Early afternoon on this cold and partly
cloudy Winter day. Carol is back from the hairdresser and you had a good
soaking bath after one of your five day a week forty minutes exercises (since
Christmas). The stats are on Fitbit and your iPhone 6. – Amorella
1310
hours. This earlier morning the BBC had Science News on the breakthrough on
gravity waves. It makes me wonder if the eternal soul transforms into or
through gravity waves when it moves from No-where to Here.
You are having trouble. First, you wrote ‘immortal’
then decided on ‘eternal’; second, you say the soul ‘transforms’ and ‘moves’.
That’s not how it works in here. You want to avoid ‘romantic’ thinking,
thinking that is embodied with imagination. To change the tone, as used with ‘eternal’
and ‘moves’ in particular, I like a Portuguese word in/on which a soul, (in
these books), might float: “Saudade”. We’ll use the article you discovered
online the other day.
** **
“Saudade” – A Word for the
Third Culture Kid
07
Tuesday
Feb 2012
Posted
by Marilyn in Cross-cultural
Adjustment, Life, Third
Culture Kid
“Saudade”
It’s
described as a unique word with no equivalent in English. It’s origin is
Portuguese and it was first used in the 13th Century. It is a longing, a
melancholy, a desire for what was. It is “Saudade”.
Many
immigrants and refugees search for words that adequately describe the peculiar
longing for what they left behind. Not the war and evil that is a relief to
escape, but the land, the people, the food – all that encompasses that which is
home. Doctors and nurses working with large populations of immigrants and
refugees often simply put it down as “depression”.
A
health center I know desperately tried to find out through a survey what
percentage of their immigrant and refugee patients had depression. The survey
was unsuccessful. It did not reflect the narrative that these health
care providers were hearing from patients.
One
day a woman from Haiti said to them, “Have you ever thought about asking
patients if they are homesick.” They looked at her in surprise. No, they had
not. With a simple change of a word, they felt they were better able to get to
the heart of the feeling. But is it depression? Depression is defined as a
“severe despondency and dejection, accompanied by feelings of hopelessness and
inadequacy.” That is not what immigrants are describing.
What
they describe are feelings so deep that you can scarcely give words to them.
Your throat catches. You experience an intense, but wordless, longing and
desire. How do I know this? Because I have experienced it, first hand. What we
long to describe is Saudade.
The
famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something
that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present,
a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or
poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness. A. F. G. Bell In
Portugal of 1912.
Many
know that they will never go back to the place where they feel most at home.
They realistically accept this, but not without saudade. A Portuguese
friend of mine recently told me about her father. He is in his nineties and
came to the United States with a large family over fifty years ago. A year ago,
he went back to Portugal for what everyone thought would be a short trip. Now
over a year later, he is still there. All the years he was in the United
States, he experienced saudade. He has returned so he no longer has to
experience this intense longing; he is back in a place where he is viscerally
at home, in a land that he loves.
Third
culture kids often struggle to give voice to their longing. Well aware that
they are not from the country or countries where they were raised, they still
have all the connections and feelings that represent home. When trying to voice
these, others look on with glazed eyes. Just recently, someone said to me, “But
you’re not an immigrant! You’re American!” The tone was accusing. It was meant
to be. What was unsaid was, “Give it a rest! We know you grew up overseas. Big
deal. You’re American and you’re living in America.”
Ah,
yes… but I have saudade. I have that longing for something that “does
not and cannot exist.” I know that it cannot be. And on my good days, it is
well hidden under the culture and costume of which I am now living. But on my
more difficult days, it struggles to find voice only to find that explaining is
too difficult. Finding the word gives voice to these longings.
I have often been looked at
with impatience. “Third culture kids are not that different!” says the skeptic.
“We all have times of longing,” but I would argue, gently, that our experience
is different. We are neither of one world
nor the other, but between. Our earliest memories are shaped by sights, sounds,
and smells that we now experience only in brief travels or through movies and
television. All of those physical elements that shaped our early forays into
this world are of another world. And so we experience saudade. And the
simple discovery of a word gives meaning to those feelings, and can validate
and heal.
http://communicatingacrossboundariesblogDOTcom/2012/02/07/saudade-a-word-for-the-third-culture-kid/
** **
So, to the
point, the human soul ‘line of emotional reason’ stems first from what was (the
soul’s experience) before entering the human or marsupial or who or what ever. The
human soul, upon taking in a human heartanmind has saudade on what it had
before which is sometimes misaligned by humans as perfection. Perfection, in
here, does not exist as a reality no matter what universe or place one finds
one’s self. I, the Amorella, can say here is that the soul is not-empty before
it takes on a human heartanmind to protect it more after physical life than
during. It longs for the not-empty (before) as well as it learns to experience
a similar feeling in human beings as they grow and mature. Emotions have a root
in the greater reality of the Before, the Living and the Dead. Emotions are as
a designed signature, an image, if you will, that follows soul reflection in
the heart’s lens; something throughout and beyond the margins of light and
shadows and forms and substance, a design that extends saudade. – Amorella
1345
hours. I wrote this down in a stumbling hesitation from time to time. My
concern is that I am guilty of mistranslation Amorella.
Emotional design extends saudade. Emotional
design induced the ‘Big Bang’ so to speak. Do not attempt to reduce this
concept to basic human/marsupial emotions. This particular definition, ‘emotional
design’ will make itself known in the books and blog. Post. – Amorella
1351
hours. I have this sudden desire to come up with better words than ‘emotional
design’.
This is a direct measure of your arrogance, boy. –
Amorella
1353
hours. This opens a much broader can of worms in which I see some humor, both
light and dark.
Now you are cooking with gas, boy. -
Amorella
1654
hours. We are home from Penn
Station, Mike’s Car Wash and Kroger’s. I need to begin with the standard
definitions on emotional design.
** **
emotional – adjective
•
arousing and passionate; characterized by intense feeling: an emotional
speech [such as a strong-willed as well as reasoned debate on the subject
individual and group freedoms within a social community of any size]
design – noun
purpose, planning, or
intention that exists or is thought to exist behind an action, fact, or
material object: the appearance of design in the universe.
Selected and edited by Amorella from basic Oxford/American
software
** **
1711
hours. This helps me tremendously. Thank you, Amorella.
In here the soul has an innate (if you will)
purpose to safely hold and carry a heartansoul from harm after physical
human/marsupial/other death. As such, by its nature it is a womb-like object by
purpose, planning and intention. This is not the soul’s singular nature. The
Oversoul [Emerson-like] is as a Choir beyond the scope demonstrated in a Greek
tragedy. The setting may also be a comedy or something else altogether. Capiche?
– Amorella
1725
hours. The intent here is for my limited ‘understanding’ not ‘knowledge’ as such?
Yes. These books and blog are to promote
a fictional understanding of the broader and higher conscious sense in human-like
condition of “Being”. Existing in a
higher human-like state always has a surrounding of Saudade. Amorella
1733
hours. Uh, this is a bit beyond my capacity to write on even in a fiction. –
rho
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