On Friday, I woke up sad. I woke up sad, and then I did a thing guaranteed to make me sadder: I read the news. Even worse, I read the news and checked my Facebook feed, which offered up a buffet of anxiety, finger-pointing, hurt, and derision. My sadness got sadder. I decided to take it to the woods.

I love being in the woods—or anywhere in nature, really. That doesn’t mean that being outside chases sadness away, though. For me, solo time in nature usually works like this: whatever I need to feel, I’m gonna feel the hell out of it.

And so I walked sad, sad, sad and heavy, heavy, heavy through the forest. I didn’t try to cheer myself up. Some seeds only germinate in darkness, and I want my life to be a whole garden, an entire ecosystem, not a monocrop. My patience is far from bottomless, but I figured I could spend a day in wordless darkness, trusting something to emerge.

So I walked slowly, sat by a creek, stayed even when I found myself side by side with a spider and then a snake. I met an old oak tree, his trunk rotted open. Someone had shoved a straw and a plastic lid into the space where I imagined his heart might be, and the absurdity of someone seeing a beautiful tree and choosing to fill it with trash made me cry. I lifted lid and straw and carried them sticky-fingered through the woods. I could make one tiny thing right.

When I threw them away, I felt a sense of completion. Like maybe that small act was the whole reason I’d gone to the woods. I headed back to my car. As I began to drive, I clicked at random on a podcast from my rather long feed. You’re Going to Die turned on. The title of the episode? “The Long Dark.” In it, psychotherapist Frances Weller shared a word that I’d never heard before: the Inuit word qarrtsiluni, which according to Weller, means something like “sitting in the darkness together, quietly, waiting for something creative to burst through.”

I need to confess here that I don’t have any knowledge of Inuit language. A few sources online seem to confirm this definition, but it’s not clear how these sources came by their information. And yet, the thought that there might theoretically be a word for this thing that I was doing together with spiders and trees and that there might be cultures in which people intentionally do this together and value it so much that they have a word for it felt deeply soothing and hopeful to me.

Language and culture mutually shape one another. I found myself wondering what the presence—and absence—of particular words says about American culture. If we want to change for the better, what do we need to be able to say (and think and hold and sit in) that we aren’t yet saying?

Today, I let that question take me down a delicious rabbit hole, googling words from other languages for which there are no English equivalents. In the process, I found Kristin Wong’s wonderful Substack, Untranslatable, and words I learned about there (plus a few I already knew or learned about elsewhere on the Internet) acted as the starting place for the poem I’m about to share with you. I wanted this poem to speak in some way to the moment we are in —but I wanted it to do so with a wider lens (and a richer vocabulary) than the one American culture offers up. I tried to achieve this by drawing on words from languages that I do not speak, so please note that the stanzas after each word are not intended as proper definitions (though a couple of them might more or less function that way). Instead, they reflect the feeling I had or the images, words, or impressions I was left with after reading about these words for which we have no English equivalents.

So here it is, a thing (besides trash removal) that emerged from my day in the dark…

Words for This

Boketto

     serenely doing nothing,
     gaze vacant

Merak

     simple pleasure pulls you
     into the heart of everything

Tūrangawaewae

      a place to stand,
      connected, empowered, home

Minga

     to come together
     and act as one

Ubuntu

     I am
     because we are

Hózhó

     our feet, melody,
     meant to walk in tender harmony

Schadenfreude

     though our arms push
     and our tongues pull apart

Komorebi

     light still filters through the leaves,
     there is beauty, even here

Hiraeth, Sehnsucht, Saudade

     can you feel them both—
     the ache, the joy?

Qarrtsiluni

     can we sit now, elbows touching
     in the togethering of darkness,
     midwives, our hands open to catch
     the unknown?
     

Photo by Antony Hyson Seltran on Unsplash

The Prompt

Those of you who have been following 100 Poems for awhile are used to my poetry prompts by now. Those of you who have arrived here from Incurably Human, on the other hand, not so much. So let me say this: a prompt is simply an invitation. There’s no dress code to this party, though. If a prompt inspires you to write a journal entry rather than a poem, great! If it inspires you to ponder or notice something you wouldn’t otherwise have pondered or noticed, how marvelous! Choose your own adventure, dears. Or skip this part. Okay, for the non-skippers, here are some questions for you to play around inside of . . .

What is something you wish you could say with a single word that instead requires longer phrases, sentences, or even paragraphs?

What English words (or words in your native tongue) do you think reveal the most about modern culture? About this precise moment in history?

Do a google search and take a peek at one of the many lists of words that don’t exist in English. Notice which words pull, intrigue, or challenge you the most. What is it about these words that provokes that response within you? How do—or don’t—these words fit in the culture (and subcultures) you live in? If three of these words could be offered to your culture/society/family/friend group/workplace/church/HOA/bowling league as gifts, and the presence of these words would then catalyze an increased presence of the things the words point to, what words would make the best gifts?

As you explore these questions, play the classic game of hot and cold. When a question or answer or linguistic rabbit hole feels warm, go there. Explore more. When it turns colder, that’s okay. Circle back to the last warm thing or move on to the next question. Follow your curiosity. Play. We need darkness, but we also need fun.

As always, I would be thrilled to read your poems and reflections. Please share whatever comes to you in the comments thread! I’m so glad you’re here.

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P.S. An update on my attempt to merge the archives of 100 Poems and Incurably Human. Unfortunately, for reasons I don’t fully understand, I was only able to bring over the 30 or so most recent posts from Incurably Human—which means that 100+ posts (dating all the way back to July 2020, when we were a small group of bewildered Covid-19 long-haulers, banding together for comfort) didn’t make it here. I have these all saved in a massive Word document. So if there’s some darling soul out there with long Covid or another chronic illness who wants all the words I wrote to keep myself going through the first hard years of illness, let me know, and I’ll get them to you!