Hi there,
I’ve been working on an essay about homesickness. It’s been two years since I’ve seen Finland, the country where I was born and raised. For the first time in my life I’m starting to understand what homesickness means, that it’s a physical thing. It’s a feeling that arrives as a wave, so overpowering that I can sometimes smell the reeds at the summerhouse and hear the old pine trees swaying in the breeze.
When I was doing my research for the article I came across the Welsh word hiraeth, which sums up that longing. It’s about more than homesickness, it’s deeper, bigger, both sweeter and more tender than just missing home.
The word is difficult to translate to English, but it seems to stand for “a kind of longing for a person, a place or a time that you can’t get back to, a kind of unattainable longing.”
The Cameroon-born poet Eric Ngalle Charles, who lives in Wales, describes it as "the music you play constantly in your head hoping that you do not forget – it's a place of comfort that you always return to”.
That’s what has been happening to me – it’s a kind of sweetly painful nostalgia and longing.
And perhaps it’s about something more than just the summerhouse and Finland. I miss a disappeared world, a way of life that will never return.
This pandemic has changed how we live, I’m more and more convinced that it will have changed the world for the foreseeable future. And I mourn and miss what we once had, the freedom, the thoughtless travel. It’s a nostalgic longing, because I know that this is how things will be from now on, that doesn’t erase the fact that something has been lost and I’m waiting for the new world to take shape and solidify.
– Article about hiraeth on BBC Travel.
– Photo by Christian Widell on Unsplash
True. Reminds me of the quote from the beautiful film "The Go-Between" by Joseph Losey which made a great impression on me (based on a book by LP Hartley). “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
I had this longing for many years after my mother died. I grew up in Berkeley California and for years I would visit Berkeley. And I finally realized I was hoping to see my mother come around the corner.