Sehnsucht in the Blue Ridge Mountains

I was still getting my feet under me as a new mom when I was uprooted from my California homeland and replanted on the East Coast. I required recalibration: mountains to the west, ocean to the east. It was like being put in the Tilt-a-Whirl; I was upside down and backwards for an entire year. Mountains to the west, ocean to the east. No matter that I couldn’t see the mountains or the sea. It was enough to know they were there.

And then it wasn’t.

I needed to see these so-called mountains. See how they measured up to my beloved Sierras. So, we took a trip to Boone, North Carolina, in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Had the name “Blue Ridge” ever piqued my interest before? Not a bit.

We stayed in the upstairs guest room of a lovely grandma/grandpa duo with French doors that opened to a patio with a view of trees, trees, and more trees. I couldn’t see the mountain for the trees.

Next day, my husband joined a local bicycle club for a long ride along the Blue Ridge Parkway, the longest linear park in the U.S. Did you know there was such a thing as a linear park? I did not.

There was a lot I didn’t know about the Blue Ridge Parkway. It is 469 miles of curves and spacious vistas along the spine of the Blue Ridge, a major mountain chain that is part of the Appalachian Mountains. Once I was there and realized “there” was part of the Appalachians, I remembered the book Christy I had read in high school. It’s the story about a young missionary girl in the same mountains. As I strapped our five-year-old son into his booster seat and drove the Blue Ridge Parkway in the opposite direction from Chris, I pictured Christy somewhere deep in the thick green forest. I had no itinerary, was not headed anywhere, just seeing where the road would take us.

It took us to unbelievable grandeur.

I pulled over at every vista, breaks in the tree line that allowed us to step to the edge of the ridge and look out to layers upon layers upon layers of ridges. Trees lost their individuality and became unified waves of green, then further out, purple, then blue. Like the waves of the Pacific Ocean back home, their colors faded one into the other. Unlike the Pacific, these purple mountain waves kept rolling, never breaking.

I looked to the tree beside me, green.

I looked out to the mountains before me, purple.

The watercolor artist had dipped His brush into a paint pot, swirled it around, then swiped across the horizon, leaving lines of plum, magenta, and amethyst.

Swirl and swipe. Mulberry, mauve, and wine.

Swirl and swipe. Lavender, lilac, and violet. I couldn’t tell where one ridge ended and another began.

Majestic mountains, certainly. The patriotic school song calls them “purple majesty.” Yes, that too.

One vista in particular stands out in my memory. I parked the car on a gravel pullout and stepped onto a patch of grass. My son wandered to my left, picking flowers. I walked to the edge of the grass toward the majestic rolling hills before me. With my toes on the very edge of the ridge, my soul ached. I couldn’t fully take in the panorama of color and texture before me. It was too much. Too beautiful. Too big. Too heavenly.

I longed to go out to the edge of it, the edge beyond what I could see. To stretch my soul and join the mountain waves, to go “further up and further in.” If I joined them, would I break with them on some celestial shore?

Even as I knew gravity would display itself with one more step, something in me dared to believe that one more step would lift my soul heavenward. I very nearly cried with the pull of it.

That ache, that pull, is Sehnsucht. Sehnsucht is hard to put into words, as can be seen in my painfully limited ability to describe what I felt at that vista. Some call it joy. Some called it wistful longing for something you can’t explain. It has been called melancholy and nostalgia.

It is all of that, and more.

Here are a few words from C. S. Lewis on the topic.

“It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what? . . . Before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased. It had taken only a moment of time; and in a certain sense everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison. . . . It was something quite different from ordinary life and even from ordinary pleasure; something, as they would now say, ‘in another dimension’ . . . [it was] an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy . . . anyone who has experienced it will want it again . . . I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world.” – C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy
“In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, . . . I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you – the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both . . . Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things – the beauty, the memory of our own past – are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited . . . . Here, then, is the desire, still wandering and uncertain of its object and still largely unable to see that object in the direction where it really lies . . . Heaven is, by definition, outside our experience, but all intelligible descriptions must be of things within our experience. The scriptural picture of heaven is therefore just as symbolical as the picture which our desire, unaided, invents for itself . . . “ -- C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
“Perhaps it has sometimes happened to you in a dream that someone says something which you don’t understand but in the dream it feels as if it had some enormous meaning . . . a lovely meaning too lovely to put into words, which makes the dream so beautiful that you remember it all your life and are always wishing you could get into that dream again.” -- C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

I cannot add to the explanations given by Lewis, but I can share times when I’ve known Sehnsucht. That moment on the Blue Ridge Parkway was one.

The moment, a few days after the birth of Josh, was another. He was still in the NICU, and I was home. After 7 months together in my body, and a few days of patchy togetherness in the hospital, we were now separated by 20 miles. A chasm I couldn’t cross without a driver. Worse, I couldn’t recall his face in perfect detail. I knew it, but I could not see it. The physical separation from him and the inability to conjure an image of him in my head shattered me. A shriek I have never heard before or since ripped out of my lungs, and I collapse on the garage floor. The longing for my son, whom I did not yet know inside out, was more than I could handle.

Another. Weaving through a bamboo forest to find a hidden waterfall in Maui. Then, crawling under the waterfall and swimming in the cyan pool below it. Sharing that moment with my husband and best friends made it feel like a scene from Heaven. The Bible describes the floor beneath God’s seat in the Throne Room in Revelation 4 as “Something like a sea of glass, similar to crystal.” When I picture the Throne Room, I picture that pool beyond the bamboo.

Then there’s what I feel when I watch The Lake House. I don’t even know why, and I worry that if I dig to find the reasons, the feeling will slip away.

There are more, and I know more will come. I belong to Heaven. If I keep my heart open to it, I know I will feel the pull until I am home.

I turned away from the vista but kept hold of the ache. It was too sweet to let go of. I wanted to take it with me for as long as it would last. Then, a new pull—my son tugged shorts. I looked down. He held a small yellow flower in his soft fingers. “For you, Mommy.” The ache of longing for Heaven mixed with the ache of love for my son. There couldn’t have been a fuller heart in all the Appalachians in that moment.

I love sending my subscribers special goodies straight to their inbox, like this list of 12 Verses to Help You Endure.
I’d love to send it to you.