Winter Solstice 2024
I am always contemplative this time of year. The weather has much to do with my creative mood and the types of musings that spur my imagination.
Winters during my childhood in New Jersey were cold, snowy, brutal to walk to school in, but terrific for sled-riding and ice-skating. My treasured memories of those years form the basis for my yearning to reclaim from those visions the building blocks of my tableaux, physical as well as literary.
Little did I realize, after moving to Sacramento, California in January 1979, how essential are the changes of seasons for my inventive mind. I consequently learned to appreciate seasons — even more — because this region has but two of them: wet and dry. Initially, for about a decade, my creativity was expressed through painting and sewing. My writing self didn’t emerge until after the birth of my first child.
I was in the process of changing inwardly, growing, adjusting, perhaps adapting — to the stark lack of the pattern of those 4 cyclical times-of-year. The transformation that Camille Richarde undergoes in THE DAWN is a fairly accurate representation of the personal and professional paths that I, Debra, was not only following, but forging as I plowed furrows to the future.
Upon moving into my Dream House in Placer County, in 2020, I began to experience much more marked seasons, almost four of them.
There’s a definite winter, a definite summer, a brief spring, and a faint, all-too-brief touch of autumn, which happens to be my favorite time of year. Fall is shorted, and it’s short. Summer, and its dry heat, usually run straight through that calendar, from May till November. It can feel eternal!
Winter then descends, sometimes quickly. The weather is cold, wet, damp and dank, and the days are short. I live in the forest where the sunlight axe falls sharply, each afternoon, long before the winter solstice arrives to announce it’s the shortest day of the year!
Rather than undergo a diminishment of my artistic sensibilities, I am blessed by a deeper sense of artistry. My Muse more than makes up for the paucity of external illumination by granting to me an instinctive desire to find radiance in even the most somber of settings.
That desire is optimistic aspiration. It’s my proper motivation, reaching toward the future.
The past four years in America have borne witness to human horrors and unspeakable tragedies. Those years thereby galvanized the will of the American people to reclaim their nation from the pompous mountebanks in the Ruling Class who didn’t rule, but parasitically fed off of We The People — for decades.
With the recent autumnal turning of that tide, away from the final decline of America, I look back upon those many years. I put into perspective what I’d thought I was seeing, and what I was actually seeing. Post 9/11, I’d been staunchly unwilling to accept the practiced lies of politicians that my friends, work associates and acquaintances swallowed, some very readily — because, to me, “things” did not feel right.
Something was always off. The numbers didn’t add up. The reasons given for many occurrences happening, or not happening, didn’t pass the smell test. I thought the justifications, sound-bite explanations, focus-grouped rationalizations and rank routine excuses were taking on a foul odor, regardless of how many odor-eaters the Media Puppets put out for the great unwashed in America.
I cast a highly suspicious eye on the entire circus of political gamesmanship in America — until the fall of 2008.
In many ways, that autumn, was, indeed, a fall, of many cherished traditions in America. My perceptions, at the time, supremely motivated me to protect and preserve those traditions, even more, for my family, and for myself — as I began to pen THE DAWN. I’d pieced together a very confusing puzzle, a puzzle with many missing pieces.
I’m a master at putting together puzzles, from way back. My 2nd grade class was for gifted students, and I shone among them. Picture, if you will, a 7-year-old:
— Writing a report on the brass section of an orchestra, with accompanying drawings. I was particularly fascinated by the French horn.
— Preparing a research project on Yugoslavia and Marshal Tito (complete with self-made map and cover).
— Being assigned a project on the state flowers of Utah and New Mexico and doing the artwork, using tempera paint and scrunched up crepe paper. I wore the enormous 2-sided placard, like a sandwich sign, as I marched across the stage in the auditorium in my elementary school presentation for Flag Day. The Sego Lily was on the front, the Yucca on the back.
That school year was, for me, the opening of a creative and analytic world that has only expanded with the passage of time. The following summer, my family-of-origin relocated to a different part of New Jersey, moving from Bergen County to Passaic County. I was then enrolled in a very different type of school, with lower academic demands. I was so advanced in my knowledge of many subjects in my third grade class, that I was designated by the teacher to be a Helper to other students.
It’s a role that I took on willingly, with some pleasure. Some of my classmates, however, took exception to my rather unique station in their classroom. I consequently learned to become even more of an individual: the observer who chooses to stand apart, the quiet outsider who assesses the lay of the land before taking a step onto it.
The cautious side of me works hard to live in harmony with the adventurous roamer in my soul. The two impulses usually get along, but I do believe the wanderlust portion is the more dominant. The vigilant guardian is innate, but also learned, trained, honed through the crucible of experience. It’s the disciplined, trained, methodical Dutch within me.
The wayfaring warrior expresses the Scots in my blood. “Blood will tell” is an undeniable theme in my Western, The Silent Heart. It’s an equally undeniable truth of life.
I wouldn’t be where I am today were it not for the proud fighter that I was forced to become during my childhood. Yet, I always revere, respect, and grant gratitude to the analytical side of me that loves symmetry; demands calibration; craves equilibrium; and, methodically, as well as instinctively, seeks to find, or, if need be, devise, shelter and stability.
The explorer within me needs the protective, nurturing guardian to stay the course. For all I know, that sentinel needs to be needed by the voyaging pioneer. They work in tandem, and I don’t pay too much attention to either of them.
I do try to understand the most efficient motivation to get each of their mojo’s moving. Fear, doubt, uncertainty, confusion, disappointment, sorrow, and grief nearly always stop me in my tracks. Some individuals move faster under the yoke of those emotional weights. I’ve tried to make use of that sort of motivation, but I’ve always felt a sense of dishonor toward the emotion being used as a mere catalyst for action.
I believe any profound feeling must be processed, fully, before I can proceed toward fully living life, and thoroughly appreciating whatever the day, or night, has to offer me. Through such sincere impetus, I not only live, but create art.
Until I can ascertain the proper motivation to initiate an act, decision, or attitude, I cool my heels, even in winter, if I detect my mood is surly or irate. For me, the most proper motivation is to patiently persevere through hardship, and, as best I can, surrender to the fate before me, be it bliss or sorrow. I must summon up some form of forgiveness before I can trod onward, through love, to wherever my Maker intends for me to go.
That phase of prevailing over heart-ache, even heart-break, requires solitude, the tranquillity that comes from embracing your own heart.
I’ve often commented that a person cannot let go of a beloved something, or someone, until she’s fully held it. She must then let go, and allow faith in the unknown to transport her to a place, and a time, where whatever she thinks she has lost, returns to her.
In the twinkling of an eye, I’ve felt caressed by not only souvenirs, but by the rapture of love from those souvenirs, returning to me, as my ultimate reward for having said « au revoir » to those moments, and believing they’d return to me.
During the past several decades of persevering through confusion, frustration, adversity, and fears that were foisted upon me, more than authored by me, I held the fort. And I held the line. I held tight to my faith in God, country, goodness, truth, honor, and justice.
I am one of those patriotic Americans who has been mocked by traitors, cowards, and infidels. I said little in return to those pompous pagan know-it-alls who, in the end, knew nothing, and ended up with the ends they deserved.
The tales of human nature rarely change; it’s merely the telling of them that offers a new angle, or tone, or phrasing. The classics, however, never age. I wrote my novels, and my poetry, hoping to aspire to those Classics.
Clive Staples Lewis, otherwise known as C.S. Lewis was a gifted and godly writer, born in Belfast, Ireland. He was born 29 November 1899, and died 22 November 1963. I’ve not read any of his most illustrious fantasy novels (which number seven), but I did read, more than once, his The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (1936).
This book explores the allegorical treatment of love during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It’s a topic that hold endless fascination for me. I maintain that the plot of any good Western is a form of the troubadour, telling his tale as he travels on the lone prairie.
And while I do not agree with all of the philosophy of Mr. Lewis, I do esteem his poetry, and his aphorisms. This truism I find particularly true this year of our Lord 2024:
“You can't go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”