"There are some feelings so specific that English doesn't bother to name them. The tug you feel when you leave a place that once felt like home. The strange comfort in sadness. The longing that is both wound and sweetness. We usually settle for calling it nostalgia, but that is not quite right. Nostalgia is sentimental. This feeling has more gravity."
"He described it as "a longing for a belonging," a yearning for a home that may no longer exist, or perhaps never existed at all. He has the word tattooed on his back, where he cannot quite see it. There is poetry in that. Hiraeth is something you can feel but not grasp. It is an ache you carry, a memory stitched to a myth. As Dr. Rule put it, "You crave where your soul belongs.""
Hiraeth cannot be directly translated; 'homesickness' or 'nostalgia' are faint shadows of the real thing. The word denotes a longing for a belonging, a yearning for a home that may no longer exist or perhaps never existed. The term describes an ache carried like a memory stitched to a myth, something felt but not grasped. The word can be physically marked yet remain unseen, suggesting its elusive, poetic nature. The feeling encompasses missing not only a landscape but the self that once existed within it, a soul's phantom-limb pain for a wholeness and belonging lost.
Read at Psychology Today
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