Establishing yourself as a tree

This is my first post in over six months. The time away wasn’t planned, but it turned out to be necessary. This essay is my way of explaining what happened, what I learned, and why I’m returning to writing and teaching with a slightly different focus.

I’m also publishing this piece on Substack, where I’ll be sharing ongoing reflections and new material. If that’s a platform you use, you’re welcome to subscribe there.

I’ve been playing the guitar for over fifty years. For nearly thirty of those years, I lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, plying my trade as a working musician. Over time, I grew tired of city life. I wanted space. I wanted a garden.

In 2020, when the world shut down and nearly everything moved online, I took advantage of that pause and began my move to Tucson, Arizona, where my immediate family lives. It was a big change. An uprooting and replanting.

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Here is a recording I made 12 years ago, in the Big Apple:

That change reminded me of the pomegranate tree I planted in front of my studio this spring. It was three years old and accustomed to life in a row of potted trees at a giant landscaping store and had been growing beautifully: lush green leaves, bright red flowers, some already turning into fruit.

Then I plopped it in the back of the car, drove it home, took it out of its pot and planted it in full sun, just weeks before one of the worst droughts in years. For a while, it seemed happy. Everyone says pomegranates love full sun.

Then one day, nearly all the leaves dropped.

I assumed the problem was the heat. It had been 109 degrees. I soaked the tree daily and covered the ground with wood chips to retain moisture. I did everything I thought was right. The leaves started to grow back. Here is what that looked like:

I thought, ‘Phew! We’re back, baby…’ The leaves kept getting bigger and greener. And then one night they dropped off again. All but a single tiny branch.

The heat wasn’t the real problem. Not directly.

Beneath the surface, an underground ant kingdom had taken hold. When it’s hot, leaf-cutter ants are voracious, especially for tender green leaves. The water-soaked wood chips began to compost, creating a moist, fertile environment. Beneath that young pomegranate, an army gathered, launching repeated expeditions to strip away new growth and even gnaw at the roots.

The tree wasn’t failing because it lacked care. It was failing because I misunderstood what it needed.

When I finally sat down to write this, I realized how closely that shocked tree mirrored my own experience.

This blog is mostly about music, and more specifically, about playing classical guitar. Playing classical guitar has been the one consistent passion in my life. I’ve explored several other artistic paths over the years, including writing and visual art. But guitar has always been the throughline.

I once met someone who told me he used to play mandolin but had to stop because his hands became too stiff. That’s a familiar fear for musicians. As we accumulate summers, falls, winters, and springs, our hands age with us. Compare Andrés Segovia’s first recordings as a young hotshot with his later recordings when he was in his 80s.

In addition to this, I’ve lived with insulin-dependent type 1 diabetes for nearly fifty years, essentially as long as I’ve played the guitar.

Long-standing diabetes, even when well managed, alters microvascular circulation and connective tissue chemistry. Tendons thicken. Tissue repair slows. Performance-related hand injuries become more frequent, more persistent, and harder to resolve.

In my life, this showed up in the form of trigger finger, a condition that causes the fingers of the hand to stick and click when you try to close a fist. Over a number of years, I had to undergo a series of “trigger release” operations.

About fifteen years ago, I also suffered a compression injury to my lower back during a diabetic seizure. That injury still affects how long I can practice or play in one sitting.

Despite all of this, I never stopped asking the same questions:

How can I keep playing?

And more than that, how can I keep getting better? How can I keep learning and trying new things?

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Here’s a recording I made 2 years ago, here in my studio in Tucson

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The most recent chapter of that question involved a nerve injury in my left arm, one that eventually led to cubital tunnel surgery, a long recovery, and a six-month hiatus from making videos.

When my pinky first became numb and unreliable in late 2020, I assumed it was tendinitis. I’d dealt with tendinitis before, always after an injury, and knew how to treat it. Ice baths, rest, targeted stretching. I assumed it would pass.

It didn’t.

This was a misdiagnosis, much like assuming my pomegranate tree simply needed more water. For a long stretch, it was also difficult to get proper medical evaluation. By the time the injury was correctly diagnosed, the damage had likely already progressed.

I spent two more years trying to treat it conservatively, hoping it would resolve on its own. Surgery is itself an injury, and I’ve had enough of those to respect the cost. I kept giving my arm more “water,” more of what had worked in the past.

But just as with the tree, I was unknowingly feeding the problem. The nerve injury worsened and eventually compounded into carpal tunnel syndrome. Two warning signs became impossible to ignore. If I played repertoire with serious stretches, I’d be in pain for days. And if I practiced for more than thirty minutes at a time, my hand paid for it.

Eventually, I decided to deal with the ants.

That meant letting a surgeon operate on my elbow, something he had been recommending for over a year. It was the right decision.

Recovery was slow. At first, my pinky was so weak I couldn’t execute a simple hammer-on. Some chords I just couldn’t hold down at all. I’m still not fully recovered. My left hand remains stiff at times, partially numb, with what’s often called “glove syndrome.” And yes, I’m haunted by memories of how effortless many things once felt, back when I could burn through a three-hour practice session, or a 1½-hour concert full of extremely difficult pieces, or play 7 straight takes of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, and not be the worse for wear.

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Here’s a recording I made a few days ago, on Christmas, for sharing with friends and family:

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But something else happened during this period.

I was forced to rethink everything: technique, practice structure, left-hand positioning, efficiency, and the difference between necessary effort and wasted force. In the process of adapting, I discovered approaches that allowed me to play with greater ease rather than brute strength. Expression didn’t disappear. In some ways, it deepened.

Even at this late stage in my musical life, I found new technical gems. More importantly, I gained a clearer, more practical understanding of what actually supports sustainable playing over time. That understanding now informs how I help others navigate their own technical challenges.

We all have our guitar journeys. It’s an overused phrase, but it’s still true. This is mine. And because my playing journey has always been intertwined with my teaching, the challenges I’ve faced physically and mentally have inevitably become part of what I share with students.

Music exists within a larger ecosystem. As musicians learning a demanding instrument, we’re like different trees, planted in different soils, climates, and histories. To bear musical fruit, we all need certain things in common: nourishment, time, patience, and the right conditions for growth. But no two hands are the same. No two bodies are the same. And the music is never the same.

By the way, here’s how I solved the ant problem.

I did a lot of research and came up with the solution you see in the pictures below. My pomegranate was not the only young tree the ants found tasty. I saved three other replanted trees by going full Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings, stomping my staff to the ground and declaring, “You shall not pass!” I then backed that up by wrapping the trunks in gauze, adding a layer of cardboard taped all around, and covering it with a sticky substance the ants could not traverse.

 

Establishing yourself as a healthy tree that bears beautiful musical fruit is a multifactorial process. It requires observation, adaptability, and respect for reality rather than idealized solutions.

That brings me to why I’m writing this now.

I’m in the process of rebuilding and reimagining my teaching presence online and on my website. I plan to share a series of practice videos and teaching moments, some polished and some deliberately raw. Some will be unlisted YouTube videos, closer to the workbench than the concert hall.

One major focus for the moment will be the left hand. I learned a tremendous amount during this recovery period, lessons I could never have arrived at if this hadn’t happened to me.

I’ll also be preparing the ground for a new iteration of my interactive course, Become Positively Dangerous on the Classical Guitar. Along the way, I’ll be serializing, updating, and expanding modules from Building the Perfect Practice Session, an exploration of how to turn the often intangible elements of technique and musicianship into a flexible, powerful approach to practicing, no matter how much time you have.

This is not about offering one-size-fits-all solutions. It’s about cultivating conditions. About learning to listen to what’s really happening beneath the surface.

I’m still growing here.

The tree is still growing too. It’s fall now, and the leaves are falling once more. But that’s because of the season and not because of the ants.

 

And by the way, I did manage to get a picture of what happened overnight when the ants tried to attack the tree once more: