The Welsh have a word for the unattainable yearning you feel for a place that no longer exists, or to which you can never return. *Hiraeth* is a homesickness you feel when home is years ago and far away, if it ever existed at all.
Author Val Bethell beautifully expressed this 'longing of the soul to come home to be safe':
"Hiraeth is in the mountains where the wind speaks in many tongues and the buzzards fly on silent wings. It's the call of my spiritual home, it's where ancient peoples made their home. We're high on a hill, where saints bathed sore feet in a healing spring and had a cure. ... the link with the long-forgotten past, the language of the soul, the call from the inner self. Half forgotten - fraction remembered. It speaks from the rocks, from the earth, from the trees and in the waves. It's always there."
St Marys, Tal-y-Llyn, Anglesey
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