A Change in the Header

WordPress has stopped putting author bylines on blogs written by just one person. It took me weeks to notice this, and weeks more to notice that my name didn’t actually appear anywhere on the blog!

That’s a woeful absence in the blog world, so in rectifying my anonymity, I found myself reconsidering the subtitle. I am still really fond of the concept of spirits rising, but in the last three years the blog often strayed from house and, very often, far from garden.

Initially, in setting up “Her spirits rose..” I tried to fit better into the categories of house and garden. But I wrote an early post about the importance of the everyday to me, about the possibility of nurture from ordinary doings, and added the quote I love by Fiona MacCarthy: “Art is what you choose, how you arrange things, permeating and sustaining everyday life.”

Virginia Woolf says it best of course, in many forms. Through Lily Briscoe in “To the Lighthouse”: “What is the meaning of life? That was all – a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”

So now I’ve changed my header, thinking the “the art of everyday” might more accurately express what I’ve come to look for and hold most dear – “arranging things” “little daily miracles” “lifted spirits.”