Near the end of The Essential Anandamayi Ma, the theme of homesickness strikes a forceful chord:

Question: Why do people run after material happiness?

Mātājī [Anandamayi Ma]: You know this happiness from experience, and hence your question. But God is gracious and makes you see that this so-called happiness is not happiness. He kindles discontent and anguish in you, which is due to the want of communion with the Divine. Worldly happiness is derived from the countless manifestations of God. People talk and marvel about those who renounce the world, but in actual fact it is you yourself who have renounced everything. What is this “everything”? God! Leaving Him aside, everyone is literally practicing supreme renunciation. (Laughter). It is only natural that the sense of want should awaken. Even in the midst of comforts and pleasures one feels homesick in a foreign land. There is distress even in happiness, one’s possessions are not really one’s own—this is what He causes man to feel. It is said, is it not, that on being hit one recovers one’s senses, one learns by receiving blows.

When He manifests Himself as worldly happiness, one does not feel
contented, for along with it He appears as the sense of want.

Here, Anandamayi Ma (Mataji) invites each of us to experience, deep within our hearts, that feeling, that great ache of homesickness. “I am not at home. I’ve never been at home. Even in my worldly happiness, even right now, I feel discontent.”

When you understand at the deepest level that nothing worldly can satisfy you, then the spiritual path opens up underfoot. And what a dear beginning it is. Be sweet to it. Follow this longing to its very end.