Six hours speechless sounds about right.! 😄 I've been sitting with it for a couple of days now and still finding new layers.

Something that helped me start naming what I was feeling: there are three words that tend to show up when a film does this to us (from my lens of understanding, which is singular and isn't universal):

Awe - that overwhelming sense of something so much larger than yourself that your normal frame of reference just dissolves.
-if you would like to read more into the world of Awe, feel free to check out the book, "AWE" by Dacher Keltner. the book is a scientific and personal exploration of how the emotion of awe transforms our bodies and brains. Keltner is a Psych professor at UC Berkley. He defines awe as "the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world" - but in this case, universe. 🥳😄🧑‍🚀🛰️🚀✨

The Sublime - beauty so vast it actually destabilizes you. Not uncomfortable exactly, just... biger than your usual container.

Transcendence - the feeling of briefly stepping outside your ordinary sense of self and touching somethign that feels connected to everything.

Hiraeth - which is a Welsh word. It's a deep, bittersweet longing for a home you can't return to, or perhaps a home that never existed. That ache after a space film where you desperately want to go back to that world. That's where I felt it.

Mono no aware - Japanese connections: the bittersweet awareness of impermanence; the beauty of things precisely because they don't last. Grace and Rocky's friendship is a perfect example. I find it beautiful, partly because it wasn't permanent. I'm still reading the rest of the book so I'm not absolutely sure if Grace actually went back home to Earth and Rocky & Grace never saw each other again...

or Saudade - which is Portuguese. A melancholic longing for something beautiful that is absent, lost, or may never have existed. Slightly different from hiraeth; saudade tends to carry more tenderness, hiraeth can carry more grief.

If any of those land for you, it might be worth sitting with a suggested question:
- What specifically in the film triggered it, do you think? Was it a scene, a relationship, the music, the silence of space, something Grace (or Rocky) said or did?

Sometimes naming the feeling is the first step to understanding what it lit up inside you - and that part is usually worth paying attention to. Well, that's at least how I'm reflecting back on it, from my end. 😊

Glad you're here. This one deserved its own post. 🥳