~ This was originally the cover page of Wandering Ways. It was particular to an earlier moment on my path, and has in some way lost its general relevance. I would like the blog to be about much more than this portion of my journey. Still, I think keeping these thoughts on the site is worthwhile. ~
From May, 2020… before I left my family home to pursue a path more closely linked with nature.
Hiraeth (Welsh): 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 know I’m not the only one who feels a strange sense of wrongness in the world.
It’s nothing new. That profoundly human sense has been with us for, perhaps, as long our collective memory stretches. Ever and always, we yearn. Ever and always, we reach for the unreachable… we stretch our tiny arms and grasp at the beams of the sun.
Why do we reach? What are we so desperately hoping to touch, and take for ourselves? After eons of wondering, it’s still hard to say.
I suppose, however, if we had to put a word to it… it might be connection… connection of all kinds… but essentially, we yearn for connection and identification with our experience at the deepest level… to be viscerally awake in the face of life.
For a long time, I have felt that the connection our souls seek is somehow dulled down and obfuscated by the conditions of the modern world… that the human being is more likely than not to be lulled into a deep slumber of the spirit, which robs him of the worthwhile life.
Several years ago, I expressed that feeling in a notebook scrawling. It reads: Can we recapture the simple beauty, erased by the modern machine, whose rumbling belly has churned out these easy comforts – these shackles for the spirit?
Whether right or wrong in all its aspects, that old fragment of thought was a cry from the depths of my soul… and, it is a cry that I know echoes in the silenced hearts of so many others — yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
It’s important to mention that it’s not universally felt, that sense of wrongness in the world.
There are many who truly do feel at home in today’s society… who are awake and satisfied, or at the very least, content in their slumber. For them, I am glad. I’m not here to say that anything is absolutely right or wrong.
To their credit, reason seems to suggest that we are fools, doesn’t it? How can we rebuke a world mired in the boons of modern innovation? How can we seek something else in a society filled with so many possessions of convenience?
Maybe we are fools. Maybe it’s not the world, but rather our ability to relate to it. Maybe the problem is ours.
Regardless, the sense of wrongness remains. The yearning remains.
It hasn’t left me despite all the supposed success I’ve had in my short life. And I know I’m not alone.
This blog will be a space of reflection on that strange condition of the human spirit.
It will also be a journal of sorts as I step away from my career path in journalism, and move towards a way of life more closely connected to the earth and to community… of working the land, building, tending to animals, and directly acting in service to my fellow man… all in a beautiful corner of the world.
I have a lot to learn.
Wandering Ways 