Flow

In 1990, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined the term flow: the mental zone in which one’s skill and the challenge at hand meet on equal levels and actions merge with awareness in a union of clarity and concentration.

...

She moves the paint like she makes love. Leaning her body over the canvas, tracing the spaces of lingering white with brushes of all sizes that balance weightless in the softly firm grip of her hands. Hands baptized with the crimsons and maroons of her sunsets, the deepening hues of blue in a starry sky or sea, the smoky greys and near whites of her clouds. She transforms quiet blankness into vocal skies, blending colors and bleeding sunrises into scenes born in her mind. Her palette holds an organized chaos of acrylic, mixing and mating on the plate to form every hue she conceives. She moves between palette and painting, toiling and tilling the growth of her heavens with color-kissed fingers scarred by past hurts that hold pencils and paintbrushes with more surety than they hold the other tools of life.

In every sky, sea and silvan setting, she traces trees. The silhouettes she loves that stretch through the winter sky. Her branches snake through the color like life, weaving the dark into the light. The curvatures and patterns of the tree’s limbs she knows like her own. Their trunks and slender appendages come from her views of the outside world, her studies of rendered and photographed forests that have found their place in her mind and heart.

Her eyes are the painting. The deep green of a forest flecked with distant rays of light, lined with rows of tall, slender pines. Hair loosely trails from where she has gathered it, grazing her shoulder and sweeping up a chance taste of color as she leans over the scene intent on the arc of one small branch at the top of her tree, giving the same devotion to the smallest twig as she grants the sun.

The paint is her world, and her mind its own place. She knows not of the paint in her hair, the growing ache in her bent back, the passing of time and the darkening sky. Her mind knows focus and care for her nascent scene. Her face like the calm mirror of a lake at dawn.

...

He moves the wood like he makes love, hands trailing over every inch of the surface to feel the knots and grooves of the live edge pine, sawn lengthwise to preserve the natural outer bark of the old conifer. It weighs in his hands as he lays it down on the sawhorses like a prayer on an altar. With sandpaper he smooths the area of its rough table top, the tool an extension of his arm muscles.

He has artist’s hands. Each callous and muscle speaks years of labor and endurance. Cuts bear the pain of progress and determination. Fingernails remain closely cropped to avoid the damage of their engagements. Permanent lines and rough patches weave along the traces of the veins beneath his toughened skin. These hands hoist weight large and small. They bear splinters and nail bites. They move with a stitcher’s precision in the exactitudes of measuring and cutting, balancing strength with care.

He leans into his task to soften the wild edges into something even and calm that won’t splinter at the graze of a hand. His electric sander melts sound into one hum and sprinkles dust over the concrete floor and his clothes and shoes, christening his eyebrows and head with weightless flecks of wood.

He takes its weight onto his shoulder, the sinews and muscles in his sun-touched arms working and straining in their motion, and balances its being above him as he moves with sure, focused strides. Amid the mess of a work in progress, he fits the pine into place - smooth top and sloping sides. He knows its every inch and strength, knows to work with focus and delicacy to avoid compromising the shape and wealth of the wood. He knows to nail the piece the right way to secure its weight and keep it in place. His hands know the tools by touch, each hammer, wrench and chisel. His fingers hold them like a part of him, moving deftly over wood to give purpose to raw material.

He enters a flow state deeper than the oceans of his eyes in which minutes melt like waves into the tide. Time transforms and doubt resigns. Zen permeates his eyes, emanating from within rather than receiving. They speak the concentrated calm of eudaimonia.

...

Her face mirrors his, eyes window to where work and will are one and all else occupies another realm - like dipping underwater while sounds and sights remain over the surface and apart.

Psychologists name this place flow. They call it love.