heted
or did her beautiful embroidery work. So I pictured older people, most
of them with white hair like my grandparents, all with kindly faces,
gathered in silent assembly, heads bent slightly forward, waiting to be
moved. It never occurred to me that young people, boys and girls of my
age and even younger, might be present and participating.

As the word "spirit" meant nothing definite to me, I could have no idea
of just what would move the Quakers, but I had a sense that it would be
something within them, perhaps like the stirrings that sometimes moved
me, and I may have had a vague notion that this something within them
was somehow related to what people called God. I never thought to ask
what the Quakers might do after they were moved.

Had I been invited in those days to attend a Friends meeting for worship
I would have gladly gone. I would have gone because my picturings had
given me good feelings about the Quakers. I would have gone because,
young though I was, I liked to be silent now and again. Sometimes my
best friend and I would sit quietly together, happy that we were
together but not wanting to talk. Sometimes I would go off by myself on
walks to look at the wonders of nature, to think my own thoughts, to
dream, to feel something stirring in me for which I had no name. Or I
might withdraw for a time from the activities of the boys and girls and
sit on the porch of our house, my outward eyes watching them at play, my
inward eyes turned to an inner life that was as real to me, and
sometimes more wonderful than my life with the group.

Certain experiences I had when alone, certain experiences I had with my
young friends, attitudes and feelings that would suddenly arise in me at
any time or place--these made up the mainstream of my religious life.
Such religion as I had was life-centered, not book-centered, not
church-centered. It arose from the well of life within me, and within my
friends and parents. It arose from the well of life within nature and
the human world. It consisted in my response to flowers, trees, birds,
snow, the smell of the earth after a spring rain, sunsets and the starry
sky. It consisted in my devotion to pet rabbits and dogs, and to some
interest or project that caught my imagination.

I had been taught several formal prayers. One of these I said every
night, regularly, before getting into bed. But I am thinking of the
unformed prayers that welled up in me whenever I had need of the