Spring seems intent on coming very early this year to the Piedmont of North Carolina. Daffodils are blooming, the weeping willows are putting out their leaves, and the birds are singing earlier and louder. More cold weather will undoubtedly come, but these signs are unmistakable. The season is changing.
These signs make me restless to get to work. I am a gardener, and this is my favorite time of year. Last week, I put out onion sets, and soon I will be harvesting green onions. Within the next few weeks, I will plant snow peas, carrots, radishes, lettuce, spinach, and beets. Each new week will bring another planting, until the time that the ground warms up for sure and I can plant tomatoes, the glory of the garden.
This year, the most exciting event is that the asparagus is already starting to come up. The reason I am so excited is that this is the third year I have watched those green shoots come up, and finally, this is the year I can taste my asparagus. Asparagus is an act of faith. Actually, all gardening is an act of faith, but asparagus is perhaps the ultimate act of faith for a gardener. With other vegetables, you plant a seed or a plant, then wait weeks or months for a harvest. With asparagus, you plant root crowns, then wait two years for the first taste. (But it keeps on giving--an asparagus bed will yield year after year, thirty or forty years or more, often yielding long after the gardener who planted it is gone.)
Thoreau (a Tao master if there ever was one) said, "I have faith in a seed." All gardeners know this.
All mandolin players know this too. The practice you put in over the winter is a planted seed. It has been germinating, putting down roots, and growing, even when you didn't know it was. Now is the time it will put up shoots, then flower and blossom, then bear fruit. Every bit of technique you put into your hands will someday bear fruit.
Late last spring, Mike Compton planted a seed in me. (He did not know this at the time, not consciously, but since he was my teacher at the Kaufman Mandolin Camp, he must have known that he was planting seeds.) I barely noticed the seed at the time. The seed was the triplet tremolo, which Bill Monroe had planted in Mike Compton some time before, and last June, he planted it in me. But the soil was not ready. It was not until this fall, when I listened to the tapes from his class, that the seed he planted germinated, suddenly and furiously. The triplet tremolo! It was a revelation to me, and I set out to let it grow.
And grow it did. I worked on it, nurtured it, practiced it. At first I had to work so hard to get that sound. Then it became so natural. Had I not been doing this all my life? The funny thing to me is that I listen to so many recordings now and hear the triplet tremolo. Everywhere. Bill Monroe, Mike Compton, David Grisman, Doyle Lawson, Ronnie McCoury, Butch Baldassari, John Reishchman, and on and on. Now I had listened to some of these for years, but it's only now that I hear it. It was always there, but I didn't have the ears to hear it. The soil was not ready. For some reason, this fall it was. The seed was there, the soil was ready. And oh what a fruit is being borne now! Every day, a seed may germinate, a seed that can change the way you play. Forever.
Your mandolin is itself the product of a seed. One day a maple seedling, a spruce seedling, a mahogany seedling, or whatever wood, sprouted, and your mandolin began to be born. It grew, then was nurtured, then, after many years, was harvested. Then it was seasoned. Think of the patience of this! Far beyond my patience to harvest my asparagus. Then think of the patience of the luthier, of all the seeds planted in that talented man or woman before he or she could carve your mandolin from the living wood. The mandolin I hold in my hands is a miracle, the product of a seed, the result of many years of nurturing and patience. And that's the way I play it, too.
The Tao says that gardening keeps us in touch with the seasons, and thus with the cycle of life and with the Tao itself. And now I know that playing a mandolin, or building a mandolin, does the same. I will keep playing. Others will keep building. Others will keep teaching. Like Thoreau, we all have faith in a seed.
© 1999 John Bird
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