Yesterday, I learned of a word. A Portuguese word. Saudade.

Saudade reveals its meaning in context. Something like the English words longing, yearning, and love when it’s about a quality of ineffable missing. Like many words in other languages, there’s really not a direct translation. This is because the word holds more than its parts. A noun that’s bigger than we English speakers think nouns can be. Bigger than person, place, thing – but holding all of them together along with a touch of verb-ness – a translucent action.  Homesickness, kind of.

Saudade is what you long for that you believe you’ve had in the past – but may not actually have had. A salve of memory – melancholy and gentle at the same time. A quality of awareness that gives ground to a measure of confidence that circumstances hold the possibility of making the longed-for present again.

The smell of Georgia rain on magnolia leaves dusty from summer will always be one in the same with my grandmother’s unconditional love. The surprise of goosebumps at something said, or read, or sensed.

How accurate is my memory? Can I truly recall moments of pure perfection?

Life is improbable. A complex mix of physical bits with personalities and situations.  Yet here we are in it. And from time to time we feel longing. Saudade.

Consider lemurs.

They’re among the most endangered of species. Left the primate line 60,000 years ago to strike out on their own – genetically speaking. Range in height from 2.5 inches to 2.5 feet. They take their guidance from reason in the context of relationship and feeling – the intuitive. In that way, lemurs live very well balanced in what we tend to think of as feminine and masculine traits.

The only place they live outside zoos, is high in the tree canopy of Madagascar. This, a shrinking homeland due to un-regulated logging.

Still, they persist. For now.

And I, having never been a lemur, can’t know if these beings are even fussed by their circumstances. I’m the one who’s troubled. Lemurs aren’t always on my mind. But since I’ve heard of their vulnerability, I’ve had a vague yearning – an ache for their being returned to those better circumstances of before. The absence of thriving is present for me when I think of lemurs.

Life was never altogether easy for lemurs, what with their vulnerability to being taken by predators for food, their association with evil spirits by groups of humans over time. Then there were the everyday dangers of walking the planet at all.

In that way, we can all admit that it’s never been altogether easy for any of us.

Along the way, English-speaking zoologists came up with a term for a group of lemurs (think covey of geese, pride of lions, murder of crows). A conspiracy.  A conspiracy of lemurs.

So, saudade – this longing for a peace and comfort we believe we remember – may actually have arisen from nothing wholly easy or uneasy. Nothing wholly great or un-great. But from presence.

Presence in a conspiracy of lemurs. In the conspiratorial matter of fact that is lemurs living their lives against a good many odds – right now. Nothing absent.

And that constant pull to presence – the eternal invitation to be in what is right now – maybe that is saudade. A precise homing mechanism, lending us courage and focus, to be here, when our minds alone are less than 100% sure about … well … anything.