There is a beauty in words; the poignant words of a poet; the words of old now lost to time; the uncommon words that are cleverly chosen to weave into a writer’s tale. And there are emotional words used to convey feelings and some of these are what I think of as words of the soul.
A few months ago I wrote a post about the word “Saudade”, a Brazilian word with the emotional connotation of expressing a longing for something lost or that never was. In what seems to be a synchronicity of a spiritual nature, I have over the past few months found other words from various cultures and countries that are strikingly similar to Saudade in meaning. Each of these words represents an emotion of longing from deep within the soul for something lost or that never was.
Saudade describes a profound longing for the absence of something or someone deeply loved but with a repressed knowing that it may never be or may never return. It does not have an English translation but could be understood similarly to a feeling of nostalgia, but much more sorrowful and intense.
Setsunai is a Japanese word intended to convey a heartrending emotion described as the experienced feeling between bittersweet and painful. It roughly translates to ‘the pain of things’. It is likened to the heartache felt when something once bright has faded, the anguish of knowing it is now lost to memory. My fondest description of Setsunai is to say that the passage of time paints a thin line of sorrow across even the happiest of moments.
Hiraeth is a world of Welsh origin. It connotes the feeling of homesickness, and similar to Saudade, a deep longing for something or someone lost, gone, or departed. Like Setsunai it is a wistful feeling shaded with grief and the pain of regret. In its origins, it described the sadness of missing the Welsh culture and the people and ways of old, but today may also describe the yearning for someone or something permanently lost.
Sevdah, a word from Bosnia, derives from the word ‘sevda’, the Turkish word for love. Its meaning is to express amorous longing for someone you love. Sevdah comes from the Arabic word ‘sawda’ which has the meaning of melancholy, introspection, loss and black bile. In Bosnia today ‘Sevdah’ also lends its name to a form of folk music which is themed with sadness and emotional pain.
Karot’ is a word from Armenia also used to describe a feeling of longing or yearning for someone or something lost. It represents the feeling of an intense melancholic nostalgia. The origins of karot’ come from an Old Armenian word of similar spelling and pronunciation, which meant to wish, desire, or need.
From Romania comes the word Dor’ which is very similar to Saudade. It comes from the Latin word ‘dolus’ which means pain, and like saudade is also used today to express life situations beyond simply meaning a longing and aching feeling of missing someone or something. Like the Welsh word Hiraeth, it can also mean missing a place or time of life.
Sehnsucht is a German word which also like Saudade means longing, desire, yearning or craving. It represents thoughts and feelings of unfinished or imperfect aspects of life. It conveys the emotional hunger for an alternate ideal to provide completion and perfection. The literal meaning of Sehnsucht is a sickness caused by yearning desire. The Brothers Grimm wrote in their dictionary that Sehnsucht means “to grasp, to grieve, to demand something especially related to the pain and desire of love.”
In Russia, there is a word ‘Toska’ which is also similar to Saudade. As the word Hiraeth is claimed to denote what may only be known to the Welsh, Russians argue that Toska describes a feeling only known to Russians. Derived from Slavic roots it comes from an Old East Slavic word which meant a tightness of grief, worry, and sadness. In modern Russian language, the word represents a severe and spontaneous melancholy for a time gone by, or a sharp sadness for a distant place. According to Vladimir Nabokov, a Russian-American novelist and poet, the word Toska cannot be expressed adequately in an English word. He writes:
“No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”
Except for the word Toska, these words do not specifically refer to spirituality but for me these words express emotion from deep within the heart and they feel spiritual. Perhaps that is because I find it difficult to express to people the emotions that I genuinely experience in a spiritual context. Or perhaps it is because I have noticed that there is an inborn desire in the human psyche to possess or search for something that exists beyond us. For many, it is some form of love: taboo and forbidden, elusive or unreturned, another’s acceptance or approval, or an unrealistic ideal of what love is supposed to be. For others it is a fascination with the mystery and the unexplained such as the pursuit of ghosts, aliens, or bigfoot.
I’ve often heard the religious refer to the instinct for this subliminal search as a hole that can’t be filled without finding and accepting God. Maybe that is true, maybe that is what we are unconsciously looking for – the creator and our purpose for existence. While I may consider the notion that we are looking for God, I am not saying we are looking for any god that humans have created or one who some worship. I am referencing the sense of god in ourselves, the higher consciousness or higher self that knows all of everything but withholds it from us behind a veil of ego, dimension, and frequency. The higher consciousness that weaves into our human emotions and creates an unconscious longing for a distant place of home not accessible while in an earthly form. It can’t be experienced with any human sense, yet intuitively it is there like the imprint of a latent memory in our subconscious; it is there expressed in words of the soul – saudade, hiraeth, dor’, toska, sevdah, karot, sehnsucht, setsunai….the ‘whole’ that can’t be filled.
“The lost home that we are seeking is ourselves; It is the story we carry within our soul.” – Michael Meade
Unconventional Spirituality 