The story
Gökotta is Swedish, and it names an outing rather than a feeling. Gök is the cuckoo. Otta is an old word for the hour around dawn, the same one that turns up in julotta, the early service on Christmas morning. Together they mean going out at first light in spring to hear the birds, and above all the cuckoo.
The traditional day is Ascension Day, which falls between the end of April and early June, close to when the cuckoo was expected to start calling. People walked into the woods or the town park in the small hours, with coffee and something to eat, and listened. Around 1900 several Swedish popular movements took up the custom, often with a brass band, and it spread across the country. Some parishes still hold one: an open-air service with a walk through the woods on Ascension morning. In the 1940s the naturalist Nils Linnman gave the name to a nature programme on Swedish radio.
English has the dawn chorus, but that is only the sound. Gökotta also takes in the alarm at four, the flask, the wet grass and the decision to go at all.
Picture a lake in central Sweden in late May. Mist lies on the water, a thermos lid goes round, and nobody says much. Then, from somewhere across the lake, come the two notes everyone got up for.