Morning Work | Week 6 | The Flood

Writing like I’m running out of time

Howdy. Happy Friday.

Last Monday I told you the oil is received, not made. The good stuff arrives on its own. Our job is mostly to show up and catch it.

Then I spent this week trying to make it instead. As much as I could.

As fast as I could.

This is the sixth thing I have put out in six days. Including today. I am diagnosing the disease in the middle of the symptom.

Not anxious. The well is not closing. It’s the opposite. There is more in me than there are mornings left to get it out, so I open every gate and let it pour, and I call the flooding abundance.

The Flood

Too much water does not feed the ground. It floods it.

The soil cannot drink a downpour any faster than it drinks a rain. The excess runs off the top, takes the loose earth with it, and pools where nothing was trying to grow. You can drown a field trying to feed it. Anyone who has tried to keep a garden alive knows this. I forgot it the second I sat down at the keyboard.

A reader cannot drink from a fire hose, and neither can the work. When I write more than a thousand words a day, most of it sheets off and is gone by noon. The piece that needed a week gets buried under the three that came after it. The slow deep thing that was trying to root in me washes out with all the rest.

The mornings really are finite. That part is not a lie. But the urgency lies about the cure. It swears the answer to running out of time is to move faster, to pour harder, to open every gate. It says it so reasonably I believe it.

The Bloom

This is the week of the book where Cameron stops talking about art and starts talking about money. People hate this chapter. A close friend a few weeks ahead of me in the same pages put it perfectly.

This is a creativity book, why am I being asked to budget?

But the money was never the point. It’s a ripple. The teaching underneath it is simple. Abundance is already happening, all around you, whether or not you show up to produce it.

The wildflower in the ditch does not strive. It blooms in gravel and runoff, on no one’s schedule, for no one in particular. Cameron says the thing I needed to hear this week. Discipline is not always the most virtuous or the most fruitful trait. I have built seventeen months on discipline. Past a point, discipline is just the polite name for a man who does not trust the supply.

Jesus told a story about a man who scattered seed on the ground and then slept and rose, night and day, while the seed sprouted and grew and he did not know how. First the blade. Then the ear. Then the full grain in the ear. The earth produced all of it by itself, on a clock that was never his to set.

The Mountain

Moses spent forty years leading his people toward a country he had been promised at a burning bush, and he never set foot in it. At the very end God brought him up a mountain and showed him the whole land, every far hill of it, and told him plainly that he would see it with his own eyes but would not cross over. He laid down there with the river still uncrossed and the work unfinished, and it was not a failure. It was a whole life given to something he was never going to get to finish.

That is the answer to the clock. You are not going to finish.

You were never going to finish. The thing you are building outlasts the years you have to build it, and it was always meant to. The only thing ever asked of you is to give yourself to the part you are standing in.

I have everything I need. The seed grows whether I stand over it or not. The wildflower blooms in the ditch without my permission. None of it was ever waiting on me to hurry.

The Assignment

Three things this week.

01. The Count

Asking you to count what you have. You will resist it the way everyone does. Do it anyway, and do not stop at the numbers. Count the abundance already blooming around you that you did not produce and cannot take credit for. The people. The ideas arriving faster than you can use them. The morning, showing up again, free.

02. The Small Luxury

Take one. Fresh fruit. A ten-minute shower (or bath). The hour you keep telling yourself you have not earned. Let yourself have the thing that is purely for the pleasure of being alive, and watch what it does to the work.

03. The Far Country

Write to the feeling that you are running out of time.

Then write this line at the top of the page:

I am not going to finish.

And I give myself to it anyway.

Answer it. What would you give yourself to, fully, today, if you finally accepted you were not going to finish?

This Week

I put out my first big listicle-y guide this week and broke it into shorter reads you can take one at a time. The longer work keeps unfolding at its own pace.

Everything I publish is free. Read what you have room for and leave the rest.

If any of this hit you, forward it to the person flooding their own field, sure that more and faster is the same as better.

<3EKO

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P.S. What are you rushing that only grows in its own time? The mornings are finite. Drowning them does not make more. Let something bloom.

You can always support me, but I have everything I need. So do you.

I love you.