Happy Lunar New Year to those who celebrate!
Because today is the Lunar New Year ( “Tsagaan Sar” in Mongolian), I cannot help but reflect on this holiday and my homeland. In the past, I’ve spent many lunar new year’s outside of Mongolia, but each time it happens, it is the same: I find myself longing to be with my family and relatives, longing for buuz (dumplings), longing for the sunrise watching on the first day of the year, longing for milk tea and in short, a whole lot of longing for my homeland.
But I’m not sure ‘longing’ is even the right word. I’m reminiscing the sweet times gone by, I am hopeful that times like these will happen again, and I am also profoundly grateful that I have this special of a holiday in my life. Longing doesn’t exactly cover all of these, but it is the closest I can get.
Several years ago, I visited my hometown, a small town in the Khovd province of Mongolia, where I was born, and it lighted up something deep within me. Up until then, I’d lived in the belief that knowledge and growth as a human always come from novelty and new adventures. And while that can be true, that trip to my hometown made me realize that what is familiar and what is home can also have much to teach us. There is something deeply nourishing and life-affirming about connecting with the land from which one came forth.
More than any specific memory, what I remember most vividly from that trip is the deep peace I felt as I sat outside in the sun, looking at the primal, pristine land – the land that is so old, so dear and so beloved to me. I just felt my entire being take a long exhale and I could feel my spirit revelling in the peace of the homeland it belongs to.
There are so many beautiful places in this beloved world, and so many of them fill me with such beautiful emotions but it is not quite the same. I think only your spiritual homeland can fill you with such ineffable peace. On this day, I am reflecting on what Mongolia means to me and how it has shaped – and continues to shape – my life in important and irreplaceable ways.
Because of all of this, these lines from The Mill on the Floss have been coming back to me, over and over again. The last line, especially, speaks to the very core of my being. I love the tenderness and truth of those words.
“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass, the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows, the same redbreasts that we used to call ‘God’s birds’ because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?” ― George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
Do you also have a place that feels like your spiritual homeland? I’d love to hear from you!
PS: Here is a picture I took in the suburb of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia back in 2020.
