Tracing Hiraeth: searching for home's lost feeling

HIRAETH is a Welsh word which cannot be fully translated into English. A homesickness, the deep nostalgia of a home you cannot return to; a yearning for a home that you’ve never physically experienced but is as real as the potentially melancholic, often warming stab in the heart that complements such thoughts. It’s a home that could have been, or once was, but is no longer. A longing to be where your spirit lives, in time, in place, and in mind.

Past fragments into mirrors and wholes. It sits on the stairs of your childhood home and watches the early afternoon light-glow bask over the hallway, telling stories long faded of family trips into the countryside, a palimpsest on landscape. It calms, known only as the breeze rustling lonely aged leaves. Aged, aging, constantly in motion. Nothing else really matters until the illusion passes. I’ve felt this yearning for a while, the love-hate relationship with time, and how it brings forth its zephyr attrition.

The path often seems alluring. But the garden’s overgrown with weeds and thorns, and the paths were previously trodden long ago. Memories are precious to us; they are fragile as glass. Memories of childhood especially. It differs to vision because it is amorphous, like a half-remembered dream.

I have never lived in the mountains. Maybe if I had, my sense of kinship would be more ephemeral to this, tethered to breathing in place. Like how Nan Shepherd spoke of her eyes being in her feet in the Cairngorms. Natural spaces often bring with them intensely spiritual experiences, in moment and retrospect; touching golden aurora light on a winter’s dawn. It is something that should – and will – exist despite the Ego, the ‘I am’. In the moment of stillness, you becomes attuned, both to the movements of creation, where something as simple as susurrating leaves start to speak to you, and to the collected visions that build up who we perceive ourselves to be. To resonate, ambient, it rises as a plangent call over a conversation with history. The echoes themselves lie shrouded in mystery – of what, from where, and why – but I hear them calling sometimes.

If I condemn myself to memorial thinking, it is 2002 (or is it 2001? 2003? I don’t know), and the world of the child expands before me as I look through the curved glass eye of nostalgia. I try to see what he sees as he takes his first tentative steps into his imaginary worlds: his introverted paradise. He would explore these worlds on a Sunday afternoon, having been to church and going to school tomorrow. The afternoon is free, it is a wild untamed tundra, an uncharted woodland glade, an Ashland desert, but it is also a hearthfire in the heart. Family is near, food is on the table, responsibility seems so distant, languid thoughts are commonplace and do not bring much consequence. Your world is all you see in front of you and within, and there are no worries. The scent of an old leather chair, the soundtrack to an old video game, the discovery of a passion, all are artefacts to the inner child, all are new and fascinating. You don’t know many people yet, you haven’t set fire to your catalyst of doubt.

Eighteen years later, or nineteen, or twenty, I am here again. But the search for the inner home of childhood seems a cause for the lost and the weary. What remains are the artefacts, showing their age, and your brain, watching askance. I seek the spirit of the inner child, but he is ethereal. His ghostly footsteps lead you through the deeper crevices of mind and memory, and so the re-visitation presents a gamble: risk hurting the idyll of memory by pursuing it, or attempt to trace the steps made by the spirit and bask in the joy of (re-)discovery. To relive what your mind encountered – in books, in experience, when the world was new - all those years ago, once again. Part of me knows better than to try, and yet, I still wonder why I shouldn’t. The voice says to me that the poetry of remembering shatters with the arrival of the remembered. Do not revisit the burned home on the quiet night, the phantasms do haunt. Still, I want to go.

The call of the spiritual home has evolved much in the past five years, let alone eighteen. Revisiting the artefacts with the renewed sense of vision unveils change. Life is not the same as it once was, but perhaps it never truly was. The thought often differs to how you imagine it, only a variation, a thematic motif that reaches out to you every now and then, with elements recognisable in memory altered by the wistful passing of time and the fear of getting older than you are in this moment. Past becomes a luminary, an orb of synesthetic liquid light collating memory and feeling, not quite here, not quite there, but still it lies before you. With dolorous, recognisable eyes, you know you must speak with it, for it has much to tell you.

A notebook opens, and with it I write the memory of what I consumed as a child: video games, films, books, images of Devon, rural Scotland, Wales, green fields full of ticks, grey dusk, Lord of the Rings, Morrowind on a Sunday afternoon (and the fears of what lived within and up the mountain), days out with family, farmlands and barn animals, early school, winter snow stranding the car, Christmas-time, the nightland wood, the mystical journeys deep into old lore, the prevalence of the harp in an unknown soundtrack, re-watches of old childhood films. Introvert’s paradise.

You know there is more, much more even, but this is what you have now. The list will surely grow. Looking at it, it looks back a peculiar mixture of media, literature and nature, family and solitude. It’s somewhat true, but there’s more beneath. The joy of simplicity, escapism, even then, more. Protection, perhaps; safety in the warmth of family. The context that surrounds such memories filters through like rays of light through an empty grey-mist. And the more I think about this, the more I am convinced that this luminary orb is somewhat leading me back to what I thought lost, or what I have shunned over more recent years. Down that path lies a simpler kind of happiness akin to the pleasant afternoon sun in springtime. Perhaps aging is less a matter of detachment and more a cycle of embraces of the present as a result of the good past. Of course, you can never go back to what was, nor really should we but in reflection or a re-visitation. Change is what it is, for better or for worse. It is a force outside our own control. Sooner or later the places we inhabit and the paths we walk return to the palimpsest, walked by another, for generations below and leading. But they will not stay young, as we are no longer. It is a melancholy face, interrupted by brief moments of recognition, and a flutter. Warm, effervescent joy pierced by the sorrow of its passing. Then, one day, none of us will be here. But the artefacts remain. I think about this and want to embrace the ones closest to me. That’s largely all that matters.

Since the beginning of the pandemic and the worldwide lockdown I have taken to revisiting these artefacts from childhood, as well as others spurring thought on such a subject, and with more time available to think and ponder I tend to step back and see the pathways that lie ahead, ramose and mystic. I miss treading the old paths, and so with it, with revisiting, I hope, I will find out what I’m looking for. As I do so, however, the voice is distant. Oneiric, beyond what I remember, veiled beneath the secret mist in the depths. I can’t analyse or pick it apart in the academic sense, for to do so would be its death, or rather, there would be no tangible way to glean the actual essence of what is felt. Joy, at once fragile, longs for a return from nothing. I look through the mist and see the spectre of my childhood; it is in repose. I can only hope to trace his dreams, walking as his eidolon of the present. I long, but fear needs no place in longing. Slowly, gradually, we journey onwards towards peace.