Thursday, December 18, 2008

“There’s magic all around us…”

Stevie Nicks summed it up quite nicely with those words. I’m sure if you opened your mind to it you can pinpoint a mystical experience you couldn’t quite explain.

Maybe you had a dog that seemed to know what you were thinking just by looking at him.
Maybe you remembered an old friend and that moment the phone rang. On the other end of the line was the person you were just thinking about.
Maybe you had a terrible feeling about a trip, so you canceled it. Then the brakes on your car went out.
Or maybe you had a dream that came true.

Whatever your personal beliefs, everyone has had some strange experience they couldn’t quite put their finger on. Call it cosmic, call it paranormal, call it spiritual, but it happens all the time.

For me it all started with a penny.

I was on the phone with my mother one morning when she asked me what was new. “You know, it’s the strangest thing. I keep finding pennies everywhere, in the strangest places.” It was true. The garden, in my napkin drawer, on a bench I sat on. Just odd places you wouldn’t expect to find a penny. My uncle had recently passed and my mother said, “You know what those are. They’re pennies from Heaven. Check the dates, I bet you’ll find some correlation.”

I did. And she was right. The dates might have signified anything from the year I got married to the year I was born.

From then on if a penny approached me (and I had rules--it couldn’t just be in a parking lot or at the Piggly Wiggly) it went into the penny jar.

That little experience became a common thread throughout my first novel. My protagonist, Stacy Justice, gets hit in the head with a penny from her spirit guide, sparking the entire plot.

I’ve had many otherworldly experiences, but none quite so satisfying, or tangible, as that.

What’s your story?

“Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night…”
-Bruce Springsteen

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