Teach the children. We don't matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. Attention is the beginning of devotion — without devotion there is nothing. Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report.

An openness — an empathy — was necessary if the attention was to matter. Such openness and empathy my mother had in abundance, and shared with me, although she had received it from no one.