“Could you share a word you grew up with that regular English doesn’t quite capture?”

It’s a question I’ve begun asking people whenever I can. For me, good questions are like a skip intro button. As a middling small talker, I feel it’s a gift of relief to both myself and the person I’m meeting. When a question works, I remember it.

The first time I asked this one was a few years ago, near the tail end of COVID, in a meeting with Alma. She’s a fellow Louisvillian who arrived here from Bosnia as a toddler refugee and is now a rising star in the nonprofit world. We were meeting about a possible collaboration between Louisville Magazine and the Muhammad Ali Center, where she worked at the time.

She paused after I asked — not to think of a word, it seemed, but how best to translate it.

"The Bosnian word is sparina,” she said. “It’s that feeling of foreboding you get right before it rains.”

She explained that sparina is technically a weather word. It describes the dense, muggy air before a storm. But Bosnians use it more broadly too — to describe the sense that something significant is about to happen.

Glad I asked. Sparina and the question that yielded it were clearly keepers.

One of the people I asked recently was Adam Kane. We met between sessions at last November’s Festival of Faiths at the Kentucky Center. I’d missed the meditation session he led the day before, meant to prepare participants for several days of conversations on the theme of Sacred Belonging.

My brother-in-law, Owsley, had told me Adam was an expert translator and interpreter of Tibetan Buddhism. So I asked him a version of the same question.

Was there a word in the teachings he works with that English can’t quite express?

He didn’t hesitate.“Yep,” he said. “The Tibetan word is tiglè — bindu in Sanskrit.”

For years, translators rendered it as something like “drops” or “seeds of energy.” But, he told me, he had recently been working on a new translation with his teacher, Tsoknyi Rinpoche.

"It’s a bit of a mouthful,” he said, “but it gets closer to the meaning.”

The phrase was this: “We each have a basic birthright of okay-ness.”

I asked him to repeat it so I could remember it — and pass it on.

He did. And I have.

“Okay-ness” struck me as such a humble and grounding idea. It also feels refreshingly out of step with the maximalist language we hear so often around us — from politics and business to academia, social media, philanthropy and advertising. Everywhere we turn, we are told to be more, achieve more, prove more.

“Okay-ness,” by contrast, suggests something steadier: that beneath all the striving and comparison, there is a basic dignity we already share.

The work of translation reminds us how difficult it can be to carry meaning faithfully from one language to another. But it also hints at a deeper challenge we face as individuals — and as a city.

How do we stand out as distinct individuals with our own internal languages, so to speak, while also fitting in with one another into something larger than ourselves?

Not disappearing into a homogeneous whole. Not standing apart. But hanging in there and working through the translation, again and again.

Looking at it this way, belonging may be less a feeling or a state of being than a practice.

At Louisville Magazine, we’ve begun asking this same question, among many others, to members of our Best of Louisville Voting Academy: What is a word from another language that English doesn’t quite capture?

In the pages that follow, you’ll see some of their answers.Each one is a small act of translation.

And perhaps, in its own way, a small step toward belonging.

Or, to borrow Alma’s word, something like sparina — that moment in the air before the rain, when something meaningful feels just about to begin.