There used to be a website called engrish.com. English, but with an R in there as an error. It's still out there somewhere, half-broken, not updated, sometimes you can't even get to it. But for years it was a place where people posted photographs of weird English — mistranslations, menus, street signs, t-shirts, mostly from Asia, where English was often used purely as decoration. It looked cool. Nobody knew what it meant. So it didn't mean anything.
I loved that site. When I was really down, when I was depressed, it was usually enough to go there and look at ten or twenty pictures and I'd be laughing out loud. Some of it is just English as a pattern on a shirt. And some of it is a beautifully confident translation that guides you gently toward peeing on dogs, or eating things that should not be eaten.
And somewhere in there I found a t-shirt.
A very minimal drawing: a man with deer antlers, probably wearing a hat, riding a dolphin. Underneath it, three words.
Part of everything.
That's it. That's the whole thing. It was so random and made so little sense that people went crazy for it. A deer-man on a dolphin. Yeah, why not. The phrase connected to nothing. Engrish.com ended up printing it on t-shirts and mugs. It stuck precisely because it was weird.
It stuck with me too. Things surface from your own history from time to time and suddenly start making sense, or stop making sense, or make a different kind of sense than they did before. Lately this one has been surfacing. So let's follow it.
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What does it actually mean to be part of something?
Right now you could name a hundred things you're part of without trying. Part of this conversation. Part of the people who use the internet. Part of a family. Part of a country. Part of a generation. We are part of countless sets, countless structures, and they define us — or maybe they don't.
Some of them we joined because we identified with something. Some of them we were joined to, without knowing, without agreeing, without ever being asked. And they shape us anyway.
There's a practice, and a whole way of thinking, that works with ourselves as a set of parts — parts you can address separately, work with separately. I like the switch that happens when you turn it around. Not: I am made of parts. But: I am a part of something bigger. There is love that is always here and I am one part of it. There's fear, and I'm part of that too. There's a family, a language, a species, a planet, and I'm part of all of it.
Part of this room. Part of humanity. Part of this moment. Part of people who like drinking coffee. Part of the future. Part of anxiety. Part of gratitude. Part of a problem. Part of not knowing.
Sit with any of those for a second and something moves.
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Start with the skin, because that's where most of us draw the line.
Being part of something can also mean being separate from it. Which raises the question: where do I start, and where am I not me anymore? We usually take the skin as the border. Inside, me. Outside, world. Neat.
But close your eyes and try to find it. Most of the time, with the eyes closed, you're not aware of the skin at all. Things blend. The edge isn't there where you left it. So where is it, that place where I end and something else begins? Is there even a boundary, or just a habit of drawing one?
The same thing happens with people. In social meditation, in practicing out loud together with others, there's a point where you lose yourself a little. Sometimes it gets genuinely unclear who said what. Was that me? Or was that just a reaction moving through the thing that usually gets called me — a part of this group? Or is it simply the group talking?
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Then there's language, which is a strange one, because we didn't choose it.
Nobody picks their mother tongue. You are handed the language you grew up in, and it does not just carry your thoughts — it forms them. You can learn other languages later. But you can't un-be shaped by the first one.
I was struck once by how differently parents speak to their babies in Japan and in the West. Here we're oriented toward objects. We point and we say: this is a car. In Japan they use verbs. They don't show you the car — they say, it rides. The whole attention lands somewhere else.
It's a tiny example. It also forms entire people. Their thinking, their perception, the way emotion gets communicated, the way an idea gets handed over to another person. Every language does it differently. And we are part of a language. So what does that do to us?
Then there's extended mind theory, which says that when you use a tool often enough — a carpenter with a hammer — the perception of the body extends into it. Put simply, you're no longer just the body. You're the body with the hammer.
So where's the border now? At what point does the hammer become part of me? Or is it the other way round — am I integrating the hammer into being part of the world?
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And then there's grief, which teaches this in a way you would rather not be taught.
When we lose someone, we sometimes realize that the person was — and still is — part of us. That we are part of a connection with another person, and the connection is still there. Hurt. Painful. Lacking. But there.
My grandmother has been gone for more than twenty years. I can still feel the connection. It's still there.
Being part of something also implies a separation that may not actually exist, because being part of something is also being it. So is the separation just language, a side effect of trying to describe anything at all? Or is it real in some way? Or is it both, and neither, as Buddhism likes to answer.
Which drops us straight into no-self. One of the central Buddhist claims: there is no self. And yet, obviously, here is the self. Being part of this exploration takes you toward the wholeness of being one with everything, not a separate self — while being the separate self.
And here's my favourite part of the joke. Sangha. Being part of a community that is founded on the notion that there is no self. A community of practitioners is basically a community of people who say, each one of them, from inside themselves: there is no self.
It's very funny. It's also true.
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Everything up to here has been the warm side of this. There's another one.
Not being part of something is great pain.
The feeling that you don't belong anywhere. That there's no space for you — not in the world, not in the community, not in the place where you live, not in the family, not in the classroom, not at work. That's one of the most painful things a person can experience internally. It's crushing. Not being able to be part of something damages who you are.
We're socially oriented beings. We gather in groups. Sometimes we don't want to be seen as part of a particular group — fine, that's a choice. But when we feel we're not allowed into any group at all, something is genuinely lost.
And that's just the community layer of it. Underneath that there's the bigger one: being part of the ecosystem, part of the universe, part of everything.
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Here's where I've landed, at least for now.
My practice is aiming at being part of everything.
I think that's one of the great gifts of this whole path of exploration, whether you do it inside Buddhism or just inside meditation or just inside the plain stubborn question — who am I, what is this, what is actually happening here. One way to look at what gets uncovered is this: a weird man with deer antlers riding a dolphin through the sky, being part of everything, consciously.
Being part of awareness. And not just part of it. Being it.
I only got through about a third of my list. There are far more ideas hiding under this than I can hold, and I'd rather stop here and leave the space open than tie it up.
A t-shirt from South Korea, 2006. Three words that meant nothing at all.