Hiraeth

It’s New Year’s Eve, 2024. Quite an incredible, challenging, and rewarding year behind us, and a lot of possibility in front.

I’ve just come back from spending a couple of days down in New Jersey with family. All of the joys, jokes, competitions, cooking, baking, headaches, indigestion, and new memories that you can possibly imagine.

But now I’m sitting here back at the house, putting together a model train of Lego. I also spent a little bit of time earlier today watching other model trains travel through a snowscape.

And through all of that, I’ve been feeling this vague nostalgia and longing.

There is a word in Welsh that I think covers this feeling: Hiraeth. It’s nostalgia, homesickness, a longing for something somewhat undefinable.  It’s also a longing for a time, place, or person that feels like home but may no longer exist or that never existed at all. 

It is that somewhat unsettled feeling that something has been lost, and is just outside of our describing.

For my part, I wonder if it isn’t a side effect of all of the striving, scraping, and scrambling that I do the other 51 weeks of the year. Perhaps it’s a longing for a simpler time that I romanticize. Or maybe, it’s just a longing to be free of responsibility and care, to not be worrying about the next thing coming down the line

I’m working on a song I’m calling “Tomorrow Will Come When It Comes,” and I’m trying to capture some of that thinking in the song. An acceptance and even a celebration and embrace of things as they are, rather than worrying about and trying to prepare for the thing that might or might not be around the corner. 

This song – along with maybe “No, Jim, No” and “Have You Read The News?” – is part of a trio of new songs that I’ll be debuting on my Eagle’s Nest Revisited Friday afternoon sets and/or when I play Open Mic America on January 19 (I’m also hosting again in February!).  The plan is for another new album in ‘26 or ‘27, and a lot of live playing between now and then. Please come and join me.  Perhaps we can find a sense of new belonging, together!

-Chris