Howdy. Happy Monday.
So about last week’s media fast. Lasted about two days. Then I went back to routine. Solo parenting last week. We camped. We had a tea party. Went swimming then burgers and ice cream.
I felt the pull the whole time. The phone. The feeds. The reflex. I did not conquer it. I just got better at noticing it.
The Drop
On Friday they declassified the aliens. UAP files, technically. I was pouring lemon water tea for my daughter.
A slow drip dressed up as a flood. The architecture was already visible to anyone willing to look. The bodies are biological drones. The intelligence behind them is not visiting. It has been here.
I wrote about it in The Filter.
What I Learned by Failing
The fast did not work the way Cameron describes it. I did not reach some deep silence on day four where buried creativity started flowing. I caved and went back to scrolling and reading and pattern-matching like I always do.
I dropped the Pages too. Not just the fast.
Every time I opened a tab or picked up my phone I caught myself asking one question. Am I looking for something or am I avoiding something? Most of the time the answer was the second one.
Three days into solo parenting I told myself I needed to catch up. A draft. A title for the next book. Lighter boots for summer hiking. Distraction came dressed as productivity. I can rationalize any of them in a sentence. None of them was creation.
Then I dropped my Harley. First time. A car did not make a full stop. I swerved. Cut too hard. The bike went down. I am fine. The 883 is a tank. But I was not focused. I was somewhere else. Running someone else’s input through my head instead of watching the road.
Every rider knows target fixation.
Stare at the rock you do not want to hit, you hit it. Look where you want to go, not where you do not want to crash. But my drop was not target fixation. I was not staring at anything. I was somewhere else.
That is the trap. Not the bad thing you fear. The reflex that pulls you off the track you said you were on.
Three projects require my energy. Everything else is a different track. Not evil. Not sin. Just not mine.
The noise does not stay on the screen. It follows you into the turn.
The Oil
The widow in 2 Kings had nothing left. Creditors at the door. Two sons about to be taken as slaves. Elisha told her to gather every empty vessel she could find. Borrow them from neighbors. Fill the house with empties. Then pour.
The oil did not stop until the last vessel was full.
She did not make the oil. She made room for it.
Cameron calls Week 5 Recovering a Sense of Possibility. Most of us were taught creativity is something you produce. Sit down grind force it out. If it is not coming try harder. Stay up later. Consume more input until the output arrives.
I have been running that program for 17 months. A short book every ten days or so since January. Three to six articles a week. It worked. Until the fast showed me what it cost.
Cameron says creativity is something you receive. The work is real. The widow still had to gather the vessels. She still had to pour. But the oil was not hers to manufacture. The source of the work is the one who made you. Your job is to bring the empties.
The vessel cannot receive oil if it is full of someone else’s water.
If you have been doing the Pages for five weeks you already know this. Some mornings you sit down with nothing and three pages later something is on the paper that you did not plan did not outline did not think your way into. It arrived.
The Assignment
Three things this week.
01. The Vessel List
Write down five creative acts you have been meaning to start return to or finish. Not goals. Just the names. A painting. A letter. A song you used to sing. A garden. An instrument in the closet. These are your empty vessels. You do not have to fill them this week. Just name them and set them out.
02. The Source Page
In your morning pages start one session with this line at the top:
If I trusted that the source would provide I would _____.
Fill the blank. Keep writing. See what comes through when you stop trying to produce and start listening.
03. The Fast Report
If you tried the fast write down what you noticed. Not whether you succeeded. What you noticed. Where the reach was strongest. What surfaced when the noise dropped even briefly. If you did not try it notice this week how many hours you spend consuming versus creating. Just count. Do not judge.
This Week
After Jesus is finished. The third and final book in the Kingdom Within trilogy. Jesus Frequency. Parables Unsealed. And now this one. Possibly my best. Three offerings that ask the question the institutional church stopped asking. What happened next and what does it mean for us now.
39 advance readers got copies last week. It’s yours now, too.
The Nazarene returns this week. A new direction in early drafts. The three projects mentioned earlier are back on the track.
If any of this hit you, forward it to the person who keeps saying they are going to make something. The one sitting on a vessel they have not named.
P.S. What did the fast give you? Even if you failed (especially if you failed).
Fasting from technology would be almost as difficult as fasting from food. I've never managed to do so for more than two days with either of them.