I was unaware that there was a word to describe this, but there is, Hiraeth It’s the feeling of homesickness and nostalgia that overwhelms me at times. The feeling pulls deeply, leaves me sad, seems to tug at memories and reveals small snapshots that can’t be made sense of. It’s confusing. It’s a feeling of displacement, not belonging, a yearning for another place.
It’s also believed that it could be a longing to be where your spirit lives. That place might not be a physical location, but nostalgic, not a place but a time, a memory. Or maybe it’s an imaginary place, a place visited in dreams and daydreams.
Whatever it is, it’s worth sitting with and trying to understand, there has to be some rationale for a pining heart. I believe it’s a longing of the soul, whether for an imaginary or real place or time, I don’t know but I do think it’s a lost soul because it’s such a deep pull.
Lost souls are restless, searching, hoping. Mine is one of them. So it’s no surprise that I experience intense feelings of nostalgia and longing. I’ve come to understand mine as a sense of being an observer, sitting alongside or above situations, looking on or down, uninvolved, detached. Sometimes it feels like slow motion, a lot of the time things seem so irrelevant and trivial.
Often I daydream, take myself elsewhere, fade away from a scene, get lost in imagination, think about things that embrace me. Perhaps that’s part of a creative mind, my mind is very busy, it doesn’t switch off, it inquires, searches, questions pose more questions and my mind searches through images for answers.
So there it is, Hiraeth, a strange sounding word to describe my feelings of homesickness and nostalgia.