First Sense

We learn to feel as our first sense before all others—in our mother's womb, we feel before we see. And that ability to touch and be touched—to feel a physical connection with another—has profound, unconscious effects.

Perhaps seeing the Veiled wasn't really just about seeing after all. August considered this possibility as she cradled Greta with her eyes closed, feeling the girl's being moving and pulsing with life under her touch.

When Sylvia performed the healing art of reiki, she did not use her eyes. She used other senses. She used movement. And she also used touch.

August didn't know how to perform reiki—they had never gotten that far in her meetings with Sylvia—but she remembered Sylvia saying how she imagined that August's gift of the Veiled was connected to what reiki practitioners did in some way.