What's in a Name?

With time running out on my New Year's resolution for 2015, to start blogging, my son Quentin and his fiancée Mary helped set up this blog as their Christmas gift to me, less than a week away from the new year.  What did I want to call the blog, they asked me? For inspiration in making this decision I turned to my commonplace book. 

Commonplace books, which have been used for centuries (Marcus Aurelius apparently kept one) are simply personal compilations of quotes and notes and thoughts, perhaps pictures and images too.  I started mine in back in 1976, in an undistinguished blank book I picked up at the Dartmouth Bookstore in Hanover, New Hampshire. Although some people use their commonplace books for their own words and thoughts, I use mine mostly for quotes and passages from my reading, both poetry and prose, sometimes written in longhand, sometimes typed and pasted in its pages, supplemented with articles tucked into the front and back covers. Forty years later, my Dartmouth book is a treasure whose precious contents I have read and reread many times over.

Leafing through my book, I scribbled down ideas on scratch paper, only to reject them, until I came upon a passage from Thoreau's Walden that I had not read in a long time:

Still grows the vivacious lilac a generation after the door and lintel and
the sill are gone, unfolding its sweet-scented flowers each spring. . . 

I learned to love lilacs in Vermont as a child, and have always missed them terribly over the years since moving south. My husband and I were fortunate to be in Vermont this very year during lilac season, and I was enchanted anew with their "sweet-scented" aroma, their purple and white flowers. We even visited Walden Pond this summer together for the first time. Thoreau's meditative words on time and transience, embodied in the lilac itself and energized by the word vivacious, resonated with me. The next thing I knew Quentin and I were scanning the web for images of lilacs to use on the title page.  

I also liked the idea of a pithy quote underneath the blog's title, and I knew immediately what I wanted, a quote from Muriel Rukeyser that I have committed to memory:

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.

This, too, I had recorded in my commonplace book, and to make sure I had remembered it correctly (I had, as it turned out) I searched again through the book until I found the place I had written it down. According to Wikipedia -- and I have no qualms about relying on Wiki for this sort of thing -- Rukeyser was "an American poet and political activist, best known for her poems about equality, feminism, social justice, and Judaism." All quite auspicious as far as I am concerned. 

So here I start, thinking about the lilacs of New England on a Christmas night in North Carolina, listening to the wind as it gently moves the blossoming flowers and the heart-shaped leaves.