Magical philosophy has always claimed that the world is made of
language. The world is a thing of words, and if you know these words, you can
take it apart and put it together any old way you wish. –Terrence McKenna
Creation
seems to come out of imperfection. It seems to come out of a striving and a
frustration. This is where, I think, language came from. I mean, it came from
our desire to transcend our isolation and have some sort of connection with one
another…
So
much of what we perceive cannot be expressed. It’s unspeakable. And yet, you
know, when we communicate with one another and we feel that we have connected
and we think we’re understood I think we have a feeling of almost spiritual
communion. And that feeling may be transient, but I think it’s what we live
for. - Waking
Life
"There are no politics,"
"Well, what the fuck is there?"
"Sign language."
-I'm Not There
Language moves love.
There are lots of languages the world uses
to move its love.
There are many languages the world
has taught me to feel, but it only taught me to truly play one language:
letters.
Words.
They call this language English.
It is the most popular language on
the love ball.
This makes my life much easier,
because when I began life, everyone around me taught me how to use the English
language as an instrument of understanding the world and expressing myself.
One of the signs above says “London”. London is the capital city of England. England is the island where the English
language was born. England is the island
where most of my life heritage was born.
England is essential to everything in my existence.
The English language is the most
popular language on Earth for two reasons.
The first is England, and the second is its child, the United States of
America. England is an island, and
people on islands tend to get lonely, isolated and inspired to explore
the world with watercraft. They are also
able to develop highly refined and complex cultures and civilizations thanks to
the protection which the natural barrier of great waters affords. Japan is a similar super island on the opposite side
of Eurasia, the biggest most diverse land mass on the love ball.
England was able to spread its
language around the world by learning the ways of water, but it couldn’t
control its most powerful student, the colonies of North America. Even though the nations split, the language
continued to spread. After World War II
the United States replaced England as the leading ambassador of the English
language. Through both brutal force and arts from the heart, it made English an
essential tool for any nation hoping to fully participate in the modern world.
I don’t know many other languages,
or whether or not English deserves to be the most popular one. I do know how to speak it, and I love playing
with it. The most exalted writer in
history is a man named William Shakespeare, and he lived on that island,
England, and wrote stories called “plays” to be acted out by humans. He said, “All the world’s a stage, and all
the men and women on it merely players.”
The most respected novelist in history, Tolstoy, didn’t like Shakespeare
because he was too life-affirming instead of ascetic.
English may be the lingua franca,
but music is the language of life. The most
popular group of musicians in the history of the world was called The Beatles,
and they were from England. They used
their guitars, bass and drums to say things that words cannot say. They also used the English language to say, “All you need is love” and “there’s nowhere you
can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be.”
England’s newest cutting edge musical masters, Radiohead, used the
English language to say, “There was nothing to fear and nothing to doubt” and “everything
in its right place.”
When I was 16 years old England became my first overseas experience. England is also the first country I ever had to travel to by airplane, and
marked the first time I flew over any ocean to get anywhere or spent more
than a few hours on a plane. We were
going there because my cousins lived there and my sister was working in Paris,
which we would also visit.
Back then, mine led me to this island across the sea. We were there for two weeks and I was miserable. I had a head cold, and February is not a great time to visit anywhere in the northern hemisphere, and especially not England. I had to keep blowing my nose and stuffing the tissues in my pockets because there weren’t any public trash cans because the IRA had been leaving bombs in them. And blowing them up, presumably.
My family rarely took expensive
vacations, and it was the first time any of us had been to Europe (except my
mom, who studied abroad in Sweden in high school, and my sister, who was
currently in her first living abroad experience (of many)). It made sense to me that my first true abroad
experience was in this country not only because it was where my language came
from, or even because I was obsessed with Monty Python as a child, but because
half of my blood comes from this island.
The Sanford’s are English all the way, although more American than
anything now, having been here for well over three hundred years. All of the other branches of my family tree
somehow lead back to England too. Where does your family tree lead YOU? Anywhere you want it to...
Back then, mine led me to this island across the sea. We were there for two weeks and I was miserable. I had a head cold, and February is not a great time to visit anywhere in the northern hemisphere, and especially not England. I had to keep blowing my nose and stuffing the tissues in my pockets because there weren’t any public trash cans because the IRA had been leaving bombs in them. And blowing them up, presumably.
On top of all of that, I was missing the playoffs after my basketball team's only undefeated season, just so I could go on this trip with my family, which I later reasoned very likely hurt my playing time the following season, my senior year. Basketball had been my number one joy and dream since I was nine years old, and even though I’d learned by then that I wasn’t the next Larry Bird, I knew that it would really hurt my final season if I skipped the playoffs. Ironically, I would have sat on the bench most of those playoffs anyway. Even more ironically, the coach always told me I made a difference by pushing the star senior starters in practice every day, and then they got upset in the second round without me.
Sometimes I say that playing basketball is how I dance. I had no idea that when I went to England I was taking a step toward my real dreams, dreams that could take my life much further than an overly popular game with a spinning orange ball. The new dream was learning how to dance around the spinning blue-green ball, and that I would be able to do it thanks to the language created by my ancestors on that magical rainy island.
This picture was taken on a different rainy island very far away, on the other side of the spinning blue-green ball. This picture was taken in New
Zealand, a country that speaks English because England mastered the water and
found a way to get there and settle it.
When I was a young boy, one of my
favorite movies was The Sword and the
Stone. A little runty English boy
named Arthur realizes he is king after pulling the sacred sword from the stone,
a feat no other man present could accomplish, not even the ones who taunted him
and ordered him around like a lowly serf. Arthur grew up to be the legendary King Arthur
with his castle of Camelot and noble Knights of the Round Table, who helped him
on his search for the Holy Grail.
A few years ago I traveled around
the world for seven months. I began in
India, where ½ the country speaks English, and finished in Ireland, where ¼ of
my blood comes from. I was browsing in a
bookstore for something intelligent and spiritual to enlighten me near the
completion of the journey, and I came across my first Deepak Chopra: The Way of the Wizard. It was all about a young Arthur learning from
Merlin, and how much the philosophies of the legendary western wizard overlapped
with ancient eastern wisdom. More
importantly, they overlapped what I had just learned myself through experience,
which is the only true litmus test for spiritual advice, regardless of how
popular it is or how many people believe it.
It inspired me to continue traveling, gaining wisdom through new
experiences and pulling as many swords out of stones as possible.
Those travels brought me to Japan
for a year of teaching and writing. I
was able to do this because the US won World War II and the Japanese needed to
learn our language for business and not the other way around. English not only enhances my understanding of
this world and endlessly entertains me with the ways of its words, but also
puts a roof over my head and food in my body.
Speaking of which, I pulled another
sword out of a stone today. I finally
got another job as an English sensei, but in my own country this time. I’m very excited to get back to work and have
truly completed my move to the west coast. Not to say I haven’t been working since I got
here. I’m always writing, learning,
creating and reading. Also, I have officially
worked since I moved to California. My
last job was at a winery for harvest season.
I worked 12-15 hours per day, always on my feet and either operating
heavy machines or carrying heavy buckets of this and that, and then going home
to sleep on the ground in my co-worker’s yard.
I worked seventeen days in a row like that at one point. Needless to say, I was happy to live off of
savings while I adjusted to my new city and began writing about my
experiences. I used my time well in many respects, but Einstein was right when he said that, "Life is like a bicycle. In order to keep your balance you must keep moving." Luckily teaching not only
pays the bills, it also makes my brain dance for when I finally get a chance to
sit down and play with the language.
Now I have my own space in a house
on a hill overlooking a beautiful place to be, and I will continue to make it
possible by increasing the world’s understanding of itself. All the world needs to remember is love, but
experience makes us lose the feeling so we can appreciate the joy of receiving
it again.
Q: How does love return once lost?
A: Communication of the sensation from creation’s imagination.
Q: How does love return once lost?
A: Communication of the sensation from creation’s imagination.
“The Grail is the crystal speck of being in your own heart.”
– The Way of the Wizard
