I invite you to learn to speak the names of your non-human kin with words that were also spoken by your ancient ancestors, taste the same foods they enjoyed and nourished their bodies with, sing their songs and revive their blessings for the waters, wind and mountain peaks. Within these threads of your ancestral past you can awaken dormant seeds of knowing that weave through your bones, into your heart and through the fabric of your soul.

Hiraeth is a Welsh term that does not translate to English. It conveys a blend of homesickness, nostalgia and longing for a place that one has never been before in this particular lifetime. “Hiraeth” is a pull on the heart that conveys a distinct feeling of missing something irretrievably lost in the physical world.

Hiraeth also gives a name to that sense of incompleteness you feel when you’re acutely aware of something missing in your life. Something you’ve left behind in the deep past – a home, a sense of feeling at home in yourself, an out-grown dream – or maybe an ideal you’ve invented that can never be realised, or a hope that perpetually eludes you as the future unfolds. At its core, hiraeth boils down to an awareness of the presence of absence, kindling a feeling in which pain and joy are braided too tightly to untangle.

Words and language are indeed powerful forms of magic and from the little bit I have learned of indigenous languages from Turtle Island (and now also having begun to learn some Gaelic and Welsh words) I can say that there is a significant difference in the type of magic wielded within their languages as compared to English.

The English language is structured to re-enforce anthropocentric delusions of grandeur, relegating all our non-human relations on earth to the demeaning status of being an “it”. Older languages with an animistic ethos of deep belonging to place do not refer to the trees, or the birds, or the fish, or the river or the mountain as an “it”, they refer to those beings as kin.

These variations in language in how we refer to the beings we share this world with may seem inconsequential to the indoctrinated self-important statist that trusts “The Science”, but ask yourself this, how much easier is it to train human beings to be willing to poison a river, or carve into a mountain for lithium or clear cut an ancient forest for profit when you raise them describing those beings as inanimate objects, rather than referring to them in the same way you would refer to a sister or a grandfather?

Reconnecting to your ancestral knowledge and awakening ancient re-membering is a path that aligns you with the powerful magic that is unlocked when one takes the time to learn the names and forgotten languages of the rivers, ancient trees and mountain peaks again. It is the magic that the ancient ones wielded when they studied the stars, the sky, the mountain spring and learned to listen to their secrets, connecting in communion, giving thanks, receiving their gifts of wisdom. We to can embark on such a path if we awaken the dormant seeds deep within and nurture them to set down roots in our day to day routines, habits, perspectives and traditions.