You Are Dust. Now Write.

There’s a moment in every Ash Wednesday service that’s the great equalizer. A thumb presses ash to your forehead and a voice speaks:

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

A moment every human must grapple with as mortals living under the sun. An honest moment, and one we can’t escape.

We’re going to die.

And somewhere between now and that day, there are things you haven’t written yet. There are creations waiting to be birthed.

The Liturgy of Urgency

We don’t like to think about our limited time. Writers especially are masters of procrastination — we research, outline, take a nap, doom-scroll, search for the net worth of our favorite stars, wait for the right moment, and the right mood, a moment between the kid’s nap schedule.

We tell ourselves we’ll start the essay when the semester ends, begin the novel after the move, and finish the memoir once we have more distance from it. Ash Wednesday interrupts all of that.

Death doesn’t knock politely. The ashes smeared on our foreheads a gentle reminder of the ticking clock of our lives. And the question it leaves — the one that sits in your chest like a weighted blanket is simple:

If our days are numbered, what are we still waiting for?

Not what will get the most likes. We’re not interested in building a platform, or personal brand. Forget about what some guru says is “hot” right now.

What is the thing inside you trying to get out? The heavy, real, and maybe inconvenient creation you were made to write?

Into the Wilderness

After Ash Wednesday comes Lent. Forty days. The number is borrowed from Christ’s time in the wilderness — alone, hungry, tempted, stripped of everything comfortable.

Many participants of Lent will give something up. A fasting of sorts to draw closer to God and others. Chocolate. Social media. Coffee. These small surrenders have their place.

But what if this year, instead of subtraction, you added something? What if you entered your own wilderness — not to deprive yourself, but to finally do the work you’ve been avoiding?

Forty days isn’t a lifetime. It’s not even an entire season. But it’s enough time to create the thing you’ve been dreaming about.

Forty days is enough time to draft a chapbook. To finish your essay collection that’s been sitting in your Google Drive since 2021. Forty days is enough time to write a letter to your father you’ve composed in your head in the shower. This focused season is enough time to put down the poem that’s been circling your head for months, the one you’re afraid isn’t good enough.

Forty days is 960 hours. Imagine what you could accomplish by Easter Sunday?

Honest, Heartfelt, and For No One’s Applause

Here’s what the wilderness does — it strips away the audience. Jesus wasn’t out there building a brand. He was out there contending with what was true.

Writers need that. We desperately need that.

So much of what poisons the creative life is the constant awareness of being watched. We write with one eye on the metrics, one ear tuned to what’s trending. We shape our sentences for virality. We sand down the rough, strange, sacred edges of our work so it fits neatly into a content strategy.

Lent invites the opposite. It says:

Go into the desert. Leave the noise behind. Write the thing that’s true, even if no one reads it. Especially if no one reads it. Write it for you, and God above.

Write for God, if you believe in God. Write for the version of yourself who needed to read this and never found it. Write for the sheer, stubborn act of making something real out of the dust you’re made of.

The paradox of Ash Wednesday is you are dust — fragile, temporary, impossibly small. And yet dust is what God used to make everything. You are the material of creation. The raw stuff of making.

A Forty-Day Invitation

So here’s what I’m proposing. Not a challenge. Not a content sprint. An invitation.

From Ash Wednesday to Easter, give yourself forty days in the wilderness with your writing. It doesn’t have to be public. It doesn’t have to be polished. It just has to be yours — the real thing, the honest thing, the work you’d do for free.

Show up to the page the way you’d show up to a church — humble, open, willing to be moved by something bigger than yourself.

Some days will feel barren. That’s the wilderness working. Some days the words will come like water from a rock. That’s grace.

And at the end of forty days, you’ll have something. Maybe a messy first draft. Maybe it’s just forty entries in a notebook no one will ever see. But it will exist. It will live in the world because you chose to stop waiting, and chose to start.

From Dust to Resurrection

Lent crescendos on Easter Sunday. Death gives way to life. The temptations of the wilderness opens into a vista of hope and new beginnings.

That’s the arc every writer knows in their bones — you go through the hard, dry, unglamorous middle, and if you keep going, something new comes to life. Not because you were talented enough or disciplined enough, but because you were faithful to the work.

You are dust. This is not a call for defeat. This is a starting line, the place we all inhabit.

The ash is still on your forehead. The blank page is open in front of you.

Forty days. Your words. The wilderness.

Let’s begin.

If this resonated, I’d love to hear: what’s the thing you’ve been waiting to write? And what would it look like to give it forty days?