Hands touch skin.
The idea of controlling this muscle under my fingers fades away. Rather than trying to direct, I listen.
I tune into the frequency of fascial sensitivity like my perception has a radio dial. I follow ley lines of tension and cords of restriction, angle my weight and wait. Unraveling happens.
~
Liquid color is laid on palette.
Swirling ideas coalesce into the totality of this single brushstroke. I feel as surprised as how I imagine an onlooker might by what unfolds on the canvas before me.
The inevitability of the final painting dances in counterpoint to the unplanability of its emergent form.
~
The audience quiets as a living presence descends.
I track words on a trail of vibration, a hunter softly yet fervently pursuing a glowing creature of ether.
For a moment it falls into my open palms, out my open mouth into this world as sound, and the improvised poem is complete.
~
Some call it the zone or flow state. Some older names are duende, djin, muse, genius. Despite modern culture’s tendency to highlight individual success, a broader perspective sees creative activity as dynamic conversation between the artist, athlete, or healer; and an unseen force that permeates all craft.
I usually call this force the Muse, as personification supports me in practicing active relationship with it. Or them, if we’re calling this force a type of person, or at least a plurality. Thinking of them as a semi-corporeal being of inspiration, who can appear as a flash of insight or a glimpse of perfectly arranged image ready to be drawn, who rewards me with ideas if I show up to my art practices consistently, keeps me honest and helps me honor my commitment to create every day.
They are visceral yet untouchable, tangible and otherworldly. Intensely, intimately personal and vastly universal. If I listen and focus carefully enough, the paint is shaped into a moving story. The client rises from the table with a little more space in their tissues, a little less pain, a little more capacity to be present.
~
When it’s a struggle, when I’m forcing, it isn’t flow state. In those moments all I can do is muck through on stubbornness and faith.
The Muse cannot be forced. They can only be courted, invited, and waited upon. Presence, true flow state, is grace. Flow is more likely to grace us when we tend our bodies and minds. When we practice the techniques of our crafts rigorously and regularly, with a lens towards growth but not perfection.
Muscle memory, skill, practice, iteration.
When we make a place for it in our lives consistently. The Muse likes to be given a place of importance.
On my best days I cannot honestly say I’m the one making the art. It comes through me. On our best days, we are clear and present enough to steadily hold up a lightning rod, and immersed and facile in technical skills enough to ground the power and deliver it into something that can be witnessed by another. Unconscious competence meets connection to the transpersonal creative field.
Jazz musicians can improvise with immense complexity because they know all the keys, modes, and progressions without having to think.
I especially find comfort in the grace of this connection, the ability to court flow, as I adapt to the frustration of reduced dexterity and sensitivity due to nerve damage, and intense fatigue, from multiple sclerosis. Even as it gets harder to manipulate my fingers or even get out of bed some days, the art is still arting and, in fact, my relationship with hand-based creating and healing continue to deepen, so there must be something beyond physical prowess at play.
We are each an orchestra, yet we own none of the music. Both players and instruments, yet at the most creative moments we are not in control of where the hands go, we are cooperating with the creative force that moves through us, as us. Awake and relaxed, engaged and surrendered. Here, everywhere, and nowhere, all at once.