Tag: soul

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unstitched

I don’t have a way to explain this place. It’s part of me. Like it was born of my soul or my soul from it. It’s grand and vast and full of stars and wind and pieces of a home I once knew. I feel like I want to open my mouth and fill it with sand so every bit of it is inside of me. Part of me. Like I know it is. I don’t know what started the love affair with this place. What was the tipping point? What was the moment when it felt like everything else came undone? When I knew I wanted to burn it all down? I don’t know. I think it grew day by day. Until I was in a bus crossing the High Atlas thinking about the things that stitch our lives together. And if moments now can unravel the past. If they can unstitch things that have happened like ripping out a seam. Is it all that fragile? That a pull on one thread can unravel a whole life? I think it can. 

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Hiraeth

A Welsh word I discovered a few years ago; hiraeth. It is described as a longing, a melancholia, an existential feeling. A homesickness for a person or place that maybe never was. I’ve felt this my whole life. A missing-ness of belonging where I am. Pamela Petro says, “So hiraeth is a protest. If it must be called homesickness, it’s a sickness come on—in Welsh ailments come onto you, as if hopping aboard a ship—because home isn’t the place it should have been. It’s an unattainable longing for a place, a person, a figure, even a national history that may never have actually existed. To feel hiraeth is to feel a deep incompleteness and recognize it as familiar.” This feeling lives with me and it wasn’t until I stepped into Morocco, that I felt a letting go of it. A relief that perhaps I had found a place that my soul knows or once knew. The feeling of longing for a place was replaced with a knowing, that I had found one. A place I feel instantly and deeply connected.