I’m probably outing myself as too much of a ginormous geek, but I truly love learning new words, especially those wonderful words that don’t have a direct translation into other languages.
Today, I want to introduce you (or re-introduce you if you’ve already heard about it) to the word Hiraeth.
Hiraeth–pronounced a bit like “here-ayeth”–is one of these wonderful words. It’s a Welsh (Cymry) word that (for simplicity’s sake) is often translated as “homesickness,” but the meaning is not as one-dimensional as that.
Hiraeth is a sense of yearning, a longing, a feeling something like nostalgia for a place or a home or even a sensation or state of being that no longer exists…or one that possibly never existed in the first place.
It’s been described as “a longing to be where your spirit lives,” and I can see why that is such an apt description. Because it has that sense of belonging-somewhere-that’s-unattainable to it.
I remember the first time I experienced hiraeth. I didn’t yet know that that’s what it was, but I definitely felt it. I was looking at an image from outer space, a picture of a part of the universe, and I had this intense and overwhelming sadness and nostalgia and…well, yes, homesickness.
I’ve never been to space, of course. I shouldn’t have this feeling of homesickness just looking at images of space. And yet I very often do.
But that’s not the only time I’ve experienced hiraeth.
I grew up in New Jersey. I didn’t live on the water or super near the ocean, but I was close enough to go fairly regularly as a child, and I did actually live close by the ocean for a year as an adult.
Experiencing the ocean is a lot easier than experiencing outer space, but it’s not really much less unknown than space when you get right down to it. I can see the ocean up close, I can touch it with my hands, I can swim in it for a bit. But I can’t dive beneath the waves and set up a life down there.
And yet, I’ve sat and watched the ocean, the waves crashing against the shore, and felt a deep longing to immerse myself in it. To “go back to it” as if I had been born in those deep waters and migrated to land as an infant or some other time before I can remember. Unlike my experience looking at space, though, there’s a bit more peace as I watch the ocean, a little less sadness than when I look at images of space.
Perhaps that’s because I can touch the ocean, have a bit of it in my life, but I can’t do the same with outer space.
In any event, it’s not unlike the idea of how you “can’t go home again” that people talk about. The fact that no matter who you are or where you live or whether you can literally go back and into your childhood home, neighborhood, etc…that you still aren’t truly going back home. You may be able to go to the physical spot and visit it, but you can’t be that child, that person again, so you can’t in actuality go back home for real.
And yet it’s not only those feelings, it’s also that deep longing for ancient places and those lost bits of ourselves and of humanity that we can’t recover and maybe never personally experienced.
I think hiraeth is what drives human beings to explore, to wonder, to immerse ourselves (if only for a short time) into other lives and other worlds as we do through books and other forms of education and entertainment.