LANGUAGE LOVE LEAVES

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. 

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.

“The Grail is the crystal speck of being in your own heart.” 

                                                                                
                                              – The Way of the Wizard