Day One, Part Two - The Language of Muay Thai

I don't speak Thai.  Not a word.  In fact, before I began my first day of training, the only Thai words I knew were "Muay Thai."

Here I am, this English-speaking lawyer who spent her entire life fine-tuning the niceties of language, the subtleties of wordplay, and the rules of grammar.  I can write you a legal brief and outline an article as if it were second-nature.  I can analyze, rationalize, proselytize, orate, narrate, and speak in Lawyer as if I were speaking in tongues, if you'd like.  After a lifetime of reading, writing, poetry --- years of formal education, endless hours alone with words --- I can be a dancing one-woman show of words.  Sure, no problem.

Most of the trainers didn't understand much of what I said, aside from the most basic of information like my name and the country I'm from.  I wanted to tell them all about how much I loved their sport, how much I admired it, how much I respected everything they stood for, and how invaluable their training would be to me.  But, I was at a loss for words; there was no Thai in my brain to explain it.

But Muay Thai is a universal language in and of itself.  I came to realize this during my first day training in a different country with a formidable language barrier.  I didn't need to explain how much I loved their sport; everything I wanted to say about it translated with perfect clarity through each punch, kick, and check that I did.

For all the English I had studied, I had immersed myself in a second language for the past year without really knowing it; with each day of training, I had been learning the language of Muay Thai.   I had been building a universal physical vocabulary that would work for me whichever Muay Thai gym I should go to, no matter the spoken language.  No words can ever translate a teep or an elbow; no words are necessary.

As soon as I began to work with the trainers and hit the pads and bags, the language of Muay Thai spoke for me.  My work denoted what my experience level was, so I didn't need to tell them; they could see what I already knew, exactly what changes to make, and where I could be better.   English became irrelevant.  Spinning elbows, teeps, sweeps, jabs, rights, low kicks; these all became the words we all knew.  The combinations became the sentences with which we would speak to each other.  Sparring would be our conversations; it was the same back-and-forth flow of physical poetry I knew from Blackhouse, the very same I fell in love with what seems like the longest year ago.  And if the practitioners and teachers of Muay Thai are poets, then these men are the Shakespeares.  After all is said and done, I find myself again to be a student of language and poetry, this time spoken with the "eight limbs."  A situation new but all-too-familiar, comforting in its homeliness, strikingly reassuring.