“Our life is in our hands. We are the ones who help create our fate,” she told The Daily Beast. “Whatever we do, if we have a dream, we must work toward that.

"It was a miracle to watch the water swirl down the hole and then fill up again," she writes in her memoir, This Life Is in Your Hands (Harper Perennial, $15.99).

I have always been fascinated with hands and the stories they tell of their owners' lives. I've found that just as the eyes are the window to the soul, so are hands the mirror of the heart. In ...