The meaning of home

What it means to connect with 'place'

Hello there. I seem to be writing more and more about connection and I spent some time journalling around this topic this morning, but focussed entirely on people. The more I wrote, the more I noticed how a sense of place kept featuring. I don’t know how, yet, but this is perhaps a wonderful example of how writing can help us to figure something out.

I also wanted to write about connecting to something bigger than myself, a topic requested by

Jocelyn Lovelle

so I hope this has set us on that pathway to uncovering some of these moments from my life. The ones I have felt profoundly, to the core of my soul, but haven’t yet explored in writing.

I’d love to know your thoughts on connecting with a place.

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The sun was setting over the mounds and dales to the west, golden and scarlet and regal. It was brilliant and freezing, perched atop a rock, hypnotised by the most magnificent sunset I had seen. My hand twirled through my dog’s soft fur, and I knew, in that precise moment, a piece of me had found a home.

Five months later, I left that land, that home, to make my home elsewhere. I landed in a place that never quite felt like home. I walked for miles through fields and spent hours watching beautiful sunsets, but never connected with that place in the same way. When I return now, I drive through the hills and vales, commenting oh isn’t it pretty and look how lovely that is but it still was never home. Despite spending more years living there than almost any home previously, I miss nothing of that place. Only the people.

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There’s a sense I get, sometimes, that the land I live in is a painting. The way the light hits those trees on that hill over there, how still they appear. I can see a painter with an easel on this hillside, with the paints and the brushes and the critical eye. What depth to paint the green, how smooth should the field be, and how many birds to dot into the sky?

When I leave that land, my home, I begin to understand more and more what is truly meant by the term hiraeth¹.

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We wandered through cobbled streets, beneath a bright winter sky, dipping into shops of colourful curios, stacks of old books and heaps of crystals or soaps. There, a painting captured my heart. Here, a book hooked my mind. I lost myself in the owls carved into tree stumps, carved hollow for spring geraniums and pansies. I wandered through a maze of trinkets and a beloved history.

This was Howarth, nestled deep in Brontë country. As we drove through lanes lined with drystone walls, climbing higher and higher, my heart remembered what it was to be back in a land like the one I watched the sunset over. I felt a distinct sense of coming home, a peculiar feeling in a place I’d never visited before.

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My life has been nomadic, uprooted and transitory. I have lived in many different parts of the land, and have only recently come to know what it means to truly put roots down, to start to settle into the land. How I can connect not just with the people around me, but the land too. To stand on one mountain and stare at the intricacies of the world at my feet, drinking the view into my heart. To fall in love with the curve of this lane as it climbs between cliffs, emerging into a place so wondrous, it feels unreal. To breathe in the cold, winter wind, to smell the wings of a storm driving up the vale, to feel the majesty of the sunset on my skin, and hear the harmonies of choral songbirds on a morning heralding spring.

This is my connection to the land. How is it formed? Why are some places home after barely a moment, and others will never be after years? It’s like walking through a crowd of strangers, passing each one by without notice, until one, just one, catches your eyes with theirs in a fleeting moment of true understanding. Perhaps it is this, a moment of feeling seen, heard and in harmony with something else.

Perhaps this is why we can get homesick for the land we have chosen to call home.

The sunset over the Yorkshire Dales that captured my heart and made it always feel like home. Not my best, given it was a decade ago.

1. Originally and chiefly in the context of Wales and Welsh culture: deep longing for a person or thing which is absent or lost; yearning; nostalgia; spec. homesickness. OED