From Y Geiriadur Mawr, “longing, nostalgia, grief.” Literally, in Welsh, hir (long)

and aeth (grief). Hiraethu, its verb form means “to yearn, to sorrow.” There are mugs and shirts that proclaim that hiraeth is “not homesickness. Homesickness is too weak. You feel hiraeth. A longing of the soul to come home.”

A decade ago, I became a temporary kiwi, and I was lucky enough to live in the Land of the Long White Cloud for a year. I explored the  North and South (and Stewart) Island from top to bottom, as much as I could, while trying to find myself and my ultimate destiny (as an office monkey and occasional ESL teacher). I haven’t been to every Lord of the Rings filming location, but I think I came pretty close.

While I was there, I’ll admit I cried more than I probably should have. Then I felt some pretty powerful hiraeth: I wanted to come home. Then I arrived back in the US, back to the town where I’d lived since I was born, and discovered I felt hiraeth for an entirely different place: New Zealand.

Thanks to the powers of Facebook and the interwebz, I’m happy to now have a name for this longing. Part of me wonders if Cymru settled in my soul a little more than I thought, in the six weeks I was there in the summer of 2012, because some of the uniquely Welsh words speak to me. English seems like such a limited language sometimes, and I love that I can reach out to other languages to find a word that expresses exactly what I feel. Like when it’s 30 the day after we have a glorious day of 65 and sunshine, and all I feel is kawawa. Thank you, Tagalog, for perfectly summing up the amount of pathos and pity I feel for myself.

I’m celebrating eight years in New York State, land of snow and clouds and farms and apples and glorious falls (followed by six months of winter). I’ve traveled east and west and south to other hemispheres, I make the cross-country flight back to California at least three times a year, and yet, I still find myself feeling hiraeth. Is it a lack of home, which is the life of the itinerant academic? Or is there just something about the history and culture of New Zealand that keeps calling me back? Like Moana and the ocean, “it calls me.”

Someday I will find the time to pursue my Victorian chivalry/Maori treatment by the military in WWI research project. Someday, I will fuse my interest of community-shaping story with the culture that I love. And until then, I’ll keep looking at twelve years of pictures of five visits to New Zealand and fueling my hiraeth.