THE SEED OF KNOWING

A human baby is a seed, arriving in the world with everything it needs to become what it is capable of becoming. Unlike any other life on Earth, human beings do not only create more life—they create new realities through ideas, dreams, desire, and an unexplainable, compulsive need to make a life.

From the very beginning, the world supports this. Mother Nature speaks to the baby through touch, sound, sight, taste, and smell—then color, beauty, harmony, patterns, symbols, actions, and reactions—before a baby can even talk.

Every human starts life dependent on grown babies who survived because their own needs—biological, physiological, emotional, spiritual—were met until they could meet them on their own. These are the same needs we will all have to meet to grow, thrive, and self-actualize until we die.

No one can stand the suffering of a miserable baby. We are wired to relieve it. When those needs are not met, a baby closes its eyes and screams so loudly it can't hear. It can't talk and tell us what's wrong because it doesn't know anything yet. Even if the baby is not ours, we find a way to ease its discomfort.

The minute those needs are met and the baby feels safe, it opens its eyes again. It can hear. It begins to use its mouth for sound. It begins to learn a language. It begins to thrive.

Then the brain kicks in and goes, I want to know all there is to know. It wants to know what that sound is. What that color is. What that face is. What that feeling is.

The desire to know is one of the first signs that a human being is thriving. This continues into adulthood, until our time is up. The hands that rock the cradle rule the world. We are those hands. Hands that care.

The seed of knowing begins here.

Long before I had words for any of this, my mother did something I would understand differently years later. She still doesn't know how she found the courage to leave the codependent relationship with her family behind. She married a stranger from a place she had never heard of, packed up, and moved to the shores of another ocean on the opposite side of the world.

When she arrived at Portland International Airport in 1972, the cab driver asked where she was going.

“Hillsboro.”

“Hillsboro? Where is that?”

He had to take out a carefully folded paper map from the glove compartment and look it up.

Oregon nights in 1972 were really dark. My mother was terrified of the dark. I don't have to imagine her panic as she looked out at a cloudy, starless night, seeing black shapes of pine trees and mountains and sprinkles of light on the side of the road—because I saw it on her face when she told me the story.

On that drive, she became her own headlights.

She did not know where she was going. She went anyway. Looking back, I see the same knowing I see in a baby: movement before certainty.

When she woke up the next day in Oregon, she thought she had gone home.

I felt the opposite when I followed months later. For years, I thought she should have known better than to try to uproot her only child from a sunlit island paradise to a rainy, forested, foreign land.

I longed for home. I beelined back to Puerto Rico, lived with my grandparents, and traveled back and forth until I permanently joined her eight years later to go to college.

Eight billion babies, and counting, have survived because we are wired to care and meet each other's needs. Children are promised, through the words and deeds of adult humans, that the world they're entering is one where everyone cares, shares what they know, cares about what they need, and wants them to actualize their dreams.

We build systems around it.

But we never teach a child that once they graduate from childhood, they move to a different hood—adulthood—where they create life on their own. Not everyone can or will want to meet their needs. Not everyone who knows will share what they know.

This omission causes great suffering.

Adults spend much of life trying to figure out what they know, what someone else might know, or what they may not really want to know so they can feel certain, when it is the other way around.

Babies do not have to know to have certainty. They are driven to know how to belong, become, and birth a life from root to fruit through attraction and curiosity.

As long as a baby feels cared for, safe, and excited to know about everything they experience, they begin to trust what in the experience feels inexplicably familiar.

That’s how they know.

That is how they learn they can make things with what they know. A coloring page becomes a world. Toy blocks become a building. A sound becomes words. Words become sentences. Sentences become thoughts. Thoughts become knowing. Shared knowing begets questions.

Questions lead to abundance, expansion, potential, possibility, more knowing.

The more babies know, the more they trust the world. The more they know they belong to it, the more they know they're meant to become part of its ongoing creation—birthing beautiful realities where all living things thrive.

Knowing is what happens when human curiosity becomes creation itself.

We are here to expand from a tiny baby into our fullest selves through knowing. With relationships. With passions. With pursuits. Most of all, with dreams.

Humans can watch a bird, then make a spaceship that flies a crew to the dark side of the moon and back.

To know more.

The destiny of every human being is to achieve the potential they have to be happy, from root to fruit, by knowing more. That is the fecundity of our lives: the ability to create abundance with what we know and to raise others up in their knowing.

Knowing is not knowledge. Knowing makes reality possible.

My mother did not know exactly where she was going when she left Puerto Rico. The cab driver did not even know where Hillsboro was.

She went anyway.

She looked into the darkness without knowing what the next morning would reveal. Then she woke up and thought she had gone home.

44 years later, when an astrologer read my birth chart and asked where I lived, not knowing I lived in Portland, Oregon, she asked, “Do you feel connected to Portland?”

I told her I had never truly connected to Oregon, but it was here that I created a whole new color world and transformed the Pacific Northwest with my gift for color so I could feel at home.

Then she blew my mind away.

“This is your Neptune line, which is spiritual attunement. This is your Mars line, so they connect in Portland. Driven towards spiritual transformation in Portland.”

This was the one place on that chart where two planets intersected, and their meaning described the place I had to willfully learn to belong so I could become what I was capable of becoming by creating new realities through color and living a fecund life.

If Puerto Rico taught me about the sovereignty of light, Oregon taught me about the sovereignty of shadows—and how that intersected with my life as a transformationalist.

What started as a personal longing to belong and a dream shared with a bucket of paint became a master class in belonging, becoming, and bearing the life and dreams I came to build by trusting that we are born to know, care, and know together.

To do better.

When we choose knowing, we spend a lifetime creating what we discover. When we don't, we spend a lifetime looking for answers as though answers will finally make us certain.

This causes great suffering.

This is the root of our Should Know Better Crisis.

There will always be things we do not know. But wanting to know is our North Star.

A human baby is a seed, arriving in the world with everything it needs to become what it is capable of becoming.

When we know together, we do better.

This is my way of sharing what I know.

Gretchen.  Send this to someone you know.  Author Note

I came to this work not through therapy or a doctorate, but through a bucket of paint. I didn’t hear a calling, and I wasn’t particularly gifted at art. Color became my vehicle for self-actualization not because I loved decorating, but because using paint colors to make myself feel at home changed how I felt about the world.