I ran across this passage in Women Who Run With the Wolves the other day:

The most important thing is to hold on, hold out, for your creative life, for your solitude, for your time to be and do, for your very life; hold on, for the promise from the wild nature is this: after winter, spring always comes.

For me, it’s autumn.

I shake my feathers and the dust of the summer doldrums shifts away from them. Soon I’ll step into the cool, crisp waters of Fall and it will be washed away completely. I’ll slap my wings into the bath of autumn winds, dip my head, ruffle my feathers, and be off, on the wing again.

Summer has always been a trial for me. You know that Seasonal Affective Disorder thing? I always knew there was a summertime version of it, long before science tumbled to the fact. Every year, starting about late spring, I’d feel myself sinking. By full summer, I’d be slogging along through hot molasses. Then the seasons turned again and I’d be filled with incredible new energy that lasted through the winter and into early spring. I have always started new novels in the fall. That’s when they burgeoned inside me most naturally.

This year we had a mild summer, but the doldrums came anyway. It’s been a difficult year in other ways and I’ve been so exhausted I have hardly had time for that creative life. I thought many times of quitting altogether—but hey, anyone who’s known me long knows I’ve been down that path before. I spent most of the year doing revisions rather than creating new works. That weighed me down, too. But the spark always refuses to die, no matter how convinced I am that this time it will finally be extinguished. No matter how desperate I feel, how pushed into the earth I feel, that little light remains—and probably will until my bones are pushed into the earth.

I don’t yet know for sure that things will be okay, but I trust that little light. And I’m rising again. The wind may be crisp and cold, but once more it promises sure flight.

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