Have you ever done a piece on the human condition of belonging and homesickness from a global perspective? It’s something that every person and every culture tries to dismiss or laugh off to varying extent through either shame or the process of being shamed. We all belong somewhere and often that is where we are happiest.
Rachel, Greater Manchester
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Dear Rachel,
I felt compelled to reply to your question almost right away, because home is something which has always eluded me, and still does.
I’m writing to you from my flat in London, which is barely a mile from the hospital at which I was born. I don’t like it much, I’ll be honest: London makes me anxious more than anything else; the city feels like a grey weight on my shoulders.
But earlier this spring I spent a month living in Antwerp — a city I had never visited before — and felt light, alive, at peace. I’ve written letters before about my homesickness for Paris: a mean, dirty city, but one that produced in me a deep longing to return.
My dear friend Jenny, who is one of the wisest souls I know, told me recently of a memory she has of looking at herself in the mirror and feeling a profound sense of homesickness — yet, as she felt this, she was sitting in her childhood home.
So let’s start by doing away with the idea that homesickness is a yearning for a familiar place. And let’s acknowledge that we all — regardless of our childhoods — feel homesick. It does, as you said in your question, transcend cultures.
But where are we homesick for?
Well Rachel, your question prompted me to go somewhere deep, both literally and metaphorically. I hope you’ll come down with me.
Gandalf and the Balrog falling from the sky into the sea in The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers
Carl Jung suggested the existence of a collective unconscious: a shared pool of archetypes, symbols and images that seem to exist across people, time and cultures. I’ve always been somewhat skeptical of this idea or, at least, felt unable to access this store myself. None of my dreams or ideas seemed in anyway connected to something collective. Honestly, my entire unconscious was out of reach.
That was until just a few weeks ago, when I was listening to the mythologist Michael Meade (thank you Miki for the tip!) tell the old Native American creation myth of Atahensic, the Sky Goddess.
At the beginning of all things, she ripped a hole in the sky and fell through it down towards the deep dark ocean below. As she fell between the sky and the sea, two geese swept down and carried her safely onto the back of a giant turtle. Searching for land, Atahensic asked other animals to swim down to the bottom of the deep dark sea and collect mud from the ocean floor, which she used to fashion the earth as we know it today.
The world, then, was made by creatures diving down and retrieving gifts, which they offered up for the collective good. This, Meade explains, is a metaphor for our own individual potential to bring forth gifts to help our wider community.
And then he added that in mythology, the deep dark ocean is a recurring symbol for the unconscious: it is where we must dive to find those gifts.
Well, Rachel, as soon as I heard that, I leapt over to my pile of used sketchbooks and rifled through them. The images below are panels from short stories I drew between 2020 and 2024. None of them are connected, they were drawn months or years apart as completely separate stories.
If you bought one or both of my short story collections, you might recognise some of the panels.
Each of these stories ends with someone falling, diving, sinking into deep bodies of water — and in that moment finding truth.
Looking at these images I realised that my unconscious has been speaking to me all along — and telling me (and telling you through my drawings) exactly where to find it.
This is Big Magic at work!
It’s a shame that, as you say Rachel, we dismiss and shrug off homesickness as a childish complaint; for we are all homesick, we are all yearning to find where we belong. But allow me to gently suggest that home isn’t a place we can travel to by train or by plane. It is not on Tripadvisor. Instead, home is with us always: like the turtle in the story, we carry it with us wherever we go.
The problem is we cannot access it. Like the Garden of Eden in another creation myth, we’ve been locked out. But my experience with my drawings makes me believe that creating something, making art — whatever that looks like to you — might be the compass we are looking for.
It speaks to us in yearnings and ancient symbols, calling us home.
Until another Sunday soon,
