I don’t believe in zombies.
Sparkly vampires.
The Loch Ness Monster.
Big Foot.
I do believe in something though. I know there’s more out there than my eyes can see or my outer ear can hear. I feel it sometimes. I sense it. Do you?
It.
That which inhabits an invisible dimension.
The unknown.
The unseen.
Some people never sense it. Others of us have what I think of as an extrareceptive ear. A greater capacity to relate to the energy around us. The energies from living people, from formerly living people. From a million unseen sources that we can’t name but know exist.
Culture plays a role. In some parts of the world, kids are raised believing, and so they listen more openly. My husband Eric grew up in the Caribbean. Jumbies — ghosts, spirits — were an accepted and expected part of life. Santeria, voodoo, and other tropical practices exist for a reason. People in the islands believe and are looking for a way to better communicate with and harness the power of the unseen. One of his three kids has “it,” and his visits from what he believes are ghosts knock him sideways occasionally.
I’ve got some sort of “it.” I could feel what my husband called jumbies at our rainforest house on St. Croix. But the more common manifestation for me, is through being a bit of an empath. You know, like Deanna Troi in the purple jumpsuit on Star Trek: Next Generation. That kind of empath. I’ve always known I could change the air around me, for instance, with what I project. Whether chemically or by my thoughts, when in person, I can get all the way through to people if I try hard enough to project my energy outward, without saying a word.
Yeah, yeah, I know. You think this is crap. But ask people that know me. This little skill makes me quite effective in interpersonal situations, when I am focused. People understand me, latch onto me, grab hold of the energy I put toward them. It makes me a heck of an investigator and executive coach, two of the things I do professionally. I am a rather good public speaker — large groups, yes, I can handle them, but in small groups I’m dynamite. Get me close enough to establish multiple one -on-one “connections,” and I can make something happen, when I want to, when I put myself into it. I don’t always want to, though. It takes a lot out of me. And when I knowingly open my channel, the drain on my resources from needy folks can almost incapacitate me. I’ve learned to protect myself and only make it available when I choose to do so.
The closer I am, emotionally, to a person, the more powerful this force can be. I can even “connect” from longer distances with those to whom I am closest. And of course the more the other person is in touch with the unseen, the greater the energy we can pass between us.
My empathic, Caribbean-bred husband thus can suck me into a black hole by consuming my energy through this channel/connection. I think my husband’s similarity to me in this regard was one of the things that drew us together. But there have been tough times when he needed me that I let him take “it,” and I felt like a cosmic vacuum cleaner sucked all the light out of me. He can leave me physically ill.
Other times, the channel between us receives information. Once, he was in a horrific bike wreck. I was 10 miles away, cooking dinner up at Estate Annaly on St. Croix. Suddenly, I cried out from the blunt force of a traumatic energy that overcame me. It literally sent me down on my knees with my hand around my throat. I grabbed my car keys off the counter, and without even getting my purse, I sprinted to my truck, and drove at breakneck speed toward “Town.” I had no idea where he was. Fifteen minutes later, when I was out of the rain forest and back into cell reception, my phone rang. I couldn’t understand him, but it was Eric. Finally he was able to speak clearly enough for me to realize he had a head-on collision with a car and was refusing medical treatment. It turned out that he had woken with no memory of who he was, but kept saying he needed Pamela. I wondered if the jumbie house — Annaly — had anything to do with my stunning receptivity that night.
Another time, after we moved to Houston, we were in a disagreement while I was traveling. I decided to a) cut my energy off from him and b) come back to Houston one day early. As soon as I decided, from 150 miles away, that I was done letting him “feel” me, he called, scared and angry, asking why I had done it. When I reached the outskirts of Baytown thirty minutes from home, I relented. I mustered my energy and sent it out to him. “I’m here, I love you.” Ten minutes later the phone rang. It was my husband asking if I was home, because he “felt me.”
If humans have this much energy to tap into the unseen with each other, doesn’t it stand to reason that we can feel/hear/sense the other unseen energies around us? And that all of this force is interconnected and constant? Aren’t some auras just so powerful that through their force and circumstances, they can’t be easily erased? I don’t think there are bajillions of undead spirits clamoring for me to hear them, but I know some spirits outlast their physical bodies. What about animals? Other life forces? They’re out there. I know they are. Just because I can’t see them to name them, doesn’t make their presence less tangible.
And how do you explain some people’s greater intuition about things — spacial relations and connections to the energy emanating from objects? I’ve already told you I think that I am attuned, but my inner ear works best on living (and maybe formerly living) things. My daughter Suz has an inner ear too, but it functions differently than mine (and neither her father nor my son have an inner ear at all, by the way, nor, to our knowledge, do my husband’s two other offspring). Suz has a tremendous relationship to animals and objects. We jokingly call her the Dog Whisperer, but it is true. I think many of us can accept that some people have a different way of hearing and relating to animals.
Her other skill is stranger, though. Suz just knows where things are. Now, the first few times she knew without looking where I had left, for instance, the camera (“In the upstairs closet on the top right shelf, Mom” — DUH!) I attributed it to nosiness. Surely she had just pawed through the closet and run across it? But as she got older and could talk about it, we noticed she knew where things were immediately when we asked, and her only explanation was “I just know.” She can’t explain it. We can’t explain it. We know she keeps a good visual inventory of her surroundings. She’d make an excellent veterinarian or detective. But it transcends observation into the realm of the relational energy stored in objects, I believe, and Eric believes, too. If we lose something, we ask her. If it’s findable, she knows where it is. If she says it’s gone, she’s right.
So, yeah, that’s what I believe. That’s there’s more out there than just what we see. And I put it in my books.
So there.