Morning Work | Week 2 | The Voice

There are a million reasons not to create. Only one of them matters.

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I skipped four days last week.

I was in Zion. Camping under the stars in the Utah desert over Easter. Red rock and cold mornings and a notebook I almost left in the truck.

Easter morning I summited Angels Landing at dawn. I’d entered the lottery on a whim and won for the first time ever. Kicked off at six to be one of the first people on the mountain that morning.

Sat on a rock at the top with a pen and wrote four pages without stopping. Not about the canyon. About a dream I’d had two nights earlier that I was already starting to forget.

Wildest dream I’ve had in years. Something I’m still working through. I would have lost it entirely if I hadn’t had the muscle. The practice of sitting down and writing what’s in your head before it disappears.

Nothing dramatic happened in my Pages last week. I didn’t uncover some buried revelation. But I had the habit when the thing came, and I caught it. If I’d been scrolling, if I’d rolled over and gone back to sleep, it would be gone.

The four days I missed? I didn’t beat myself up about it. Hiking is like that. You step off the trail. Your boots hit the dirt again when you’re ready. You don’t go back to the trailhead and start over. You walk back to the trail from wherever you are and keep going.

If you missed a day this week, or three, come back.

The notebook is where you left it.

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Identity

Cameron says Week 2 is about recovering a sense of identity. Who were you before the world told you who to be?

I read your comments from last week. Betty was told by an authority figure to stop journaling. She’s 71 and she’s picking it back up. Chriss is wrestling with the silence of kids who don’t call. D Marie pushed her creativity to the back of the to-do list for decades and just opened a restaurant. Arthur is 75 and jealous of his early morning hours with God because the Accuser tries to fill them with everything else.

Every one of you had something before the roles took over. Before wife, mother, grandmother, caretaker, the woman everybody counts on to hold it together. The man who stays strong so everyone else can fall apart. There was a person underneath all of that. A girl who drew horses on everything. A boy who sang in the shower and meant it. Someone who wrote poems in a spiral notebook and hid them in a drawer because nobody asked to read them.

Cameron calls it the Shadow Artist. The person who wants to create but orbits the creative life instead of living it. She teaches art but doesn’t paint. She reads about writing but doesn’t write. She admires creators and manages creative people and does everything except the thing itself. Because somewhere, early enough that it took root, someone told her she wasn’t that. That it wasn’t practical. That her job was to support, not to make.

The Pages are putting you in a room with that person for thirty minutes a day. The one underneath. She’s been waiting. She’s patient. She just wants to know if you remember.

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The Parable

The master gives three servants talents. Two invest and multiply. One buries his in the ground. When the master returns, the one who buried it says he was afraid.

The master doesn’t say that’s understandable. He says you wicked, lazy servant.

That parable is about the thing inside you that was given to you by someone who expects you to use it. The singing. The painting. The cooking. The writing. The gardening. The thing you’ve been putting at the end of the list for thirty years because there was always something more responsible to do.

The talent you buried is still there. The Master is asking about it.

There are a million reasons not to create. But there’s only one voice that matters. The one that speaks to the Father.

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This Week: Imaginary Lives

Grab a blank page.

Write down five completely different lives you would live if you could. Not what’s practical. Not what makes sense at your age. What would you choose if everything was on the table?

A painter in a studio with north light. Someone who runs a bookstore by the ocean. A travel writer. A chef. A potter with clay under your nails.

Write fast. Don’t filter. Then look at the five and ask what they have in common.

What desire is hiding underneath each and every one of them?

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The Artist Date

If you haven’t done one yet, this is the week. Two hours. Solo. Something that fills you up and has no purpose. A walk through a garden. An hour in a bookstore with no shopping list. Sitting at a coffee shop and drawing on a napkin.

A few weeks ago I was walking through the forest, nestled myself between two stumps and sat there pretending I was an old tree. Thought about Methuselah, the bristlecone pine that’s been alive for 5,000 years.

What has it seen?

Cameron calls it a date with the Creator. He made all this beauty and you’re going out to receive some of it. Worship with your eyes open.

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The Lineage

MacDonald was twenty-nine with a wife, no pulpit, no denomination, and no prospects. His congregation had voted to cut his salary in half because they didn’t like his sermons. He resigned. He started writing to feed his family and didn’t stop until he died fifty years later with over fifty books behind him.

He didn’t become a writer because it was practical. He became a writer because the thing inside him demanded out. The circumstances forced the opening. But the thing was there before the circumstances.

What’s the thing in you that circumstances haven’t killed?

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What’s one thing you remember loving to do as a kid that you haven’t done in years? Not whether you’ll do it again. Just name it.

What was the thing?

<3EKO

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