Monday was garbage day, so I stumbled out with the recycling bin, trying to beat that truck. As I rounded the corner of the house, I saw a scrap of paper on the ground. "Damn," I muttered to myself, bending to pick it up. The week before, somebody's newspapers had been scattered all over the neighborhood by the wind, and I spent about ten minutes picking up the pieces that landed in my yard. So here it was again.
But when I picked up the scrap, I realized it wasn't newspaper at all, but bark from a birch tree. It was incredibly beautiful! I stood there in my driveway, turning it over in my hands. It was soft as tissue on the inside, the color and look of a salmon's skin. The outside was darker, but still soft, with a lovely grain. It was beautiful enough to be expensive wrapping paper, or parchment for a diploma. What I originally mistook for trash was actually a treasure. It sits on my desk beside me now as I write. I'm not sure what I will do with it--frame it, perhaps. It is a work of art.
As I stood there holding it, I suddenly realized how disconnected from the earth I had become. I had planted the tree this scrap of bark came from! Planted it with my own hands: dug the hole, fertilized it, watered it, babied it for its first difficult year. And now I had forgotten it, had not recognized it when it came back to me as a free treasure. That birch tree stood before me, grown tall in four years, naked in the late winter wind, waiting for spring.
In his book Everyday Tao, Deng Ming-Dao writes eloquently of the tree: "A tree uses what comes its way to nurture itself. By sinking its roots deeply into the earth, by accepting the rain that flows toward it, by reaching deeply into the earth, by reaching out to the sun, the tree perfects its character and becomes great." Then he writes this:
Absorb, absorb, absorb. That is the secret of the tree. When human beings egotistically divide themselves from nature, that is a great mistake. When we divide ourselves from Tao, we are committing the greatest crime, and like all criminals, it is we who suffer the most. No, accept what life sends you. Accept how Tao flows through you, just as the tree absorbs and grows, and you will never be without Tao.
Absorb, absorb, absorb. What better description is there of learning to play the mandolin? I think of all I have absorbed over the years, all I absorb every day, all that I want to go on absorbing. I want to perfect my character. I want to become great. (When we hear a virtuoso play, we say he or she is "great." How did the virtuoso become great? By absorbing, absorbing, absorbing.)
Every day, I hold my mandolin and absorb. Every day, I am holding a tree. Every day, I am connected to the earth, connected by my mandolin. When I hold my mandolin, I hold the Tao. And those scraps of newspaper, where did they come from? From a tree, no less than my beautiful piece of bark did. The next time I have to stoop to pick them up, I will remember not to be so angry. No less than my scrap of bark, no less than my mandolin, they connect me to the earth.
(quotations from Deng Ming-Dao, Everyday Tao, HarperCollins, 1996, p. 18)
© 1999 John Bird
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