While writing about spirits and elementals, I’ve been moved to revamp the blog. I have been to wild places on the themes page but have arrived back where I began, with a modification to the original design. I’m opting for less clutter so it has a misty sidebar. Please let me know if it gets your approval (or not).
In the process, I’ve changed the name to ‘Ancestral Voices’. I found ‘Writing Historical Fiction’ too constricting, corsetting me into writing about writing, specifically, about writing history. I’d like to be free of that. Thinking about it, the word ‘history’ denotes something dead and gone whereas ‘the past’ – well, that’s where we all live when we’re not in the future.
And that’s coming to the crux of it really. I want to convey the now-ness, the presence of the past in its eternal nature. I do not believe humans were different back then. What we have in common with just anybody who ever lived is the very fact of being human, of being alive, of having hopes, dreams, lusts, disappointments. And so I’m cutting loose from the concept of history, getting out of the straightjacket of a tightly themed blog, and allowing myself to be me.
So expect changes here. There’s as much likelihood of a post on making jam, or knitting in fairisle, or bringing in the potato harvest, or the horrors of fracking, or the government’s determination to kill off herbalism, as on the wonders of sacred geometry and Iron Age hillforts. It could be any of those things, none of them, other things, but what all future posts will have in common is the past, for I believe we have much to learn from the past and, if we listen in silence, sometimes we hear the voices of ancestors.
The name, by the way, is derived from Owen Barfield. See the ‘About this site’ page.
cherylhoweld
2 Oct 2013This is a time of connecting with our ancestors and to open History out into the broader vision seems absolutely right to me.