhood just showed up on my door one day and moved in my apartment. I began to feel like it would maybe be better if I didn't bother being alive at all. I didn't think I had a lot of value to the world. I didn't think that I was equipped to deal with life. My closest friend at the time, I saw my struggle and gifted me a pass to this African American meditation retreat in northern California. It seemed random at the time, but I had nothing else to lose. On the way up, I volunteered to pick up one of the meditation teachers who was flying in from New York. I had always been told that when in pain, just find one simple act of service that you can manage and do it. The teacher I picked up that day was the Reverend Angel Kyoto Williams. She was the first real Zen Buddhist I ever met, and she was nothing like the movies told me and ordained Zen practitioner would be. She was black and queer and have the no non since demeanor of a born and raised New Yorker. And when I attended her Dharma talks, I was mesmerized. Here she was talking about a liberation beyond liberation. She talked about love as a form of practice, resistance to oppression as a spiritual calling. She talked about meditation and quiet as a path toward the full realization of the self. I didn't understand all of it, but I trusted it. Something about a woman who grew up in Queens teaching me love and understanding just hit me. We became friends, and over the years I sometimes have practiced with her often and sometimes not so often. But the way she has looked at me and seen me and loved me, it did for me what Fred Rogers did for me. It gave me this very quiet, very subtle sense that I have value, that I matter just as I am. In some way, Angel might have saved my life. She's written some books, including Being Black and Then In the Art of Fearlessness and Grace and Radical Dharma, Talking Love, Race and Liberation. She's the founder of the Center of Transformative Change in the Spiritual director of the meditation based New Dharma Community. As long as I've known her, her work has been about freedom, freedom from oppression, freedom from anger and hate, freedom from suffering, freedom for all of us. I could not talk about the work that Fred Rogers did without talking to the person I know who most directly aligns with Fred's philosophy, even though she came from a very different place than Fred did. Angel was a young activist in New York City. She knows confrontation, so I asked her how she managed to overcome the year and anger that can come with that. She told me a story about what it was like to return to New York after years of practice in California. I got off at Penn Station, as one as one does, and I left the relative space of being on the train and I entered into the sea of people that is the life of New York. And in that moment, like I felt this release of like, oh so good. And it became super clear to me in that moment that what happens in that space of confrontation is you can see it as confrontation with all of these other people, but if you're open to it, you recognize that it's actually what it is as a conference tation or a meeting with yourself. Hmm. And when it's a meeting with yourself, then all of it is profound. Every single person, every single person is a meeting with yourself like velcro, right, it's like if there's nothing to rub, it just all like smooths by. But if you've got a little like stickiness there, it's like a little you know, then people's hooks get on that your that those fuzzy like gnarly places in you, and so then it's an opportunity instead of you know, you're in my way, you get right. It wasn't that. It was it was this like, oh yeah, oh there, I am, oh right, it's like and and that that was very very clear. Remember you once described sitting meditation as a kind of curiosity, and that really struck me. I remember right after you profound a profound curiosity. I remember sitting after that at this retreat with that in my head, and it was kind of hot and there was a like a beat of sweat was just down my face, and I was really annoyed by it. And it was this embodiment of something that I felt like, I think I know what she's talking about, what it means to just sit and be curious as opposed to constantly trying to manage and control. But but again I wonder, I wonder, like, okay, so I just I say people to people in the podcast, all right, everyone being curious, domag and control, thank you, goodnight? And then what keeps people from going off and doing that? In other words, how does one it's one thing to know something and a different thing to live it and embody it. How do you cross that gap? I think you, I mean, I think that's where practice comes in, right, we practice our way into contact with reality, a more truer reality, until it is familiar enough to us that we recognize the other thing is false, so that a bead of sweat is just a bead of sweat. It doesn't have to be an annoyance. It could first just be a feeling. Angel practices meditation in the neighborhood. Fred helped kids get there by showing them how to slow down and get quiet. There were long pauses on the show and moments when Fred would ask us to stop and reflect on a song or an image or just breathe. That kind of slowing down becomes really useful when we're hurt or overwhelmed, when someone makes us angry, that's when we really need to understand our motions to be able to get space from them. My practice is having the space right, carving the space out, and I mean just is a monumental feat in a world that is like constantly moving, and it moves maybe I would say about three four times as fast as it did when I was younger and entered into this practice. Just the mental commitment to carve that kind of space out in a in a society that's so much about doing to say, like I'm not gonna actually be doing anything. I'm not going to be accomplished anything or producing anything. And I think as a as a black person in particular, it frees me from the notion that I am defined by what I'm producing and for people that were brought to this land to to produce and have in so many ways organized ourselves and many of the campaigns organized for us by our leaders no shame or blame, but have been organized around our our our value in relationship to producing things. Uh. And I'm fond of saying these days. You know, I'm like, get us jobs, Like I mean, we have worked all we have, need to work for the next We don't. You know, we don't. You don't need to teach us how to work job skills. That's it, Like, that's a that's an oxy moron. Like our evidence of our job skills is this country. That's the man. They're not ready for this one, they're not ready for this conversation. So um. And so what I saw is these very particular opportunities to be a fugitive from this construct. So I think it's really it's it's really profound that just the act of the choosing of the silence, and and I get to defy some things. And I think what we're talking about is defying. Yes, we are talking about defying, I mean, and that is the thing I mean, they're Defiance is a really great word to bring into this conversation because I feel like when I'm talking about the power of someone representing love in the way that Fred Rogers represented it, and the way that that love, the way Fred Rogers said to kids, you matter in a way that maybe no one else in that kid's life was telling them. It's tempting to think of that as a kind of affirmation and a kind of and that's what's that's what's made fun of when we make fun of Fred Rogers. But the more I think about it, the more I think of it as an act of denial, an act of resistance, denying this what he saw encroaching on kids and what then proceeded to over the next because he started in nine, so the world was similar in some ways but wildly different in other ways, and that he wanted to deny this. What he saw was this encroaching idea that your value was only based on how how much you please people, or how much people like you or how much money you earn, or if you could ap them all up, you can earn a lot of money. Then people are pleased and they like you maybe get that all together. But really, what Fred Rogers was talking about, seen through certain lends, was a kind of resistance to the to the momentum of our culture. And that's where I think of him as like an incredibly strong person. No. I think that his his his active resistance was fairly um demonstrated and strong and persistent and you know all of the things that make a warrior a warrior, right, Like not a war monger, not a soldier, right, but a warrior. What is that difference? Um, I think of soldiers is following instructions, you know. I think as I think of warriors in the heroic sense of warrior, as people that are charged, right, They're charged with a cause. I think the power and the potency of him, like any true teacher of wisdom, is that he he was talking to you each and every single time. And maybe he would turn his attention and he would talk to Mr mcpheeley or you know whoever else or you know, um, but there were those times when he turned directly to the camera and he spoke to you, he spoke to me, and so that held ness, especially for those of us that were made to feel as if the society wasn't constructed for our sense of belonging unless we vied for that belonging, unless we quote unquote earned that belonging to have someone turned to you directly you and say, just as you are, your loved, just as you are, exactly as you are in this moment, not another moment, not a moment to come, not a promised moment. Right even even our religions were selling us on a promised moment to come one day, and he was saying, no, right now, like right this particular moment, which I think of, as you know, as Howard Thurman would say, is like the religion of Jesus, not the religion about Jesus right doing the work of Jesus. That was to like hold love right there in the space. And you know, when we say this word love, people are probably turning to their warm fuzzy feelings and looking for that. And I'm not talking about the warm fuzzy feelings. And if it generated warm fuzzy feelings for you, great, but I think what it generated from me is space, right, it's the space. It was the space to be me. I didn't look at Fred Rogerson go oh, my god, warm and fuzzy. I love him, you know. In fact, I didn't think much about him, and I think that that is the most profound love is it to make me think about him and how I felt about him. It made me think about how it felt about me. How do you feel about you? What is your value? How do you even know? Above my desk at home, where I write this, I have a small reminder that says you are enough. I look at it all the time, not because I believe it, but because I actually don't. I mean, I am enough for what, for you, for the world, for me. In my forty or five years, I've had a lot of experiences, but maybe the most defining one is the experience of being shown in myrriad ways that I'm not enough, that my life doesn't matter. Many people have had this same experience. My mother and I were homeless for a time, often hungry. I was violently sexually assaulted at the age of seven, and it wouldn't be the last time I was called racial slurs by classmates and even occasionally by teachers. I grew up to watch people who looked like me beat and shot on television while unarmed, only to have the justice system decide time and time and time again that no wrong had been committed in the eyes of the law. I've looked down the barrel of guns just because people thought my mother and I didn't belong in the neighborhood that we lived in. Am I enough? Do I have value? Does my life really matter? I can tell myself that it does, But what does it take for me to believe it? Of course, not believing that I am enough? It's not just a personal problem. It's a collective one, because how can I believe in your value if I don't even believe in my own In this life, people like me and maybe like you, we've had to find our own value, our own worth. And one voice, like the voice of Fred Rogers telling me that I am enough is powerful and it is beautiful, and I want to believe it. I love believing it. But his voice alone is not enough to undo an entire history. I wish it was, but it's not. But his example, the way he lived now, that has impact, the way Reverend Angel lives, that has impact the people in your lives that you've called to tell us about that has impact. Fred Rogers lived his life in service to something greater than himself. Let's call it love, and not warm feelings. I like you a lot. Love, but love in the way that Ashley defines it as action, as accountability, Love in the way that Reverend Angel defines it as space. Space to see others, to understand others. This was not his only devotion, but it seemed to be his primary devotion, and I don't think he could have done this work without it. Fred was devoted and disciplined. He swam every morning, He rose early and studied and prayed and meditated on how he would be an active force for good every day. A producer for his Showow told us that each time he entered the TV studio he uttered a small prayer, Dear God, lets some part of this be yours. He famously made sure that every one of the hundreds of letters he received each week was thoughtfully answered. His dedication was to loving us, accepting us, showing up for us every day. For nine episodes forty years. Through the television neighborhood he created, he showed us how to love like that too. That was Fred Rogers way of making the world better? So what is yours? There is no one sentence I can say, or that Fred Rogers can say that solves all of our problems. Our freedom, our love for ourselves, our care for one another does not come overnight. It is something we build bit by bit, one action at a time, maybe even one moment at a time. But I do not have doubt. I believe in your ability to imagine and live something better than this because I'm learning to do it myself. I'm proud of you. I'm grateful to you, and I love you. Here's the sweater going into the closet. Here's the jacket going on. Me hmm. There'll be the night time and then I'll come the new day, and that's when you and I will be together again. Thank you for listening to Finding Fred. Our show is produced by Transmitter Media. The team is Dan O'Donnell, Jordan Bailey, and Maddie Foley. Our editor is Sarah Nicks. The executive producer for Transmitter Media is Gretta Cohne. Executive producers at Fatherly are Simon Isaac's and Andrew Berman. Thanks to the team at I Heart Media. Special thanks to all of our guests. Many thanks also to Fred Rogers Productions to show Negri into the studio. Engineers at You See Berkeley. Extra special thanks to Tim lie Barger who runs the site neighborhood archive dot com. It's a listing of every song, every episode, every character on Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. It's been an amazing resource for our team. Rick Kwan makes the show sound beautiful. Theme music is by Blue Dot Sessions and interstitial music by Alison Layton Brown. That's it for our show. You can come back and listen to all of our episodes and tell your friends to do the same. I'm Carvil Wallace. Thank you for listening.

Hi. Before we get started, I wanted to give you a heads up that this episode contains brief mentions of trauma, abuse, and suicide. I want to ask you if Fred Rogers were here today and you could sit down with him, and he sat across from you and said, Hi, Actually, it's nice to meet you. I'm Fred. I want to know what you would ask him. I mean, it wouldn't be one question. I would want to sit and listen to Fred Rogers talk about the people who he's loved in his life. I think there's so much to learn from listening to people talk about the people who make them feel a certain way. This is Ashley c Ford in our first episode. I talked to her about a very bad day, a bathtub and rediscovering Mr Rogers as an adult. I would love, love, love for him to talk to me about his love of his wife, his love of close friends, of pen pals, how he appreciated the parts of them that you know, it's not just set them apart, but gave them joy. I feel like Mr Rogers never really needed anybody to to be different. In an interesting way, he understood that we are fascinating creatures all our own and there are people who when they speak of passion, when they speak of themselves at their best, you learn so much about what happiness can create in a person. It's so beautiful and it's so wonderful. And I think that very few people appreciated and respected the concept of love like Fred Rogers. There's so many things to know and to wonder about in this world, and there's so many people who want to show and tell you all they can, people who want to help you to learn and to be brave and strong and interesting and loving. That's the best part of living, loving, and I love being with you. I'm carved a Wallace and this is Finding Fred, a podcast about Fred Rogers from Fatherly and I Heart Media in partnership with Transmitter Media. We spoke to Ashley Seaford in our first episode because she reminded us that as adults, it's possible to return to Mr Rogers and feel affirmed and accepted. But then she also took time to consider what Fred might have been asking of her as a small child, and might still be asking of her now. I've been following her example, wrestling with what grown up things there are to learn from this children's entertainer for a long time, I've been trying to talk about feelings in a serious way, and I think at times I've been dismissed because of that and definitely thought of as soft or lacking and intelligence. And I think that what Mr Rogers in the Cultural Conversation is doing right now is offering a lot of people a chance to reparent themselves in one way or another by listening and realizing that while their feelings aren't facts, their feelings are powerful, and feelings change things whether or not we want them to. And we're not going to solve anything, change anything, um progress on some of the issues we want to progress on if we continue to act as if emotions and feelings are not having real consequences in our society and in our culture and in our everyday lives. We define love differently all across this country. Like for me, love includes accountability. There's no such thing as love without accountability. And some people think of love as active and some people think of love as a nothing emotion. Like what what could love possibly add to this conversation? What could love possibly help in these trying times? We aren't talking about what love means, and we are acting like figuring that out isn't a worthy conversation, and we're going to pay for it, And so the idea that love would be useless. Right now, I'm like, oh no, oh, no, Love changes everything. For a long time, I thought love was just a stronger version of like. But Fred said love is an active noun, like the words struggle. To love someone, he says, is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is to accept ourselves as we are right here and now. That has nothing to do with liking people. It's about something else, something requiring time and patience and quiet, things that may seem hard to come by today. Time and patience and quiet seem especially lacking in the place where many of us do most of our noisemaking. Online. The Internet is a kind of manic modern neighborhood where outrage changes to laughter, changes to vanity, all in a few seconds and seemingly out of our own control. That's when I start feeling like a video game and somebody else has the joystick, And in that case, all the people on my timeline have the joystick, and I'm letting them move me in different directions, and I've lost the plot. I've lost control, and I don't like to feel that way. I was talking to my therapists in the early stages of making this show and thinking out loud about what makes Fred Rogers interesting and important today, and she stopped me and she said, the thing I've always thought about him is that he leads with self. This, of course, made no sense to me. So she broke out the markers in the paper and she drew a big circle, and on the outside of the circle, she labeled all of these selves, these roles that we take on when we interact with the world. That protect herself, who makes sure that nobody is hurting me or my family, The self that needs to prove its worth, the fearful self, the prideful self, the needy self. She wrote all these selves around the circle, and I pointed to the empty center of it, and I said, so, then, what's that? And she said, that is what we are. That isn't anger or fear or shame or worthlessness or a loneness. That is the true self. And when I watched Mr Rogers, it's clear that this person has done the work necessary to lead primarily with that self. The other parts are there, but there in the back seat he can be in dialogue with them, but they don't run the show, or, as Ashley would say, it's the true self that has the joystick. I recently went and saw Celene Dion perform UH in concert, and one of the first songs she sings is the Power of Love. Now, I remember when it came out. I used to go all nights skating with my cousins and my brother at roller Dome South in Fort Wayne, Indiana. And when I was a kid at all night skate rolling around the skating rink, and the Power of Love would come on right to skate two, and I would just throw my hands back behind me and skate as quickly as I could. And there's that part that she gets to, you know that, because I'm y'allt and I when she would get to that part, that's when I would stop skating, and I would just let the momentum of my body push me forward with my arms back and my eyes closed, singing at the top of my lungs. And the DJ would get on the microphone and would say, Ashley Ford, once again, this is a couple's skate, and I could not care. I was going to skate to that song. I feel like the person I was in that moment was and is my core self. I feel like there was this deep understanding of myself in that time of what I wanted, what I valued, how to just feel my body and enjoy it for what it was doing, for the movement, for the fun, how to like dream about big love and what love could be like, and be surrounded by people and still feel like I was my own and I couldn't care what they thought about me. I couldn't care if I was going to be in trouble. All I could think was who I am right now is like good, Like this is good. And it wasn't good because I was doing anything for anybody else, And it wasn't good because I was trying to be anything else. It's about a way of being and putting myself at the center, not because everybody else should put me at the center, but just because I am worthy of being at the center of myself. I'm glad I'm the way I am. I think I'm fine. I'm glad I'm the way I am. The pleasure's mine. It's good that I look the way I should. Wouldn't change now if I could, because I'm happy to be me. Aren't there times that you feel that way that you're just glad you're the way you are? Good for you if you know those times, yes, sir, I'm proud of it. When you can feel that way. Ye. Hope for ourselves and hope for our relationships our communities depends on our ability to find our center, to stay in touch with it, and to act from it. Fred Rogers spent his life creating television for children that was shaped in part by this new understanding of what we need in order to flourish. Mr rogers Neighborhood was less about learning a B c S and more about sorting through and managing the enormous feelings that move through you as you grow and Actuley says he did that by making time and space for the little feelings, just listening to them, and that is something a lot of us have forgotten. The problem is is that we think the extreme feelings are the only feelings that should motivate action, and I think think that we have to stop relying on the idea that certain feelings will compel us to act a certain way, and instead notice our feelings, no matter how mild they are, and choose to do something with them. And I think, unfortunately what we've done is encouraged a real lack of imagination for what can be done when you feel something that is not as strong. I think it's a lack of imagination. The first time we talked, one of the questions that people seem to really respond to is and want to ask you what do you do with the mad that you feel? And in this conversation, we've talked less about mad and more about love, And so I'm going to ask you what some may think is the inverse of that question, though I don't know that it is, what do you do with the love that you feel? I keep what I need and I spend the rest, and there's always more. It's it's abundant. I I'd like to honor people and love people with my presence and with being president with them, because not enough of us get that, and I'm good at that. And if that's the gift I got to give, then that's what y'all gonna get. Hi. My name is Risa and I've never called it for a show before, but I was fired by you guys. We asked you you who've been listening to share stories about people who showed you how to be helpers. But that's really a question about love too. Hi, mom saw that we each walk around with a bokay of flowers and walk down the street. If somebody says hied you with smiles and there giving you a flower, and you have a choice. You can smile back and say hi, give them a flower back, or you going to take their flower of human And so the trick is to keep your okay healthy. And so if you're always giving away your flowers and not accepting other people's flowers and return, you're going to run out of flowers. Whereas if you're always accepting other people's flowers but you're not getting out yours, and you're gonna find them with a little huge out of sorts. Okay, So to tricking, you know, to find that balance. More stories from you After a quick break, h Ashley says she takes the love she needs and gives the rest away. That feels most natural when we're giving it away to our family or our friends. But when we give it away to strangers, we're not doing it because we think we might get something back. We may never even see them again. We're doing it because we to be good neighbors, high carvel. My name is Benny Delgado. What a profound question. Who taught me what it means to be a helper? And you know, I distinctly remember my mother. We were driving down the road. It was snowing. It was really cold that day, and we're coming down a busy street and there was a mother and her children that were walking against the wind with the snow hitting them and carrying bags of groceries and uh and immediately she pulled over, rolled down the window and offered to give these people a ride. And immediately she asked us to move over. There was several kids and the mother. Mother got in the front seat and we all squished into the back. She got out, help get the groceries and its the trunk of a car and took them to wherever they were going, way past our house. And you know that that memory is ingrained in my mind. Hello, my name is Justin sweeton Um from Texas and two thousand and sixteen, I was homeless and on drugs and needed to make a change in my life. So I walked to uh Conro, Texas, met a man there by the name of Luke Reatas. He invited me into the men's transitional home called the Freedom House. He basically just instructed me on good ethics through the lens of Christianity. A few months into the program, the guy who was running the Corner House of Prayer, he was stepping down after seven years. I just felt the urge and I wanted to step into that position, and I wanted to be a part of this, this community to help homeless people get back on their feet. And uh Luke was absolutely on board with it. He gave me a key to the church. He gave me basically all authority over the place. You know, somebody who had only been sober for a few months. And for the next two years I impacted people's lives like I wouldn't believe, you know. I went from someone who was in search of help to suddenly giving help. It was the most important two years of my life. Ki grovel Um. When I was in the third grade, I was a painfully awkward kid and had glasses and I had a big backpack, and I got picked on a lot by this one girl in particular. I was just I was so afraid of her. And I had this teacher, Mr. Lebron, who paired us together. We had a writing assignment and he said, she needs some help, and I think you would be really good at helping her with this writing assignment, and you need some help with your presentation because you're not good at speaking up. And she's really brave and really strong, and it it changed my whole life. I became friends with this girl. We realized that we needed each other. She taught me how to speak up for myself and how to not take bullying from other people. And it helps me relate to people that I wouldn't otherwise relate to. And I just mister Brown, if you're out there, I think value all the time, and thank you so much. When I was in my twenties, I went through a crippling depression. It was as if all the unprocessed trauma from my childhood just showed up on my door one day and moved in my apartment. I began to feel like it would maybe be better if I didn't bother being alive at all. I didn't think I had a lot of value to the world. I didn't think that I was equipped to deal with life. My closest friend at the time, I saw my struggle and gifted me a pass to this African American meditation retreat in northern California. It seemed random at the time, but I had nothing else to lose. On the way up, I volunteered to pick up one of the meditation teachers who was flying in from New York. I had always been told that when in pain, just find one simple act of service that you can manage and do it. The teacher I picked up that day was the Reverend Angel Kyoto Williams. She was the first real Zen Buddhist I ever met, and she was nothing like the movies told me and ordained Zen practitioner would be. She was black and queer and have the no non since demeanor of a born and raised New Yorker. And when I attended her Dharma talks, I was mesmerized. Here she was talking about a liberation beyond liberation. She talked about love as a form of practice, resistance to oppression as a spiritual calling. She talked about meditation and quiet as a path toward the full realization of the self. I didn't understand all of it, but I trusted it. Something about a woman who grew up in Queens teaching me love and understanding just hit me. We became friends, and over the years I sometimes have practiced with her often and sometimes not so often. But the way she has looked at me and seen me and loved me, it did for me what Fred Rogers did for me. It gave me this very quiet, very subtle sense that I have value, that I matter just as I am. In some way, Angel might have saved my life. She's written some books, including Being Black and Then In the Art of Fearlessness and Grace and Radical Dharma, Talking Love, Race and Liberation. She's the founder of the Center of Transformative Change in the Spiritual director of the meditation based New Dharma Community. As long as I've known her, her work has been about freedom, freedom from oppression, freedom from anger and hate, freedom from suffering, freedom for all of us. I could not talk about the work that Fred Rogers did without talking to the person I know who most directly aligns with Fred's philosophy, even though she came from a very different place than Fred did. Angel was a young activist in New York City. She knows confrontation, so I asked her how she managed to overcome the year and anger that can come with that. She told me a story about what it was like to return to New York after years of practice in California. I got off at Penn Station, as one as one does, and I left the relative space of being on the train and I entered into the sea of people that is the life of New York. And in that moment, like I felt this release of like, oh so good. And it became super clear to me in that moment that what happens in that space of confrontation is you can see it as confrontation with all of these other people, but if you're open to it, you recognize that it's actually what it is as a conference tation or a meeting with yourself. Hmm. And when it's a meeting with yourself, then all of it is profound. Every single person, every single person is a meeting with yourself like velcro, right, it's like if there's nothing to rub, it just all like smooths by. But if you've got a little like stickiness there, it's like a little you know, then people's hooks get on that your that those fuzzy like gnarly places in you, and so then it's an opportunity instead of you know, you're in my way, you get right. It wasn't that. It was it was this like, oh yeah, oh there, I am, oh right, it's like and and that that was very very clear. Remember you once described sitting meditation as a kind of curiosity, and that really struck me. I remember right after you profound a profound curiosity. I remember sitting after that at this retreat with that in my head, and it was kind of hot and there was a like a beat of sweat was just down my face, and I was really annoyed by it. And it was this embodiment of something that I felt like, I think I know what she's talking about, what it means to just sit and be curious as opposed to constantly trying to manage and control. But but again I wonder, I wonder, like, okay, so I just I say people to people in the podcast, all right, everyone being curious, domag and control, thank you, goodnight? And then what keeps people from going off and doing that? In other words, how does one it's one thing to know something and a different thing to live it and embody it. How do you cross that gap? I think you, I mean, I think that's where practice comes in, right, we practice our way into contact with reality, a more truer reality, until it is familiar enough to us that we recognize the other thing is false, so that a bead of sweat is just a bead of sweat. It doesn't have to be an annoyance. It could first just be a feeling. Angel practices meditation in the neighborhood. Fred helped kids get there by showing them how to slow down and get quiet. There were long pauses on the show and moments when Fred would ask us to stop and reflect on a song or an image or just breathe. That kind of slowing down becomes really useful when we're hurt or overwhelmed, when someone makes us angry, that's when we really need to understand our motions to be able to get space from them. My practice is having the space right, carving the space out, and I mean just is a monumental feat in a world that is like constantly moving, and it moves maybe I would say about three four times as fast as it did when I was younger and entered into this practice. Just the mental commitment to carve that kind of space out in a in a society that's so much about doing to say, like I'm not gonna actually be doing anything. I'm not going to be accomplished anything or producing anything. And I think as a as a black person in particular, it frees me from the notion that I am defined by what I'm producing and for people that were brought to this land to to produce and have in so many ways organized ourselves and many of the campaigns organized for us by our leaders no shame or blame, but have been organized around our our our value in relationship to producing things. Uh. And I'm fond of saying these days. You know, I'm like, get us jobs, Like I mean, we have worked all we have, need to work for the next We don't. You know, we don't. You don't need to teach us how to work job skills. That's it, Like, that's a that's an oxy moron. Like our evidence of our job skills is this country. That's the man. They're not ready for this one, they're not ready for this conversation. So um. And so what I saw is these very particular opportunities to be a fugitive from this construct. So I think it's really it's it's really profound that just the act of the choosing of the silence, and and I get to defy some things. And I think what we're talking about is defying. Yes, we are talking about defying, I mean, and that is the thing I mean, they're Defiance is a really great word to bring into this conversation because I feel like when I'm talking about the power of someone representing love in the way that Fred Rogers represented it, and the way that that love, the way Fred Rogers said to kids, you matter in a way that maybe no one else in that kid's life was telling them. It's tempting to think of that as a kind of affirmation and a kind of and that's what's that's what's made fun of when we make fun of Fred Rogers. But the more I think about it, the more I think of it as an act of denial, an act of resistance, denying this what he saw encroaching on kids and what then proceeded to over the next because he started in nine, so the world was similar in some ways but wildly different in other ways, and that he wanted to deny this. What he saw was this encroaching idea that your value was only based on how how much you please people, or how much people like you or how much money you earn, or if you could ap them all up, you can earn a lot of money. Then people are pleased and they like you maybe get that all together. But really, what Fred Rogers was talking about, seen through certain lends, was a kind of resistance to the to the momentum of our culture. And that's where I think of him as like an incredibly strong person. No. I think that his his his active resistance was fairly um demonstrated and strong and persistent and you know all of the things that make a warrior a warrior, right, Like not a war monger, not a soldier, right, but a warrior. What is that difference? Um, I think of soldiers is following instructions, you know. I think as I think of warriors in the heroic sense of warrior, as people that are charged, right, They're charged with a cause. I think the power and the potency of him, like any true teacher of wisdom, is that he he was talking to you each and every single time. And maybe he would turn his attention and he would talk to Mr mcpheeley or you know whoever else or you know, um, but there were those times when he turned directly to the camera and he spoke to you, he spoke to me, and so that held ness, especially for those of us that were made to feel as if the society wasn't constructed for our sense of belonging unless we vied for that belonging, unless we quote unquote earned that belonging to have someone turned to you directly you and say, just as you are, your loved, just as you are, exactly as you are in this moment, not another moment, not a moment to come, not a promised moment. Right even even our religions were selling us on a promised moment to come one day, and he was saying, no, right now, like right this particular moment, which I think of, as you know, as Howard Thurman would say, is like the religion of Jesus, not the religion about Jesus right doing the work of Jesus. That was to like hold love right there in the space. And you know, when we say this word love, people are probably turning to their warm fuzzy feelings and looking for that. And I'm not talking about the warm fuzzy feelings. And if it generated warm fuzzy feelings for you, great, but I think what it generated from me is space, right, it's the space. It was the space to be me. I didn't look at Fred Rogerson go oh, my god, warm and fuzzy. I love him, you know. In fact, I didn't think much about him, and I think that that is the most profound love is it to make me think about him and how I felt about him. It made me think about how it felt about me. How do you feel about you? What is your value? How do you even know? Above my desk at home, where I write this, I have a small reminder that says you are enough. I look at it all the time, not because I believe it, but because I actually don't. I mean, I am enough for what, for you, for the world, for me. In my forty or five years, I've had a lot of experiences, but maybe the most defining one is the experience of being shown in myrriad ways that I'm not enough, that my life doesn't matter. Many people have had this same experience. My mother and I were homeless for a time, often hungry. I was violently sexually assaulted at the age of seven, and it wouldn't be the last time I was called racial slurs by classmates and even occasionally by teachers. I grew up to watch people who looked like me beat and shot on television while unarmed, only to have the justice system decide time and time and time again that no wrong had been committed in the eyes of the law. I've looked down the barrel of guns just because people thought my mother and I didn't belong in the neighborhood that we lived in. Am I enough? Do I have value? Does my life really matter? I can tell myself that it does, But what does it take for me to believe it? Of course, not believing that I am enough? It's not just a personal problem. It's a collective one, because how can I believe in your value if I don't even believe in my own In this life, people like me and maybe like you, we've had to find our own value, our own worth. And one voice, like the voice of Fred Rogers telling me that I am enough is powerful and it is beautiful, and I want to believe it. I love believing it. But his voice alone is not enough to undo an entire history. I wish it was, but it's not. But his example, the way he lived now, that has impact, the way Reverend Angel lives, that has impact the people in your lives that you've called to tell us about that has impact. Fred Rogers lived his life in service to something greater than himself. Let's call it love, and not warm feelings. I like you a lot. Love, but love in the way that Ashley defines it as action, as accountability, Love in the way that Reverend Angel defines it as space. Space to see others, to understand others. This was not his only devotion, but it seemed to be his primary devotion, and I don't think he could have done this work without it. Fred was devoted and disciplined. He swam every morning, He rose early and studied and prayed and meditated on how he would be an active force for good every day. A producer for his Showow told us that each time he entered the TV studio he uttered a small prayer, Dear God, lets some part of this be yours. He famously made sure that every one of the hundreds of letters he received each week was thoughtfully answered. His dedication was to loving us, accepting us, showing up for us every day. For nine episodes forty years. Through the television neighborhood he created, he showed us how to love like that too. That was Fred Rogers way of making the world better? So what is yours? There is no one sentence I can say, or that Fred Rogers can say that solves all of our problems. Our freedom, our love for ourselves, our care for one another does not come overnight. It is something we build bit by bit, one action at a time, maybe even one moment at a time. But I do not have doubt. I believe in your ability to imagine and live something better than this because I'm learning to do it myself. I'm proud of you. I'm grateful to you, and I love you. Here's the sweater going into the closet. Here's the jacket going on. Me hmm. There'll be the night time and then I'll come the new day, and that's when you and I will be together again. Thank you for listening to Finding Fred. Our show is produced by Transmitter Media. The team is Dan O'Donnell, Jordan Bailey, and Maddie Foley. Our editor is Sarah Nicks. The executive producer for Transmitter Media is Gretta Cohne. Executive producers at Fatherly are Simon Isaac's and Andrew Berman. Thanks to the team at I Heart Media. Special thanks to all of our guests. Many thanks also to Fred Rogers Productions to show Negri into the studio. Engineers at You See Berkeley. Extra special thanks to Tim lie Barger who runs the site neighborhood archive dot com. It's a listing of every song, every episode, every character on Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. It's been an amazing resource for our team. Rick Kwan makes the show sound beautiful. Theme music is by Blue Dot Sessions and interstitial music by Alison Layton Brown. That's it for our show. You can come back and listen to all of our episodes and tell your friends to do the same. I'm Carvil Wallace. Thank you for listening.