The Naming Ceremony

Here I am, naming what is quite possibly a public journal of sorts, and the best I can do for a name is to rephrase the name of one of my old journals from junior high. I can't decide if this is a good thing or an omen of ill portent...

They say the one who names a thing has power over it. I think I first encountered the idea in Eragon. The thing is, we tend to define ourselves by our names. You walk up to someone and say, "In the most fundamental sense, who are you?" and most of them will say "Um, Alex?" "I'm...Chelsea?" "My name is Adam, if that's what you're looking for." Or if they're religious, "I'm a Christian." "I'm a Jew." I wave that off and tell them, "Those are only definitions. That's not who you are. You are yourself." But then I remember these things for later. It's fascinating how what I consider an absolute, others argue is baseless.

Names aren't absolute. People can change their names. When women get married, they take on their husbands' family names (usually, but not always). My mom changed her first name. I think Tolkien's essay on Elvish naming customs (which I believe is in volume XII of the Histories of Middle Earth) has the best approach to it: names are prophecies. The mother-name is the prophecy, the father-name the fact.

That's one of the sorrier aspects of European names: because they are so mutated from the root words, knowing the meanings of our names is a matter of possessing some esoteric knowledge that may or may not have been considered by our parents. My grandparents weren't paying all that much attention when they strung together for my mother "Bitter Avenger"! They were naming their daughter after Mary, Mother of God, and Maria, a relative. None of them knew a lick of Hebrew to say, "Oh, that means bitter," nor do I think it would matter, judging by the number of Mary's down through the years.

The name of this blog, "Follow the Wind," has a deep meaning. But I think I'll leave that for another time.