Love Letters From Paris: Morning Pages

Morning Pages before dawn is how every new day begins on Boulevard Voltaire

When my Bic pen touches the paper in the morning, I have the sense of turning something on. It feels like a signal—an invisible bell summoning my unseen companions to come closer and lean in. This is my holy of holies, my personal sacred space. The blank white page before me is my life, waiting to be dreamed into existence.

I can’t quite remember when I began doing this regularly, but it must be over twenty years now. I first encountered the idea in The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, a book that speaks to the basic properties of creativity and how to protect this fragile, essential quality in one’s life. The world we currently occupy doesn’t exactly encourage the “artist’s way,” to say the least. In her groundbreaking book, Julia encourages the reader to write three pages of anything first thing in the morning.

This does at least two very important things. First, it’s a simple way of declaring, at the start of the day, that you are first and foremost a creator. Second, it’s a way of clearing the pipes—of letting the inner waters run free. When I was a boy growing up in the suburbs, we learned to let the garden hose run for a while before taking a drink. The first rush of water was warm, tasting of rubber. But if you waited, the flow soon turned cool and fresh. Writing morning pages is like that: letting the water run awhile.

It doesn’t matter so much what you write, only that you write. If you get stuck at the beginning, you can simply repeat a few sentences over and over. Eventually, the words, the sentences, and the ideas will begin to come.

For me, I like to write down my visions and hopes for the future as if they’ve already manifested. This enriches my imagination and draws my desired life into form. Sometimes I let my future self step through—offering words of wisdom and gentle encouragement from a higher mind. There are even mornings when my future self will ask what I would tell the version of me who was slugging it out ten years ago.

Another book that has shaped my morning writing is Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch. In it, Walsch describes a time when he was lost and discouraged. He began writing a letter to God, filled with complaints and questions, and was astonished to find words answering him—clear, loving, and wiser than his own thoughts. That spontaneous exchange became a dialogue with divine intelligence, eventually published in three books that have helped millions move beyond the stale image of an old man in the sky and toward a living, breathing relationship with the sacred.

Each morning I sit down in the dark, pre-dawn—it feels like the earth before God created the animals and the first pair of humans, or perhaps the hour before the Big Bang itself.
The pen meets the page, and something unseen stirs.
Paris listens.
My hand moves.
And the day, once again, becomes holy.

Explore more:
– Letters from Paris Archive
– About Richard Beerhorst
– Recent Paintings