How I came to blow bamboo.

Mastering the shakuhachi won't get you laid, but it might make a monk out of you, and teach you to talk to aliens. The first time I heard a man blow through a bamboo flute called a shakuhachi, I thought it sounded OK. The long, mournful tones and occasional squeaks sounded like massage music or maybe a yoga soundtrack. Good massage music, but just background.

Then he asked me if I'd like to learn to play. I said sure, why not? He offered free lessons, and it seemed dumb to say no, even though I had no musical background at all. I had that feeling that you get when you agree to help a friend move his apartment next weekend. You'll do it because it seems like the right thing to do, but it kind of sucks.

In the first lesson he lent me a wooden flute for practice. I couldn't make a single sound, no matter how I blew into that thing. Frustrating. I had my wife translate a short note into Japanese that said I would keep up with the lessons, but I would only commit to 15 minutes a day of practice. When I handed it to him, he nodded, but there was something in his eye. I felt like he was putting something over on me.

It took me a month to make a single sound on that flute. Even just the 15 minutes a day of practice was a struggle. My teacher told me it takes three years just to get the basics and I had to wonder why I was doing something this hard.

The more I tried to make a sound, the more I appreciated the notes my teacher could make. The 15 minutes of practice grew into a half hour, and then an hour. After an hour of blowing through the flute, it became warm in my hands. It felt alive. I also started to feel more relaxed. All that breathing and concentrating on sound managed to clear out the usual anxiety and nonsense that rattles around in my head.

I went online and looked up the shakuhachi, and that's when I discovered that it is one of the hardest instruments in the world to play, and that the original players of the instrument were cooler than any character created in any game of Dungeons and Dragons in any rec room anywhere.

A long time ago, in a country far far away, the shakuhachi was played by ex-samurai, Zen Buddhist monks who wandered Japan and freelanced as spies. Not only that but when they weren't blowing the bamboo, they could brain someone with it. I was learning to play music on an instrument, and weapon of spies… a Zen flute from Medieval Japan. There's more nerdy goodness.

In 1977, the Voyager I satellite was launched. It carried a golden record of sounds from the human race for any aliens that may find it. One of the songs on that satellite is "The Crane's Nest" played by Goro Yamaguchi. First wandering samurai monks tweak my geek, and now the idea of extraterrestrials hearing the shakuhachi as one of their first introductions to the human race really got my nerd on. I'm not alone. Remember the Violent femmes? Well, Brian Ritchie, one of the band's founders has become a shakuhachi master. He sits and plays all day in a teahouse in Australia.

In the past year, the shakuhachi has taken me over. I practice about an hour and a half a day. When I miss a practice, I feel it. I yearn to play that flute. The fact that I'll never be good at this impossible instrument is actually more of a comfort than confounding. This is the first time I've devoted myself fully to something impossibly hard. It's an antidote to ambition, an immunization against achievement. I sit and work really hard at something for which I can expect no results and for some reason that feels good. Even if I got good, nobody would care.

I just spent a thousand dollars on a beginner's flute. I now have my first real bamboo shak. The smell of it, the feel of it in my hands, the sound it makes is sublime. When I blow a note, even a lousy squeaky out of tune note, it's like the bamboo is whispering secrets. "Keep blowing…hold this sound…listen…breathe…try again…" It feels cringe makingly corny to describe, but the music of a shakuhachi is like a crack in the veneer of worry and fear that covers my world, it's a place where something else seeps in, something good. Something without a beat, without prestige or status, something better than all that.

I met someone who started from the same teacher and has since moved to Tokyo and studies with the grandmaster of our school. When I brought up the lamentable fact that it will take me three years to get the basics, he smiled.

"That's what they tell you. After three years, they tell you it takes ten years to get good. After that, they tell you it takes a lifetime. I've heard guys who've been playing for 15 years and still suck."

That would be bad news if it weren't OK to be lousy at the shakuhachi. It's not something I play to be good at. Let's face it. It's a bamboo flute, not the guitar. Nobody cares, and that's part of its appeal. Even in Japan, people laugh when I tell them I play it. "My grandfather plays that" is what they say. That, or, "Did you know shakuhachi is slang for blow job?"

I have grown to love the music. What used to sound like mournful notes have become infinitely subtle mediations on pitch and tone. The Zen monks used to say that if you could play one perfect note on the flute, you would enlighten all of mankind. Now I know why they said that. I feel it.