HIRAETH (Finding Your Way Back Home)

Hiraeth (n.) 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.

What is home? The roof over your head? A familiar physical interior/exterior space? A place on the map? The house in the photograph? Your childhood home? The town you grew up in? The old neighborhood? A collection of memories? A place in your mind? A place in your heart? A place out there somewhere? Does the idea of ‘home’ change with time, becoming less a physical space? Does the idea of home become more elusive? Less salient, more blurred, featureless, more felt than seen? Less external, more internal? Does the idea of home pull us ahead and into the future? Or does it pull us into the past. How do we recognize our ‘home’?

The feeling of Hiraeth as described above has followed me around since I was a child; a feeling that I was somehow misplaced, a sense that I was far from ‘home’ and my place of origin (whatever that meant).  Of course, as a child, I couldn’t put that feeling into words and I never expressed it to others, my family or friends, because I myself didn’t understand it.  I just somehow knew that even in my bed at night, under the roof of the house I lived in with my parents and my siblings, I was feeling homesick for another place of which I had no conscious memory.  Try expressing that as a seven-year-old!

I’ve had many decades since then to ponder the big questions of life…its meaning and purpose. Yet the questions remain, so I search instead for understanding, while accepting that there may be no answers.  In my searching and especially in light of my constant feeling of Hiraeth, I have come up with a personal vision regarding not so much the meaning of life, but rather our purpose as humans having been given the gift of life.  While I would expect that others might argue or disagree or debate, it makes a certain sense to me.  My fragile philosophy is that we are breathed into being (in whatever manner is meaningful to you) and that we are placed on a journey both richly joyous and unbearably tragic, and through those experiences we are meant to find our way back home again, back to our origin. And while it’s not likely that we can agree on a clear definition of what constitutes a physical, experiential, or spiritual ‘home’, we can probably agree that the deeper notion of ‘home’ is not only personal to each of us, but also an intangible concept, a feeling that resides in our deep subconscious and beckons us to keep searching as it pulls us toward it like a magnet.

My great challenge then became how to create imagery that evokes that sense of Hiraeth, images that might call forth that feeling of memory, yearning and a need to find our way back.  Some of the paintings in this series are more obviously relatable to the idea of home as an earthly place of love, safety and acceptance (whether that is someone’s experience or not).  Other images are more evocative and conceptually abstract and are meant to help the viewer access his/her own subconscious feelings relating to our longing to find our place at last.

No words describe this idea better than those of the spiritual leader Ram Dass, who said “We are all just walking each other Home…”

Shelley Stevens