A Cottage in the Forest
Recently, I received an email from my brother containing a link to a film made about a small village in Herefordshire, on the edge of the Forest of Dean.
He sent it because, like me, he remembers how—back in 1964—our parents bought a derelict forester’s cottage there for weekend and holiday use.
The cottage had no road to it, only a forest track. The nearest neighbour was half a mile away. There was no running water, just a well; no electricity, only oil and gas lamps. And yet my father had a dream of restoring that little cottage and making it a retreat for our family.
Our main home was no more than a fifty-minute drive away, so we spent holidays, weekends, and many summer evenings at the cottage. With the help of friends and relatives, it was gradually restored and made cosy and habitable. We used lamps for light, a roaring fire in the inglenook for warmth, and a chemical loo in a shed in the garden.
Despite the inconveniences, this remote hideaway on the forest edge became our sanctuary — a place of peace and wild beauty that I came to love deeply.
A Second Home, A Second Childhood
Years later, when my siblings and I had married and left home, I continued to use the cottage as a retreat until my parents decided to sell it. Loath to let it go, my husband and I bought it and transformed it into a family home. We installed electricity and running water, extended the property, and made a proper road. Our own children grew up there, blessed with the same woodland magic that had shaped my own childhood.
Eventually, we too sold it and moved on. But as I wrote to my brother in reply to that email, a huge part of my soul remains there. Watching the film stirred such wonderful memories and an aching longing — a yearning for home.
The Universal Ache for Belonging
This sense of yearning is not unusual. Many of us look back to the places of our childhood with affection and wish we could turn back time. Others feel a pull toward their ancestral roots, a connection to the motherland even if they have never stood upon its soil.
I feel that tug strongly, descended as I am from Irish ancestors who came to England during the later years of the potato famine. A good portion of my DNA is Irish — and so too, it seems, is my soul.
This deep longing for connection shapes our stories and makes us who we are. William Wordsworth captured this beautifully in Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, where the memory of a beloved place sustained him through the “din of towns and cities.”
The Deeper Longing Beneath Every Longing
Over time, I have come to see that beneath all our nostalgic longings lies a deeper one. Every ache for home, every yearning for what is lost, is a signpost pointing us toward something greater.
For there is a homecoming that puts to rest all other desires — the discovery that the separation we feel from God is an illusion.
To find our home in God is to awaken to a new perception, a conscious awareness that the distance we imagined was never real. In discovering the divine ground of our own soul, we find the unshakeable peace that assures us, in Julian’s words, all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.
Nothing Loved Is Ever Lost
Such awakening can feel fragile at first. Having lived so long under the illusion of separation, we naturally slip back into old ways of seeing. Then sadness and yearning return as memories of places and people resurface.
But as we deepen in the awareness of our oneness with God, we begin to realise that nothing we have truly loved is ever lost. Everything dear to us lives on in the eternal Presence — held safely within God, and therefore within the deepest core of our being.
Our linear minds will never fully grasp the mystery. Yet once we discover our true home in God, all other longings find their rest. The great promise is fulfilled: all tears shall be wiped away