It is 5 p.m. on Sunday afternoon. The day’s last rays of sunshine are streaming through my apartment windows. It looks like it was a lovely day, but I can’t really know for sure because I’ve been sitting in the same spot for hours, plugging away at the computer. You see, the design of my blog had been bothering me lately. It seemed a little dog-eared to me, a bit behind the times. I kept telling myself that it was just me, that I get tired of it because I look at it so much but that my readers are not tired of the way it looks. I don’t know who I thought I was kidding; when I get something rattling around in my brain, well, it usually won’t go away until I do something about it.
I finally just gave up and dug in. I started the revisions yesterday, stayed up until 6 a.m. this morning, slept for about five hours, and then got up and hit it again. Just ten minutes ago, I put the finishing touches on my new blog design. This new theme is crisp and clean and easy to read. I am SO pleased with the way it turned out. You may notice that I also chose new artwork for the header. The previous design featured a Hubble Space Telescope image of a light echo illuminating the dust around the Supergiant Star V838 Monocerotis. To me it looked like a giant donut, which was a particularly appropriate image when I began blogging, as it was symbolic of how I felt – like a donut that is solid on the outside but empty on the inside, yet bursting with energy to DO something in this life.
Two short years later, my life has changed dramatically. Gone is my soul searching. I no longer question who I am, why I am here, or what I am supposed to be doing with my life. Now I know I was put on this earth to travel, write, photograph the beauty of the world, and help others along the way. Every day of my life, I get to do what makes me joyful. The writing jobs are beginning to flow in, as are web design projects. An agent wants to read my book, a gallery on the Outer Banks of North Carolina is going to have a showing of my photography next fall, and a shop in Maine will be selling my photos beginning next spring. So, a symbolic donut hole is no longer an appropriate image for my masthead. Instead, I chose a design that features another space photograph, this one showing the sun bursting through the clouds and surrounded by the glow of the Aurora Borealis. To me, this new photo perfectly represents the journey I have been on for the past two years. It says anything is possible.
Dear readers, I hope you like the new design as well. And if I haven’t said it lately, thank you for coming back time and time again to read what spills out of my mind onto the page. I am grateful for each and every one of you.
I like the new design but maybe a thought or a challenge: as a photographer why not have the banner be one of your favourite or most meaningful photographs?