I implored both sky and water for some similar release, transformation, and peace.

Excerpt from Sejal Shah's review - Ritual as Resolution: Amarnath Ravva's American Canyon:

That summer, everything changed in my life. I left New York, a job, a relationship—it was a life I had wanted a great deal, but which was ultimately just not working. I packed up my apartment and office, and boarded a plane to India, where I would travel and live for the next several months. One October evening at an ashram in Rishikesh, a city in Northern India in the foothills of the Himalayas, I waded into the Ganga, tossed flower petals, placed a divo (a small flame in a vessel fashioned from leaves) into the river, and greeted the holy water rushing over my feet—a makeshift birthday ceremony I hoped would help unmoor the past and open new paths into the future.  While not a specific Hindu ceremony, this ritual connected me to two earlier, improvised art rituals I undertook in New York, when I began to dismantle my life there. I flung smooth stones gathered from the Rhode Island shore—as well as daisies, dried petals, shells, and even a silver ring into the East River. I had walked the few blocks from my apartment to the river and stood, before emptying my pockets of petals and shells and the silver ring—before flinging all, one by one, in some sort of prayerful gesture. I implored both sky and water for some similar release, transformation, and peace.

Nostalgia is anywhere but here.

NPR, on nostalgia. 

For an individual, nostalgia is a function of memory. But for a culture, nostalgia is a kind of travel. It is about somewhere else, somewhere different but vaguely recognizable, another place to look at the sunset. If we were really looking for a time when things felt easier, after all, we wouldn't love times of war and social upheaval; we'd be making shows about the dot-com boom. But we don't, because it isn't different enough yet. It has to be elsewhere; it cannot be here, because we cannot be here, not always, not every day.
What's eternal about nostalgia is the same thing that's eternal about travel: It will always happen, not because what's out there is so special that it will pull us out through the windows, but because what's in here is, at least some of the time, so difficult that it will push us out through the door.