ABSTRACT

Gentleness it is not conceptual but lived; not thought but sensually experienced and demonstrated. “Gentleness,” writes Anne Dufourmantelle in her book Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living , “is not perceptible categorically, but only existentially” (38). The girls’ hands are not gentle because girls are intrinsically gentle, but rather because they gently handle the flowers. Gentleness comes about by what we do, and by what is done to us. Often, it comes about through hands. Often the gentleness of hands outwardly forms and develops an inward emotional gentleness that we call empathy. Perhaps this frequency of how gentleness manifests itself is one of the meanings of the word “often” when we read that the flowers are laid out “often from edge to edge.”