The Ambiguous Path Home

Hiraeth; a Welsh word that has no direct English translation.

Hiraeth is a feeling with many layers. It is homesickness for a home you can't return to, or that never was and also sense of regret, along with a general sadness over the lost or departed. It's a longing for a place, for one’s homeland, a romanticized past, but unlike homesickness, hiraeth can be felt for a place one has never been to.

To feel hiraeth is to feel a deep incompleteness and recognize it as familiar.

Globalization and strife have pushed a huge diaspora of humans to every corner of the world, feeling Hiraeth. It is the longing you hear in the voices of the ones who have left their homeland long ago, a homeland which continues to remain in their hearts. A homeland, which has ceased to physically exist, maybe simply due to decades of development, done to ensure the improvement of the current occupant’s quality of life. The places they once inhabited, the people who once walked the land, all changed or replaced. The sense of incompleteness which persists even after visiting the place, a place of your past where your fond memories reside and refuse to accept the new reality. A homesickness and longing which cannot be fulfilled and magnified at times due to the death of the persons associated with the place. Hiraeth is truly a multi layered feeling.

In the present times of 2020-21 when the world disconnected, enforced physical distancing made everyone felt a deep hiraeth. The children stuck at home, elders separated from families, people in home offices, #migrant laborers, #homeless and away from their homeland, non residents who did not have a way to come back to their country and loved ones, all felt the same desperate longing.

Very often a place makes sense only with the person you associate it with. Young people working away from home, struggled with hiraeth as their parental homes were snatched of its occupants. Their hearts will heal with time, but the hiraeth they feel when they think of home will live with them forever. When you saw the migrants struggling to go back home, some even walking miles to achieve that, you recognize it’s a desperation driven by hiraeth. It was the need to be in your comforting familiar place in a very unpredictable and dangerous situation.

But unlike homesickness, #hiraeth can be felt for a place one has never been to. The places your heart believes you belong to. So many, in our times have made it their mission to go to another planet. The longing for a place and a home you may never even be able to reach in your lifetime. Whenever they reach there, will they suffer hiraeth for the old homeland?

In the years to follow maybe the #non residents will fly back, maybe the migrants will return for good to their workplaces, maybe our hearts will heal, but within the deep recesses of our hearts feelings of hiraeth will resurface. If ever you have to go to an empty parental home, the taste of familiar flavours of your home cuisine in a far away land, the smell of a lost dear one, a movie clip showing open green fields which are now built over, the memories of a childhood friend who is no more, the recollection of a place of deep love, lost forever in a relationship, or even a song hummed by a stranger in the subway, everything makes you experience Hiraeth.

It is truly a longing in the heart to belong somewhere, to someone or to something.

As it is said ‘We know to travel…but do we know to come home?’

#hiraeth          #homeland    #parental       #migrants       #planet