This year I was all jazzed about writing weekly reflections for Advent - pairing them with O Antiphons, even. But, of course, this did not happen, as life intervened yet again and the days and the hours slipped silently away. I was, however, invited to write a reflection on a piece of music for Advent for a site called ecclesio.com - you can read it here. This will be the extent of my spiritual musings for the season. Off into another direction we go...
I learned a new word this week - hiraeth. It's a Welsh word that is somewhat difficult to translate, but according to the Facebook Oracle (which is gospel truth), it means, "a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of your past." I read this and was suddenly flooded with images in my head - images and feelings and pieces of hopes and dreams that seemed forever broken and lost and impossible to recapture. Here was the place where those disturbing middle-of-the-night dreams originate. Here were those nagging thoughts in my brain to which I could never put a name or a face or an idea.
Hiraeth.
The definition itself has a bizarre, vague clarity to it, describing something that is tangible but only because you can never really put your hands on it. It's that moment of clarity that lasts for 5 seconds in your head, and then disappears. It's the swirling, wisps of morning fog that dissipate the moment you walk through them. It's that elusive lightning bug that always carried the possibility of holding a fragile, wondrous glow in the palm of your hand before it disappears and leaves you with a rather gross-looking bug.
Hiraeth.
What is this home? Is it a place? Is it a people? Is it a state of mind? Maybe it's that little girl who, years ago, was full of dreams and fantasies about what the future would look like. Maybe it's that not-so-little girl who, no-so-many years (weeks?) ago accepted that the dreams of that little girl really were fantasies, and that life sometimes is exactly what it looks like. And sometimes that really isn't very interesting or inspiring at all, but feels gray, dull, and death-like. Or maybe, just maybe, the home we are really yearning for does not and cannot exist. It is utopia, complete in its double meaning: the "not" place, and the "perfect" place. And that makes us want it even more.
Hiraeth.
It haunts. And yet, is also inspires a dream of something even more fantastical. Maybe this home will be filled with the warmth of the people we want to have in our lives, but cannot. And maybe those people will only haunt its rooms for eternity, in their trail the pleasures and pains of nostalgia. Whatever this "this" is, it leaves us incomplete, and our homesickness is a disease that, seemingly, will never heal.
I learned a new word this week - hiraeth. It's a Welsh word that is somewhat difficult to translate, but according to the Facebook Oracle (which is gospel truth), it means, "a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of your past." I read this and was suddenly flooded with images in my head - images and feelings and pieces of hopes and dreams that seemed forever broken and lost and impossible to recapture. Here was the place where those disturbing middle-of-the-night dreams originate. Here were those nagging thoughts in my brain to which I could never put a name or a face or an idea.
Hiraeth.
The definition itself has a bizarre, vague clarity to it, describing something that is tangible but only because you can never really put your hands on it. It's that moment of clarity that lasts for 5 seconds in your head, and then disappears. It's the swirling, wisps of morning fog that dissipate the moment you walk through them. It's that elusive lightning bug that always carried the possibility of holding a fragile, wondrous glow in the palm of your hand before it disappears and leaves you with a rather gross-looking bug.
Hiraeth.
What is this home? Is it a place? Is it a people? Is it a state of mind? Maybe it's that little girl who, years ago, was full of dreams and fantasies about what the future would look like. Maybe it's that not-so-little girl who, no-so-many years (weeks?) ago accepted that the dreams of that little girl really were fantasies, and that life sometimes is exactly what it looks like. And sometimes that really isn't very interesting or inspiring at all, but feels gray, dull, and death-like. Or maybe, just maybe, the home we are really yearning for does not and cannot exist. It is utopia, complete in its double meaning: the "not" place, and the "perfect" place. And that makes us want it even more.
Hiraeth.
It haunts. And yet, is also inspires a dream of something even more fantastical. Maybe this home will be filled with the warmth of the people we want to have in our lives, but cannot. And maybe those people will only haunt its rooms for eternity, in their trail the pleasures and pains of nostalgia. Whatever this "this" is, it leaves us incomplete, and our homesickness is a disease that, seemingly, will never heal.
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