Here it comes again...

You ever get that feeling?  Suddenly you feel an emotion, and it reminds you of when you felt it last, but your language doesn’t have a word for it?  And it’s almost physical, because you can’t put a word to it, so you’re obliged just to experience it, and muse on it?

Low today.  One of the nastier sides of feeling low is that it saps you of the energy to do the very things that would make you feel better.   Or at least, that’s how it works for me.  Still, the blogging world helped: hardly anyone I read regularly had written anything, so the computer offered no distractions.  I forced myself to go out for a walk, something I haven’t had time to do in a week.

It was sunny.  After the winter’s silence, I could hear…storks clacking their beaks, nightingales (Spanish nightingales are a sub-species of the European nightingale, largely distinguished by their habit of singing during the daytime as well as the night), blue/great tits, the occasional cuckoo.  No hoopoes yet, which is strange.

And then it happened.  I got this physical feeling in my chest which was an emotion for which I don’t really have a neat definition.  It’s not depression, anger, happiness.  I wonder sometimes how limited we are in our understanding of emotions by our native language.  Consider that whilst English has a word for children who lose their parents,  there is no such term for parents who lose their child(ren).  There ought to be.  We have one word, love, for a range of connections we might feel for people, animals and places.

But I also find it curious, that when you don’t have a word for a feeling, the experience is much more physical, somehow.  Like words distance us from our feelings.  I know what I’m saying is contradictory.

So I was walking along a track, intending to lose myself in some woods somewhere, but not sure which ones, when it happened.   A kind of heaviness in the chest, which was also tinged with sweetness.  Sadness and nostalgia were present, as were panic and fear.  But also a feeling of holiday and almost, but not quite, relief.  The sadness side of it made me feel very small and insignificant, but precisely because of that, also part of and connected to what I was walking through.    I needed to sit by a stream, and lo and behold, I found a stream.  I sat there for a while, by a tiny fall of water, no more than a twelve inch drop, and tried to let the sound of the water soothe me.  I think it did, a little. 

I climbed the hill opposite, following animal tracks, and found some magnificent old oaks.  I sat under them for a while too, looking across the valley.  The feeling continued.  I tried again to define it.  A mixture of fear, sadness, relief and connection with my immediate surroundings, together with this strange sense of being on holiday.  I know when I last felt this:  it was when I first moved here, fresh from a relationship breakup.

When I got home, I finally started work on the garden, for the first time this year.  I have missed a lot of things about my old life.

*The sound track to this post, you must imagine, is Annie Lennox singing “Here comes the rain again”.  Wish I knew how to embed videos.