Belonging and Language

In the tight, tight space of my unruly mind, I have always talked, to myself and to others, at times out loud but often voicelessly, about what belonging, or a sense of belonging, could mean and do. And I knew, or thought I knew, that language always stood in some relation to one's sense of belonging and its opposites, which may or may not include various kinds, and modes, of drifting without end.

When you have decided to drive your stake down into the soft, brown earth of a language - notwithstanding my incredulous belief that a singular "a" can crown such a divisive word-concept as language - the world takes on a certain new form. You begin to dream that the world has become multipolar, with you as one of its many minor, but integral, poles. The world is not one, as it never was and will be, but as a preserver of one language out of thousands, or millions, that exist now and have ever existed - and to clarify, albeit in an abstract manner, a language is not a bounded territory or necessarily a community, but a rolling wheel, or perhaps a pair of rolling wheels, that can travel over distances, far and near, and make crisscrossing marks on the grass - you know, with the spokes of your language set close to your beating heart, that you are verily close to being able to participate in the construction of a polyglot world, where understanding will necessarily almost always take place in something other than the language, or languages, that you have adopted as your own.