obscure sorrows

The awareness that you are not at home in the wilderness...

25 Emotions People Feel, But Can't Explain

1. Sonder

The realization that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own - populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness - an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you'll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

2. Opia

The ambiguous intensity of looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable.

3. Monachopsis
The subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place
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4. Énouement

The bittersweetness of having arrived in the future, seeing how things turn out, but not being able to tell your past self.

5. Vellichor

The strange wistfulness of used bookshops - filled with thousands of old books you'll never have time to read, each of which is itself locked in its own era, bound and dated and papered over like an old room the author abandoned years ago, a hidden annex littered with thoughts left just as they were on the day they were captured.
6. Rubatosis
The unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat.
7. Kenopsia
The eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that is usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet.
A school hallway in the evening, an unlit office on a weekend, vacant fairgrounds - an emotional afterimage that makes it seem not just empty but hyper-empty, with a total population in the negative, who are so conspicuously absent they glow like neon signs.
8. Mauerbauertraurigkeit
The inexplicable urge to push people away, even close friends who you really like.
9. Jouska
A hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head.
10. Chrysalism
The amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm. Listening to waves of rain pattering against the roof like an argument upstairs, whose muffled words are unintelligible but whose crackling release of built-up tension you understand perfectly.
11. Vemödalen
The frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist.
12. Anecdoche
A conversation in which everyone is talking, but nobody is listening.
13. Ellipsism
A sadness that you'll never be able to know how history will turn out.
14. Kuebiko
A state of exhaustion inspired by acts of senseless violence.
15. Lachesism
The desire to be struck by disaster – to survive a plane crash, or to lose everything in a fire.
16. Exulansis
The tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it - whether through envy or pity or simple foreignness, which allows it to drift away from the rest of your life story, until the memory itself feels out of place, almost mythical, wandering restlessly in the fog, no longer even looking for a place to land.
17. Adronitis
Frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone.
18. Rückkehrunruhe
The feeling of returning home after an immersive trip only to find it fading rapidly from your awareness.
19. Nodus Tollens
The realization that the plot of your life doesn't make sense to you anymore.
20. Onism
The frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time.
Imagine standing in front of the departures screen at an airport, flickering over with strange place names like other people's passwords, each representing one more thing you'll never get to see before you die - and all because, as the arrow on the map helpfully points out, you are here.
21. Liberosis
The desire to care less about things. To loosen your grip on your life, to stop glancing behind you every few steps, afraid that someone will snatch it from you before you reach the end zone - rather to hold your life loosely and playfully, like a volleyball, keeping it in the air, with only quick fleeting interventions, bouncing freely in the hands of trusted friends, always in play.
22. Altschmerz
Weariness with the same old issues that you've always had – the same boring flaws and anxieties that you've been gnawing on for years.
23. Occhiolism
The awareness of the smallness of your perspective.
24. Heartworm
A relationship or friendship that you can't get out of your head, which you thought had faded long ago but is still somehow alive and unfinished, like an abandoned campsite whose smoldering embers still have the power to start a forest fire.
25. Anemoia
Nostalgia for a time you've never known.
Imagine stepping through the frame into a sepia-tinted haze, where you could sit on the side of the road and watch the locals passing by. Who lived and died before any of us arrived here, who sleep in some of the same houses we do, who look up at the same moon, who breathe the same air, feel the same blood in their veins - and live in a completely different world.
See more at Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

on the ‘wild’, human imagination and tribal peoples

My sentiments too...humans are part of the natural life of the Earth

"How the western concept of the wild and conservation policies have affected tribal peoples, by Joanna Eede

http://www.survivalinternational.org/articles/3174-wilderness-the-human-imagination-and-tribal-peoples

The grasslands of America’s Great Plains stretch for miles across the sagebrush steppe of South Dakota as far as the Black Hills. It was here, in 1980, that acres of spruce trees and creek-carved canyons were declared a ‘wilderness’ reserve by the U.S. government.
To the indigenous North American Indians, however, the area was not wild; nor was it a ‘wilderness’. ‘We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, the winding streams with tangled growth as ’wild’,’ said Luther Standing Bear of the Oglala Lakota Sioux people. ‘To us it was tame. Only to the white man was nature a wilderness.’ In a few words, Luther Standing Bear had articulated two very different approaches to the natural world.

Hupa fisherman, US. 
© Edward Curtis

The concept of ‘wilderness’ has long existed, in Western culture, as a place of pristine natural beauty — unpolluted by human life: an Eden sanctuary, an antidote to urban living. During the 19th century such ideas were reflected in art of the time. ‘In wilderness is the preservation of the world,’ wrote Henry Thoreau. For naturalist John Muir, communion with nature served to wash his spirit ‘clean’, while the photographer Ansel Adams’ photographs of Yosemite national park famously contained no sign of human life.

In attributing other-worldly qualities to nature, however, and in seeing them as sacred spaces where God lives but man must not, ideas developed which were arguably at the root of conservation policies. ‘For decades, the idea of ’wilderness’ has been a fundamental tenet of the environmental movement,’ wrote the historian William Cronon. Such policies adversely affected the indigenous tribal peoples for whom such ‘wild’ places were merely ‘home’.
It was in Yosemite that the world’s first national park, which had been cared for by the Ahwahneechee people for generations, was established. Yellowstone National Park was subsequently created in 1872, when the government evicted the Indian tribes who are thought to have lived there for more than 11,000 years.

Yosemite Valley, US.
© Chensiyuan/CC BY-SA

Today there are an estimated 120,000 protected areas worldwide, covering nearly 15% of the world’s land surface. Conservation is undoubtedly vital when the biological diversity of the planet is so threatened. But the sorry backdrop to these statistics — the story that is overlooked in the desire to preserve the ‘wild’ — is one of intense human suffering. For in the creation of reserves, millions of people — most of them tribal — have been evicted from their homes.

In India, hundreds of thousands of people have already been displaced from parks in the name of conservation, while in Africa mass evictions from protected areas have taken place, including the Batwa ‘pygmies’, who were forcibly moved from Uganda’s Bwindi Forest in order to protect the mountain gorillas and the Waliangulu people of Kenya, who once lived in the Tsavo Park area. ‘This variant of land theft is rapidly emerging as one of the biggest problems confronting indigenous peoples today,’ says Stephen Corry of Survival International.

Kenyan plains, home of the Maasai.

© Mariëlle van Uitert/Survival

For tribal peoples, it matters little whether the theft of their homelands has been for conservation or commercial reasons. Dispossessing indigenous owners for conservation may appear more benign, but for tribal peoples the consequences are similarly catastrophic. Once separated from their lands, tribal peoples begin to lose the traditions, skills and knowledge that together weave the tapestry of identity; thus follows a profound decrease in mental and physical health.

Lands are equally ‘divorced’ from the indigenous owners. 80% of the world’s biologically rich areas are the territories of tribal communities who, for millennia, have found ingenious ways of catering for their needs and maintaining the ecological balance of their surroundings. Such sustainable principles are evident in the health of the Amazon: much of the rainforest that lies outside tribal reserves has been denuded, whereas within indigenous areas it largely remains intact. Similarly, the only remaining rainforest on the Andaman Islands is found within the Jarawa peoples’ reserve. It is often precisely because ‘wild’ places have been looked after by their indigenous guardians that they have been chosen by conservationists as reserves.

Two Jarawa relax by the coast of the Andaman Islands. 
© Salomé/Survival

Thinking has undoubtedly moved on since the days of Yosemite and attitudes have changed even since 1964, when the US Wilderness Act stated that, ‘a wilderness is hereby recognized as an area where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.’ The adoption of the U.N.‘s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples inac 2007 stated that tribal peoples need to give their ’free, prior and informed consent prior to the approval of any project affecting their lands.’ Dr. Jo Woodman of Survival believes that, ‘a new vision of conservation exists in which tribal peoples are recognized as the rightful protectors of the land.’ Only recently, the Indian government scrapped its policy of expelling tribal people from wildlife-rich areas in order to convert them into national parks.

But there is still a long way to go. Tribal peoples continue to be left out of discussions concerning the protection of their homelands, despite the fact that so often it has been they who, in the words of Davi Kopenawa, ‘preserve the flood plains, the hunt, the fish and the fruits.’ Corry thinks that the conservation of biodiversity should only be promoted with the consent of the indigenous. ‘Protecting ecosystems does not mean protecting them from the people who have always been their guardians,’ he says. ‘Conservation rights shouldn’t trump tribal rights.’

There may also be room for a broader cultural objective; one which lies in reshaping the popular idea of ‘wilderness’ in western thinking, by acknowledging the ancient interrelationship of man and the natural world. For destructive attitudes are born partly of dualistic ideas; in emphasizing the separateness of man and nature. ‘Any way of looking at nature that encourages us to believe we are separate from it is likely to reinforce irresponsible behaviour,’ says William Cronon. The world’s tribal peoples still intuitively grasp this symbiotic relationship better than most; in the words of Davi Kopenawa, ‘The environment is not separate from ourselves; we are inside it and it is inside us.’ "

Yanomami hunter darts quietly through the Amazon.