Her immediate family lived in the small town of Keeler, where her father owned a bank and her mother ran a proper house household and made sure that her three children were exposed to the important cultural refinements. Fortunately for Maureen these included music lessons, she took to the pen up piano avidly sensing its grandeur, and its potential for taking her beyond the petty minded atmosphere of small town preoccupations. In addition, she was nourished by her frequent visits to her grandparents farm with the sod roofed house, and by her solitary forays into the prairie, where she would sit absolutely still for hours at a time infused with a feeling of intimacy with every blade of grass, every breeze. It's often these childhood experiences of nature which helped you to go As to form our faith mind. We can sometimes remember very specific episodes, where we experienced oneness with things. And these these experiences really help in getting us on the mat setting. A little bit from the other book, better childhood. This is a little bit more here. When I was a very small girl, my mother said, I always needed time to just go and sit and be quiet. Our house was a very lively place. Always many people there visitors from all over many things going on. She said, I used to take a pail of cold pancakes away for the day, and go and sit somewhere quietly. I always seem to need that. At one point, I went and visited a little store and found a tiny Buddha and some incense. And I used to sit in my room with them. I must have been seven or eight. This was always a need in me a feeling that you had to every so often shut down everything just be in touch. I always went outside somewhere to a hill where there was a wind or to a swamp that had tall grasses and would sit and listen to critic to crickets and listen to birds and shut down or mental activity. She also has a little bit to say about who her grandfather here. My grandfather was a wonderful teacher, just in the way that he conducted his life. He didn't know anything about Buddhism, I'm sure. But I really feel he was a Buddhist innately. He behaved in a way that was very respectful of every living thing of every human being. He came in touch with. He never went to church, and he was a professed agnostic. Sometimes when he got really strong about it, he said he was an atheist. But he practiced a wonderful way of life. When people come to his house, he offered them whatever he had, if they needed something and he saw they needed it. He gave without any thought of return. He treated his animals and everything on his farm with the most wonderful consideration love even he was my first teacher. And I often speak about them in my talks. Really, when we get down to it, it's it's what we do that really counts not what we say or what we we profess to believe in.