A book for words that you know exist but not in English. There are many such books in the world, as there is no shortage of content. I stumbled across The Greeks Had a Word for It in my local bookshop, and it's served me well.   There is indeed a lockstep between naming and understanding, especially for the conceptual and abstract. Classics scholar Robin Lane Fox saw naming as a way of adding distinction, importance. Of course, he was talking about plants and flowers, but is that much different to emotions?

Like dadirri—a word in the Ngangikurungkurr language of Australia that helped shape my understanding of the eternal.   If understanding the eternal is possible. Perhaps it's better described as an understanding of how we think about the eternal. 
It is Alan Lightman's pondering certainty while struck by stars. It is van Gogh's urging that the supreme of our needs is a focus on the infinite and the miraculous. It is Rachel Carson's call for wonder and Jorge Luis Borges' love of soul-enriching conversations.

Dadirri implies a sense of wonder and humility, and [an] almost mystical awareness of one’s individual place in the great mystery of Creation. It focuses attention on both the vastness of the external worlds of time and space, and on the inner thoughts and emotions of the individual as a part of that greater whole.

What about the Swedish word gokotta, which means "an early morning walk."

The word means literally 'early-morning cuckoo', and it strictly refers to such a trip taken specifically on Ascension Day, some six weeks after East. Traditionally, it's a time for early-morning picnics in a clearing in the forest, in the hope of hearing the cuckoo, which usually arrives back in Sweden from its winter migration sometime during May.

I think of Thomas A. Clark's prose/poem on walking, which professes, “Early one morning, any morning, we can set out, with the least possible baggage, and discover the world.” The gokotta is featured in Clark's life. Did he search for a name? Did he find this one?

Komorebi is a Japanese word for the magical atmosphere created by sunlight filtering through the leaves. Whitman wrote, "The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag."

On love, the pages are rich. Like hiraeth, a Welsh word that holds the complexity of love—both its sadness and happiness—in embrace. Or what about saudade, a Portuguese word expressing the feeling of reflecting on a lost love? The English equivalents—mournful, longing, and regret—spin around the feeling but miss its heart.

Deceptively valuable are honne and tatemae, Japanese words that mean "a person's private and public faces—how we feel and the mask we show to the world.

Although the practical application of these words concerns everyday diplomacy, they speak to a concept we all use: a need to withhold our "unacceptable" selves: the sadness, the fear, the suffering.

Stephen Fry, one of my heroes for all he has done to show us mental illness, talks about this mask in his autobiography. Eventually, Fry admits, "The mask worn long enough will be the face.”   We live in a bizarre time where we both celebrate our individuality, yet try, desperately and even covertly, to become same, normal. 
For those of us with mental illness, we can feel put in an impossible, claustrophobic position. 
Colin Wilson's groundbreaking 1956 book, The Outsider, suggests that those considered "insane" (we'd use a different word today) were really individuals who couldn't fit inside society's rigid expectations. Victims include Vaslav Nijinsky, van Gogh, even Hermann Hesse. We so desperately want to refine what causes mental illness that we forget it is always seen against an unaddressed "normal."

Similar is the Thai word krengjai.

Sometimes it's translated as consideration, but that is a feeble echo of the way the word resonates in Thailand. To a Thai, krengjai is an all-embracing concern to demonstrate awareness of other people's feelings, to show them politeness and respect, and never to make them lose face. The word literally means 'respect-heart', and it involves not just surface courtesy or deference but a deeply felt desire to make people feel comfortable and at ease.

The Gujarati word "'godhuli' feels like the end of the day; like you call it, a day can relax. The sun is setting; cows are returning home; you don't have the weight of responsibility now; the day is over. Have supper, lay down in your bed, and look at the stars; most people of the region slept outside." Words and illustration by Parth Shah.

I might not understand what this means to a Thai, but being from the American Midwest, I certainly have a bearing set to "making others feel at ease."

Of all the cultures, the times, and the varying degrees of geographic separateness, there isn't one word included that I don't find myself nodding at. Is there any better proof of our connectedness?

American novelist Marilynne Robinson put it simply, with a certain amount of duende*: "We make language." We make language. Through it, we remember the past, democratize understanding, and connect.

At the same time, let's remember language emerges from a distinctive use and need. We will never fully understand what philotimo meant to the Greeks, even if we understand what it means to us—the love of honor.

I'll leave you with this (is there a word for a parting charge? Benediction but with more urgency?): consider what still needs to be created. What words are sorely needed? What things would you like to express and cannot? A word for the feeling that one is a still point of a turning world. A cat that greets your hand with a purr. Wind through fir trees. Language is ours and ours entirely.

Some gather words, and some gather meanings. And some pair them together. Check out Mark Strand's Poet's Alphabet or David Whyte's Consolations and my bouquet of resplendent words. New meaning to our old friends, the words.