Caterpillar edging to moth

I mean, by such flightiness, something that feels unsatisfied at the center of my life – that makes me shaky, fickle, inquisitive, and hungry.  I could call it a longing for home and not be far wrong.  Or I could call it a longing for whatever supersedes, if it cannot pass through, understanding…In my outward appearance and life habits I hardly change … But at the center: I am shaking; I am flashing like tinsel.

— Mary Oliver, Long Life

Image: Chad Wys
Title: Barbara Guest, excerpt from “Passage"

Or I could call it a longing

 Cianalas: homesickness, longing, loneliness, melancholy

A’ dol dhachaigh: going home(wards)

Image: Found
Title: Mary Oliver

The past and the future pressing so hard on either side

My life, the most truthful one, is unrecognizable, extremely interior, and there is no single word that gives it meaning.

-Clarice Lispector
 
Image: Kerry Murray, Penhas Douradas, Serra da Estrela
Title: Evelyn Waugh

Both eager and afraid to fall in

That uncrossable gulf between home and away.

-Steve Himmer, excerpt from The Importance of Unwritten Postcards

Image: Jan and Hubert Van Eyck, L’Agneau Mystique (The Ghent Altarpiece), 1432
Title: Rainer Maria Rilke, from Early Journals

The most mysterious of domains

   We are homesick most for the places we have never known.

   -Carson McCullers

     Image: Georg Bartisch, Ophthalmodouleia (1583)

               Title: Paul Eluard

Consider incompleteness as a verb

That uncrossable gulf between home and away.

-Steve Himmer, excerpt from The Importance of Unwritten Postcards

Image: Plate photographed through tissue. The frontispiece to The Giant-Killer: or, The Battle Which All Must Fight, by A.L.O.E. (Charlotte Maria Tucker, 1856). Original from Oxford University. Digitized July 12, 2006.
Title: Anne Carson, Plainwater