The Sehnsucht Project
Welcome and thank you for visiting The Sehnsucht Project...
Have you ever smiled, or caught a strange, jubilant sensation from within yourself as you were going through a deep, dark struggle? Ever experience an inner, solid ache full of unsatisfied longing in the most perfect of moments?
Sehnsucht is a German phrase that gives a conceptual, ethereal term to what cannot be defined; it captures the sense of the mystical longing for that which is beyond the physical dimension. It’s not something we tend to talk over with each other. More typically, we dismiss this feeling as a moment of hidden madness during a time of intense emotion. Why would you find pleasure in so much emotional pain, or find longing and sorrow in a satisfying achievement?
What is it that we are missing, with such incredible intensity and desire that the Germans created a term for it?
Home. The home that is beyond this life, beyond the limits of flesh and suffering. Through the tunnel, into the meadows, we are the universe. Beyond the twisted dogmas of our world’s religions and beyond the psychopathic lack of empathy we have been conditioned to embrace as economic power. If that sounds intense, you're getting close to the type of feeling we're going for. Sehnsucht is the emotional and conceptual processes eternal, divine beings experience when they’ve come close to the arbitrary boundaries set to contain them into tiny beings that have no real memory of who they are. Are you the puppet or the puppeteer?
We are upon a time where this experience is so common place it is driving a spiritual renaissance, calling all of humanity to shed bits of our amnesia and to know we live beyond our human identities. The Sehnsucht Project seeks to engage this awakening and to learn, educate and spread awareness through creative expression motivated by the old, mundane efforts of research, science, ancient wisdom and life experience. And there may be a possibility of nudity and some wild fun. Maybe kidding about the nudity. All aesthetic, all in good humor and all for the experience of awakening to divine eternalness while living through the human condition.
And we journey on.
~ Jamie DiMarco, Co-Founder
I have pursued the experience down many avenues -- the sense of time passing, of ages passing, being one of the strongest. I feel that the secret of life, love, death, life's paths taken or not taken -- the Universe itself -- is somehow embraced in its achingly beautiful promise.
I choose to wander the park path at twilight, because the trees, they are backlit and the leaves are pressed in by the sun, making the air flow with an emerald tint that leaves me breathless, nostalgic for somewhere I have never been. Certain hymns steal me into silence, into a place I don’t want to leave. I type out a perfect sentence, think a new, thought and I am tripping over myself to keep the magic alive. Where did that come from? When Wyatt laughs in falsetto, when he smiles his toothy grin it’s like a gust of joy, rushing through the house. And I want to save the moment somehow. I want to enclose it in a frame. Cap it in a bottle. I think of Annie Dillard’s reflection of nature’s movements: “Now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t.” And it seems, for me, the way faith has always been. Even when I didn’t know that’s what it was. These crisp pinpricks of something… larger. It’s there, it’s gone.
Theology, I don’t know if I have one. Faith is a slippery thing I may never get a good grip on. I only have questions. I live on curiosity.
I live on the Sehnsucht in my bones. Ask me about God, and my answer will depend on the day, honestly, but I am always compelled by these moments that startle me. There is something more. Sometimes, it is silent. Sometimes, it is only seen and not understood or realized. But it’s just a little further. It’s not the shallow, theologically bankrupt, thumb-sucking beginnings of faith. It’s the beating heart of it.
Cheers!
~Misty Gersely, Co-Founder
