HIRAETH (hee-ryth)
n. (Welsh) “A spiritual longing for a home which maybe never was. Nostalgia for ancient places to which we cannot return. It is the echo of the lost places of our soul’s past and our grief for them. It is in the wind, and the rocks, and the waves. It is nowhere and it is everywhere.”
This came to me on Facebook of all places. The words grabbed me immediately and I spent several minutes reading and re-reading them. I know why it speaks to me so insistently – we are entering 2021’s holiday season. This is a time that can be troublesome for me, no matter how much I love it. I am caught up in remembrances, in visualizing season’s past when we were all together, when Jackie and Ted and Rose and Mary and I celebrated Christmas Eve. When the kids were little and there wasn’t a question about putting up a tree. When toy shopping started the morning after Thanksgiving, with me along with other determined parents waiting outside of Best Buy for the latest video game. When hiding presents was a real challenge. When Christmas meant going to midnight service at Webster Groves Christian Church and singing the most wonderful music of the year.
But this nostalgia goes deeper still. It has something to do with wondering where and when my soul is really at home, and I really feel like I belong. I don’t have strong blood family ties other than with Jan, my children and their loved ones, so when I am with them I feel like I am home. But the kids live at a great distance, so that presence and sense of home happens rarely with them. With Jan, I am at home always.
My family is more likely to be precious friends. Rose and Mary, and Katie, and Nancy, and Sheila, and Terri, to name a few. I am so blessed to have a long list of people who I love and cherish. When I am with them I feel at home. Some are also at a distance so being together is a rare pleasure.
There is something that bothers me – why am I not at home within myself sometimes? Not always, just some times. When I do feel at home within I am content, can experience joy in my thoughts, feel like creating something out of my day – like writing. When I’m not at home within I am likely to ruminate on past hurts, to overeat, to be irritable, to review my resentments, to be unmotivated to do anything useful. What an ugly state to be in!
I have relied on myself all of my life. Made most of my own decisions and acted on them. Figured out solutions on my own. Handled my hurts and wounds in isolation. Hidden my addiction, or thought I was hiding it, for decades. I have worked for autocrats and learned to work around them in order to get real things done. These might be survival moves given my upbringing, but they have been soul sucking sometimes. I have paid a price for trying to be fiercely independent, mostly by having to admit that I may have created an island dwelling for myself.
What might stand in the way of feeling at home in my own skin? John O’Donohue has written a blessing that has resonated with me.
To Come Home to Yourself
May all that is unforgiven in you be released
May your fears yield their deepest tranquilities
May all that is unlived in you blossom into a future graced with love.
These are profound statements worthy of reflection and discernment. What is still unforgiven? What do I really fear? What is left for me to live into?
1 thought on “HIRAETH”
Beautiful reflection, Lynn, on how and where and with whom we feel at home. And then how we feel at home within ourselves. Poet David Whyte often asks: “What is the beautiful question your life is asking of you right now? The question you didn’t know you were asking”. You prompt it here : an especially poignant question as we enter a third year of pandemic and more social distancing, more time to ourselves: How do I find home within myself? I’ll be carrying that into the new year.
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