Blue Ridge Country - July/August 2013 - 98

G So Much Flow
Jan Davidson

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Jan DaviDson, a native of Murphy, n.C., is DireCtor of the John
C. CaMpbell folk sChool in brasstown, n.C. he is a reCipient of
the north Carolina awarD, the state’s highest honor, for his
work in the fine arts.
earbuds? Why is the Folk
School, with all its handmade, hand-holding, lowtech tradition still going
after 88 years?
The late writer and
“This American Life” contributor David Rakoff gave
me some insight about
what really was happening
in the classes. He had
come to Brasstown to do a
piece for the New York
Times Magazine. He
acknowledged the scenery, praised the homegrown food, enjoyed the
music and did some of the
more balletic square dancing we’d ever seen in
Brasstown. After a couple
of days he came to see me.
“This place is amazing,” he said. “I’ve never
been anywhere that
there’s so much flow.” I
had no idea what he was
talking about – had he
somehow become
impressed by our new
state-of-the-art septic
field? I was just about to
tell him it was among the
Jan Davidson: “People are surprised they’ve made
largest and most overa trunk of stuff when they thought they were resting.”
engineered in Cherokee
County, when David said to me,
“We still make things,” says the
“Mihály Csíkszentmihályi.”
bumper sticker for the John C.
We don’t hear much of that kind
Campbell Folk School.
of talk around here so I didn’t know
Why bother? Lord knows, there
whether to bless him or just look
are plenty of things around. And why
dumb.“He can tell you all about
would one spend what amounts to
‘Flow,’” Rakoff said, “Look him up.”
months of one’s life playing bumpI did, and it was a revelation that
ditty, bump-ditty on a banjo, when all
helped me understand what goes on
one has to do for music is insert one’s

98 | BlueRidgeCountry.com

at the Folk School, and why we
make things.
My advice is to learn to say “MEEhayi CHEEK-sent-mee-hayi,” so you
can drop it in the conversation at the
next coon hunt. This HungarianAmerican psychologist had many
years ago (was I the last to know?
Again?) listed the conditions needed
for “flow”: concentration on the
present; awareness and action
merged; loss of reflective self-consciousness; personal control of the
situation and activity; altered sense of
time; doing something intrinsically
rewarding. “Flow” is not what is
meant by “going with the flow” with
its connotation of “whatever.” Flow
is intense concentration, the exact
opposite of apathy. It can suspend
time and concentrate space to a few
inches in front of your eyes, between
your hands.
Well, shoot, that’s pretty much
what we do all the time in Brasstown
– close-up, intimate, repetitive, it
might look monotonous if you’re
just a-watching, not a-doing. A basketmaker threads his tiny oak strips
through meticulously shaved ribs. A
woodcarver with a Sponge Bob bandaid puts knife to wooden duck at a
focal point just past the end of her
nose. A weaver treadles and beats,
rocks and rolls in a trance as old as
looms. A fiddler off in the woods
with a new tune forgets to eat dinner. The blacksmith knows no time
but the fire. Old folks speed up,
young folks slow down. At the end
of a session, some people are surprised to find that they have somehow made a trunk full of stuff while
they thought they were resting. 

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Blue Ridge Country - July/August 2013

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