How To Cure Nostalgia

collage, amanda verdery young. original image (trunk) + overlay (Canva)

I recently went on a wander in Nature with a simple intention to nurture a sense of HOME.

It was a long holiday season filled with contradiction— delight and overwhelm, healing and dysfunction, togetherness and loneliness. I longed to reconnect with the deep, bodily at-home-ness that I’m learning to foster above all else, and to continue getting to know this new Land I now call home.

I wanted to feed a delicious feast of home-coming to the growing nostalgia in me— with all the wondrous trappings that includes: warmth, companionship, comfort, ease, abundance, simple pleasures, a helping hand… a feeling that “all is well, and all will be well,” even as injustice churns on. Respite from the cold work of these hard times.

“Nostalgia” bubbles forth from “the Greek algos **"pain, grief, distress" + nostos "homecoming."**

It also speaks to the term neomai "to reach some place, escape, return, get home," and nes "to return safely home" (cognate with Old Norse nest "food for a journey," Sanskrit nasate "approaches, joins," German genesen "to recover," Gothic ganisan "to heal” (source: etymology online).

All these root meanings swirl me into a frenzied new relationship with nostalgia: That it’s a predictable journey meant to be taken. That nostalgia is a powerful entity that must be fed. A messenger signaling that a journey is needed, one whose compass points to all we hold dear. This complex human feeling is a myth in-and-of-itself. An Atlantean story of a treasured place, once lost, that’s ready to be found again. And the protagonist (us, feeling nostalgic) is the one tasked with the search. Nostalgia is not a woeful, incurable dis-ease. It’s a map to what we long for most— which is to come home to ourselves, our loved ones, the Earth, and our true nature.

It’s funny; we’ve all spent so. much. time. at our physical homes. Yet as we begin to tumble awkwardly into the world again, many of us are struggling to feel at home within ourselves and communities, and within an undeniably sick culture.

But there is silver lining these clouds. This tension of being at-home and yet feeling less at home than ever in our lives is cracking us open to a much richer, infallible sense of home available to us, and that is our profound and inherent belonging to the Earth— our most essential home. Once tasted, this sense of home is an elixir we will never wish to put down, so medicinal and enlivening it is.

I’m no stranger to feeling like a stranger in a strange land. So, I wander. Open-minded, alert, soft and trying not to expect to find much. This landscape is unlike the wildly unpredictable island from which I just moved, or the dramatic, temperate jungles of the Pacific Northwest, where I lived before that. I can walk for miles on wide trails that border farmland against lean pockets of simple, swampy forests creaking with Maple and Oak, Witch Hazel and Hemlock, and if I’m not paying attention, miss all the much-ness going on around me.

Nevertheless, I always try to wander with the sense that whatever I seek is also seeking me. That no matter the landscape, if I’m outside upon the mysterious Earth, anything might happen.

After a long meandering, I’m drawn to an interior of meadows sliced by a thin tree-line. I stop suddenly to take in the scene. Soft purple mountains embrace me in every direction. Tones of tawny, dry grass paint the vast fields. Shivers of ice crunch beneath my feet. Oak leaves, encased like fairy wings, make poetry beneath frozen puddles. Home.

And then, there she is, laying before me like some great galleon.

She’s so big that it’s strange how I can’t see her until I’m upon her, even in a wide, open field. She just… appears: One of the biggest Oaks I’ve ever encountered, recently fallen to her death. She’s magnificent, heart breaking, beautiful. The farmers have come and axed her limbs and branches, arranging them in a circled gate around her, like a crown or a sacred threshold. As if to say, “A holy one has fallen here.”

I jump on what I hope is firm ground, stepping in slushy puddles between the icy grass, trying to get closer to her bark, her body, to her thick, mother-trunk. Closer to the pool created by the wake of her massive, uplifted root structure— a portal of frozen black water, beckoning me to the Underworld.

A gaggle of smaller root-fingers frame the great muddy mass of her underbelly like hair. This wall of earth and stone and root look like the vulvic visage of a mad Winter Hag. Suddenly, I know that’s exactly who she is. I’m in the presence of the Cailleach— the great Winter Goddess of the Celtic people. I’m in the domain of all Death Hags the world over, and most especially, to the particular ones indigenous to this land.

When we’ve been answered, we feel it. I bow and sit for a long time, contemplating the Land’s response to my wish to find (or be found by) a sense of home.

In our shared silence, I come to feel the most tender beauty, the most terrible truth, the most stunning paradox: That here, in the wake of Death, in the gully of Decay, a space is made for the waters of life to arrive and begin again. Frozen but incubating. Fallen but magnificent. Dead, and yet living. When Spring comes— and Spring always comes— this will be a place of great Rebirth.

And I am amazed and amazed at how at-home I feel. How welcoming such places are to me. Places of beautiful paradox where all is possible, all in good time. Places that remind me: the fallen and the fallow are life-givers. That deep in the shivering breath-caves of the Winter Hag lay the magic of the soft and supple Maiden Spring.

I wonder, where oh where in the natural world feels like home to you today, this moment, were you to go out looking to find home? Where might you be led, unexpectedly? What might happen, were you to say YES to the message carried to you by that old devil, Nostalgia?

If you long to come home to yourself and your life, if you long to know your place in the greater Dream of the Earth, or if you simply feel nostalgic these days, perhaps you will head out on a Home-finding Wander, knowing you needn’t ever go much farther than your own back yard. Knowing such journeys are sanctified— that home is out there waiting to find you, and waiting to be found within.

All you need to do is look for a threshold, cross it, and state your intention to find, or be found by, a sense of home.

If you’re new to sauntering (sacred strolls in Nature), check out my friendly guide to intentional nature wanders. Go gently and wildly towards all the good and scary things that call out to you.

This piece is lovingly dedicated to my Dad. Thank you , Dad, for making home a place of beauty, magic and comfort— despite our folly and the folly of the world . ~ “D1”