There's No Place Like Home

By Jos Sinnott

I’ve recently been thinking about the idea of ‘home’. What does it mean to leave home? To long for home? To return home?

Surrounded by undulating hills and creaky, crone-like trees, I began writing this piece on the border of Pembrokeshire and Cardiganshire, in West Wales, during a dreary, dark December. I like the Welsh name for December, Rhagfyr, which translates as ‘before the shortest day’ - an apt, descriptive name for this month. My stay in this area was temporary, intended as a kind of creative retreat for my partner and I. My current home is in Bristol, though I was born and raised in Wales.

As well as the idea of home, I’ve been reflecting on the idea of land. In the modern world, with our large industrialised cities, we have done a good job of cutting ourselves off from land and, ultimately, from nature. But it’s useful to remember that we are never truly cut off from these things. We have simply insulated ourselves from the immediate pressures of relying on the land, but our lives are still just as sustained by the natural world as they always have been. We wouldn’t get very far without soil, sunshine and air.

There has likely been no other time in history that we have felt so disconnected from nature. City-dwellers in particular - surrounded by cars, air pollution, supermarkets, fast food and smartphones - are uprooted creatures. Deracinated. Without being fully conscious of it, I believe many of us yearn for rootedness, for a deeper connection to place and specificity. In light of these thoughts, I have been drawn to the Welsh word hiraeth. Hiraeth is related to words like homesickness, loss, nostalgia, grief, sorrow and longing. But it has been said by Sioned Davies, a professor at Cardiff University, that there is no adequate equivalent to hiraeth in English “because it has too many cultural overtones”. In other words, it is too firmly embedded in Welsh culture to be used outside of this culture.

The word hiraeth became a trend online in recent years. Many people who are not Welsh began using this word to describe their experiences of longing. But hiraeth, as suggested earlier, specifically relates to Welsh culture and heritage. In Welsh poetry, for example, hiraeth has been used to indicate a sorrowful longing for Welsh heritage, land and people. It could be argued that the appropriation of this word, by people with no deep connection to Wales, is an extension of a colonial mindset that assumes it can adopt cultural expressions for its own purposes.

Welsh culture and heritage have been slowly eroded, for hundreds of years, by English colonialism. The effects of English colonialism in Wales continue to this day. In a 2021 census, for example, it was recorded that only 17.5% of the population of Wales speak Welsh. I only know snippets of Welsh myself (tipyn bach), having not gone to a Welsh language school. It is understandable that Welsh people, like me, would yearn for their own heritage and culture.

Human languages and cultures are sacred expressions of the land they emerge from. Our very bodies, too, are expressions of land. The Welsh language, then, reflects the Welsh landscape. Though, it should be pointed out, the impacts of modernisation and industrialisation have greatly changed the Welsh landscape over the years. I’m sure it is very different to how it was 2,000 years ago. But there is still a distinctness to Welsh nature. The Welsh landscape still cries out for Welsh poetry to extol its beauty.

In fairness, perhaps hiraeth can inspire a feeling in people who aren’t Welsh. Perhaps there are many people in our unfulfilling, modern societies who do feel a deep longing for something, for something they can’t quite put their finger on. I’m sure this is the case. I’m sure, underneath all the luminous distractions of the modern world, which numb and pacify people, there is a profound longing for something more.

The word nostalgia stems from the Greek word nostos. Nostos is usually translated as ‘homecoming’, often referring to the return of a hero to their homeland. One of the foundational literary works of Western culture, Homer’s Odyssey, is based on the theme of nostos. Homer’s Odyssey is set after the trojan war, which leaves the warrior Odysseus stranded. The Odyssey chronicles his return home, which takes 10 years. In ancient Greece, returning home after a long journey would have been a momentous event. It is difficult for us to imagine nowadays, when travelling across the world can be done in a few days. Odysseus wouldn’t have been able to WhatsApp Penelope and Telemachus before catching his next flight, sending them a selfie and telling them how exhausting his trip has been so far. Employing nostos, homecoming, as a literary theme, there is a reason why the Odyssey is such a foundational story.

Symbolically speaking, returning home is a powerful notion. In order to appreciate home, we need to leave it. Like a salmon leaving their river homes, to grow and reproduce, we also need to separate ourselves from our source. To find something, we need to lose it first. To know wholeness, we must first know separateness.

Until a certain age, humans need much guidance, care and education. But to really deepen and mature, we must eventually find things out for ourselves. We must experience life firsthand, with all its difficulties. This entails a separation from the safety and warmth of our younger years. It entails a separation from childhood and a venturing out into the tumultuous waters of direct experience. We are never fully ready for what life has in store, which is why life can be so arduous and painful. But it’s important to remember that suffering or adversity is part of becoming a well-rounded person. Without adversity, we stagnate and wither. After periods of difficulty, we hopefully learn more about who we are. Assuming we are ready, assuming we have grown wiser from our experiences, we can ‘return home’. This return is as much an inner journey as an outer one. When we return, we will not be exactly as we were when we left. We will have been tempered by our experiences. Refined by them. We will be wiser as a result of them.

But perhaps returning home means something more too, something deeper.

In Tantric philosophy there is an idea called anava-mala, which the scholar Christopher Wallis has described as “the belief that something is missing or else deeply wrong with you” (Wallis, 2013). Significantly, with anava-mala we don’t know what is missing. This powerful feeling of absence is arguably what makes people restless and ambitious, for such people are always chasing after something they feel is missing. This helps explain why some people strive for money, fame, comfort, progress and status. But all of these things are superficial substitutes and will not quench our fundamental restlessness. This is why many people, after gaining money, fame and status, realise that this isn’t what they really wanted. “For most of us, the spiritual path begins when we perceive that something is missing, and also we realise that it is not romance or money or power or fame that will be able to fill the void within” (Wallis, 2013).

We are left with some questions: What is the fundamental source of our longing? And what does it really mean to return home? I imagine these will always be unanswered to some extent. They will remain mysteries to be lived and felt, not problems to be solved. But I’d like to explore some recent ponderings.

Human civilisation began with the development of agriculture, cities and writing. This meant that previously nomadic, hunter-gatherer groups became more domesticated. We thus became less directly connected to the natural world, because we no longer needed to understand the intricate complexities of wild nature. We could just farm a patch of land or procure food from city markets. We erected buildings in these cities for us to live in, which further cut us off from nature. In this sense, civilisation could be seen as a separation, a severance.

After civilisation really took hold, no longer did civilised peoples feel so connected to the natural world. Our move into civilisation is the ‘fall’ into history. Perhaps the story of Adam and Eve was intuiting these ideas. Perhaps the Garden of Eden nostalgically symbolises a time when humans were in complete union with nature, until we separated ourselves from source. This feeling of separateness has been turbocharged over the last 400 years or so, with the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. In our modern technological world, we feel more detached from nature than ever before. We have fallen even deeper.

It is likely that the worldview of our prehistoric ancestors was animistic and participatory. Animistic means they would have seen the whole of nature, even solid matter like rocks, as alive and intelligent. Animistic traditions are dismissed by rationalists, who laugh at the idea of spirits in rocks and rivers. But to experience the world as alive and intelligent is arguably more accurate than assuming that matter is lifeless and inert. Participatory is an important word. A participatory worldview sees people as active subjects in a responsive universe. Our scientific worldview, by contrast, suggests that we are detached observers in an indifferent universe, watching the world go by with no fundamental connection to it. But for most of human history and prehistory, the view that we are detached observers didn’t hold sway.

Perhaps, then, on a historical level, our deep feelings of absence and longing stem from the false feeling that we are separate from nature. We have forgotten that we are nature. We are participants in an intelligent, natural world. We are not strangers or accidents. This world is our home. Nature is our home.

We belong. 

I have been talking about nature in a broad and abstract way until now, but I want to emphasise the importance of physically connecting with a piece of land. It has been said that to understand the universal you must first understand the specific. The philosopher and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist writes “The path to the infinite and eternal lies in, not away from – not even to the side of – the finite and the temporal” (McGilchrist, 2023).

For most people to really connect with nature, to return home, it is important to become rooted in place. There are various small things we can do to help in this regard. We could start growing vegetables. Befriend the flora and fauna on our doorstep. Go for regular walks in nearby parks, getting to know the trees and plants. Buy food grown locally. Get involved with the local community. One can even do these things living in a city.

As I write this, I pause to look out the window at the landscape around me. The Teifi Estuary, the undulating hills, St Dogmaels village below. The beaches of Ceredigion (Cardigan) are in the distance, behind the hills. Imbibing the friendliness and community feeling in this Welsh village, I feel a little tug, a pull to return to Wales. This may take some time. Maybe in my own small way, like Odysseus before me, like all those salmon who after adventuring to the ocean return to where they were born, I will find myself back in Wales. Perhaps I will be guided by the spirit of nostos. Perhaps I will live near my family. Maybe I will find a place I can call home.

References

The Dark Mountain Project, Issue 25 (Spring), 2024

The Matter With Things, Iain McGilchrist, Paperback Printing, 2023

Tantra Illuminated, Christopher Wallis, 2013

Sioned Davies quote: The untranslatable word that connects Wales - BBC Travel

Jos Sinnott is an aspiring writer and has been writing for much of his adult life. He tends to write creative essays and poetry, and his essays are usually a weaving of philosophy, nature writing and mysticism. He lives in Bristol, in the UK.