The Land of Heart’s Desire

Querencias and Dreams of Return

a deep well of longing 

The title is taken from a phrase coined by William Butler Yeats, “The Land of Hearts Desire”, to signify the personalized home-place / heart-space which we all seek, our querencia, as it is called here in the mountains of New Mexico. 

The loss of such places, and the yearning to rediscover them and to assign meaning to new places, is a crisis in our ever more placeless society. It is a root of our modern alienation. As Scottish writer Alastair McIntosh puts it, “The great disease of our times is meaninglessness.”

 Like many other people scattered across the globe, my family origins lie along the western fringe of the holy islands on the fringe of Europe. springing from a desire to see places that have such ancestral significance to so many, which many of us dream of but have never seen. 

Our grandparents’ grandparents knew the names and the meanings of these places. Long after they were driven from hills and forests they had walked for millennia, these places still exist, even if the names are forgotten and the old power lies silent. 

The poems and images have to do with place and its modern negation-- placelessness. They are about the dilemma that in order to have material progress, modern societies seemingly find themselves compelled to continually erase the past. 

I seek meaning from those lost places that the modern world has displaced and found no replacement for. They are about the significance of a single tree, of a ruined house, of old fields and faces in the grass. They about standing like stone, about going to water. 

“Let what can be shaken, be shaken
And the unshakeable remain.
The Inaccessible Pinnacle is not inaccessible
So does Alba surpass the warriors
As a graceful ash tree surpasses a thorn
Or the deer who moves sprinkled with the dewfall
Is far above all other beasts
- Its horns glittering to Heaven itself.”
Hugh MacDiarmid, Direadh III