Month: November 2012

I hear voices.  And before you ask-no, I’m neither a medium nor crazy!  I’m also not that kid in the movie, The Sixth Sense.  I don’t see dead people and am very glad for that.  I prefer to keep a healthy distance from me and those who have crossed.

When I say I hear voices, I mean that I hear my own subconscious.  I think we all have that particular inner voice.  It’s always there.  Sometimes, we choose to ignore it and sometimes we choose to embrace it (it depends on the message, doesn’t it?).  Sometimes, we wish it would just go away (when we don’t like what we hear).  My voice is called Mabel, has a Southern accent and tells it like it is (hey, I’m an author-what did you expect?  My characters come from my imagination, as does my inner voice).

But before you start sending me the names of some really good psychologists or home remedies to combat my “issues,” I have to tell you that “my voice” is my compass.  It’s my roadmap.  My intuition.  I owe getting out of a lot of close calls to that inner voice yelling at me in her Southern drawl: “Run the other way, lady!”.

Sometimes, I may not like Mabel  because she tells me to do the hard thing, the unpopular thing but always, always the right thing.

So the next time you are stuck in traffic and see a woman driving the car next to yours, talking to herself in a very animated way and she doesn’t appear to be on her blue tooth and no one else is sitting in the car with her, don’t worry.  It may very well be me having an argument with Mabel.  She can be very stubborn sometimes!

Erin

Last night, I sat with my daughter and traced our hands onto a sheet of paper with different color crayons.  After we were done, what was left was an array of rainbow colored fingers, both big and small.  We then counted them up: at least 30 hands with 300 fingers, all overlapping each other on a single piece of paper.  It gave me pause to think for a moment.  In the last few days, I’ve gotten emails, text messages and word of mouth announcements from friends, family, non-profit organizations, church groups, soccer leagues and local retail stores, reaching out to everyone in the area, calling for any assistance that anyone could provide towards the relief efforts of Hurricane Sandy;  so many drop-off points, so many collections, so many voices calling out for help!

All done by caring hands; hands that can slice an onion and make a hot meal; hands that can pick up cartons of water and piles of blankets then load it all up onto the bed of a pick-up truck; hands placed on a steering wheel of a car to drive it to those in need; hands that can hold a flashlight to lead someone out of darkness and hands that can reach into a pocketbook or a pant pocket and donate money.

Most importantly, those hands, the ones my daughter and I traced onto a single piece of paper-in hues of purple, pink, blue, brown, red and yellow, can reach out to someone in pain and give them a hug.  Those same hands can clasp together in prayer for those who really need them answered.   Those hands can make a whole lot of a difference in the world.

What started out as a fun activity to keep a child busy from yet another stormy day in New York City, where snow falls and icicles form on trees still covered with leaves, turned out to be a life lesson for me.  That single piece of paper now hangs up on my refrigerator door, staring at me, challenging me to do my part.  It’s a lesson I intend to continually learn, even after the memories of this terrible tragedy will have faded.

Erin