I have known many homes in my lifetime – there was my childhood home – fraught with conflict. Home in my heart, home in the heart of hearts. My first loving home was AKU, in the rooms of my friends those walls will always reverberate with everything that we have experienced together, all of us there, all together. That was my home. Then I had another home, it didn’t last very long. And now I have another and will soon have another. It seems to me that all homes are meant to be transitory, I leave them when the time comes, but I think of them. Memories of some give me the warmest comfort in coldest of winters. Others make me cry with sorrow filled with loss. And yet, they all were homes I think.
I have spent my life feeling Hiraeth. It is the most beautiful word I can think of. But it is my home. Every moment has been my home, every heart every soul. I have inhabited different homes, I have felt at home in different ways in my own body, so how can I ever want my home to be the same? It is like the body of the phoenix – bound to change at every cycle, carrying the ashes of its past always and forever, because that is what makes it unique. The footprint of all the ashes of all its cycles are embedded in the phoenix’s wings – they give it color and they give it flight. Who am I to say that home is to remain constant? When my own body is bound to change, the seasons of change have never stopped so who am I to want them to stop. I can just see them pass by.
Hiraeth. Except I have always been home.
Recomposed by Max Richter - Vivaldi - The Four Seasons, 1. Spring
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLDvbnK_Sqk)
