Hiraeth

I love words and have a wide reading vocabulary, but my spoken vocabulary is limited.  Sadly limited.  I'm frequently reduced to describing a common object:  "Please hand me that...thing with a handle."  When the girls were little, I said things like, "You with the freckles."  Knowing the definitions of words and being able to call them up when I need them is a paradox that frustrates me.  

 Every once in a while, I find a foreign word that so aptly describes a feeling or emotion, but has no English translation.

I read an article in The Guardian several weeks ago that had this paragraph: 

 "There is a Welsh word, hiraeth, which means something like a longing of the soul to come home to the place where your spirit lives. I’m pretty sure there is no Yorkshire term that expresses the same idea – it’s a little too lyrical for Yorkshire –but it is a word that I understand innately, and a yearning that is present in most of the characters I have ever created: home sometimes a tangible place, sometimes a psychological one."  (source)

Definition:  hiraeth m (uncountable)

1. homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, or for a home which may have never been
2. an intense form of longing or nostalgia, wistfulness
3. the grief for the lost places of your past    (source)

I wondered how to pronounce it and found these three similar versions.  Will I ever use this word in conversation?  Probably not, but I love it anyway and have added it to a list of foreign words that have no  precise English synonym but which describe an emotion we all recognize. 

----Hiraeth will make a great art journal entry.   My mind is accumulating a number of places I've longed for over the years (and still do, of course):  the porch swing at my maternal grandmother's house, the "sleeping porch" at my paternal grandparents' home, a valley filled with purple loosestrife in the Montana Rocky Mountains that enchanted my six-year-old self as I sat on a boulder looking down at the field of purple....  Wow, the list goes on and on.

How about you?