The Bearing Of Fruit

The more I talk about abundance, the more I realize how often we mistake it for having more instead of creating more.

Different words create different worlds. One word changed mine the moment I heard it:

Fecundity.

A word I had never heard before 2022.

A baby arrives with the potential to become what it is capable of becoming through fertility, fecundity, and mortality. We talk constantly about fertility and mortality, but rarely about the generative force that lives between them.

Fecundity is all about you.

A seed does not become a tree all at once. It sprouts, grows, flowers, fruits, and leaves behind seeds capable of beginning the process again. Human beings are no different, except they get to choose the seeds they leave behind. Nature creates life through fecundity, the capacity to create abundant new life.

Most people think of fecundity as a biological process. How many offsprings a creature can have during its mortal life. In humans, fecundity is also the capacity to create ideas, dreams, relationships, art, businesses, communities, and lives that nourish others long after we are gone.

The same is true for every dream.

Dreams begin as seeds. Some are planted. Some are abandoned. Some sprout but never mature. Others grow into something so successful that we stop planting altogether. We often think of this as success. Sometimes it even leads to a life of retirement.

It is also where many ideas quietly die.

Not because they failed. Not because they stopped being produced. They are no longer being tended or watered. Success can convince us that tending what already exists is enough. But nothing about our biological baggage, or life on Earth, suggests this.

The nature of life is not preservation.

It is creation.

Every living thing creates life. Every living thing dies. But only humans can choose what kind of life they create. This is why birthing matters. Building assembles something from the outside. Birthing brings something forth from within.

A dream is not simply constructed. It is carried, nurtured, protected, and eventually brought into the world. The question is not whether you are capable of creating. The question is what wants to be born through you.

 Fecundity is our ability to create abundandantly.

I had no idea I still had so many seeds to sow.

The beginning of 2021 coincided with endings, beginnings, and choices to be made.

Devine Color had ended in 2015. My five-year non-compete had finally ended in 2020. I could work with a paint manufacturer again and develop a new paint line. Everything looked like a beginning.

During Covid, it didn’t feel like one.

Miraculously, by the time summer rolled around, quarantine lifted, Scott and I were vaccinated, and we hopped in the car and took off on a meditation vacation, or what we call a Medication. We hadn’t been on one in seven years.

Unlike a regular vacation, a Medication is a soulful search-and-rescue mission. Instead of getting away, you’re going in. Your GPS is your intention. The journey is the destination. You get in the car and let go.

The contemplative scenery relaxes your vision. Open roads are an excellent metaphor for open minds.

The people you meet along the way always seem to have an offering you are meant to receive.

Our first Medication was a spring break road trip to Manhattan Beach in 2014 with our youngest daughter, who was graduating from college that year. We were about to become empty nesters. I was excited to meditate every day and delighted when I found out that a meditation coach, who lived next door, happened to own the Airbnb we rented.

We hit it off so well that she invited us to join her and her neighbors to watch the sunset from her back deck. Our chance meeting and her encouragement helped me cement my practice.

On this trip, I also realigned with the stars.

I discovered Kristin Fontana’s evolutionary horoscopes in the Manhattan Beach local paper. Her thoughtful and empowering approach to stars and destinies filled a hole in my heart left by Walter Mercado, the beloved Puerto Rican astrologer I grew up watching with my grandmother. Every week, I would sit with my grandmother and wait for him to call out our astrological signs.

“AH-RIES!”

My sign was always first.

Walter called each one as if they had just won the jackpot. He championed you and your unique purpose with every word he spoke. His sign-off made it feel even more significant:

“May you receive from me lots and lots of peace, but most of all, lots and lots of love.”

To this day, I still read Kristin’s horoscope aloud in the same enthusiastic manner and send it to my kids.

When I left Manhattan Beach in 2014, I was full of peace and love and ready to make meditation a daily practice.

Seven years later, in 2021, with our dog Atlas in tow, we chose to go to Carmel-by-the-Sea for a couple of days and then on to Santa Barbara. Sure enough, within an hour of arriving in Carmel and sitting down to lunch, we met a vibrant art dealer sitting across from us. She invited us to join her, her best friend, and her brother for a sunset bagpipe salute overlooking the Pacific.

Art dealer? Sunset? Déjà vu.

Our first Medication marked the beginning of the end of Devine Color and the dream as I knew it. This one marked the beginning of a new dream I believed in and a destination I was unsure about.

We were meant to meet.

Over wine, looking at the Pacific Ocean and listening to Outlander’s theme coming from a bagpipe, I asked her to share the most transformational growth period she had ever seen in one of her artists.

She spoke of loss instead.

Some didn’t have the financial support to keep going and had to get regular jobs. Others fell ill. All had grown except those who focused on what was already successful instead of tending to new ideas. Without new ideas, an artist cannot grow.

It was as if she had been waiting for me to show up so she could say this.

“Sing me a song of a lass that is gone; say, could that lass be I?”

Yes, it was.

I stopped doing art when Devine became successful.

And what I mean by art is not creative work. I mean new soul-bearing seeds of self-expression meant to grow, reach their full potential, and nourish the souls of others with humanity and connection.

You must incubate, plant, nurture, and protect these new seeds. This process takes time, tending, and trust. From that process, new ideas sprout, stronger roots form, and new possibilities emerge.

Not because what came before was less than.

Because what came before becomes the soil, mulched from experience and wisdom. The mulchier the soil, the more fertile it becomes. The more fertile it becomes, the richer the bounty you can share with others and the world.

When we left Carmel for Santa Barbara, we drove through acres of farmland and vineyards instead of taking the scenic coastal route. Any road, less traveled or not, taken in the name of your fullest potential is never the wrong one.

On this trip, I saw fields of seeds sprouting and growing in different stages, destined to feed bodies, much like art is destined to feed souls.

This was the route I needed to see that day.

By the time we arrived home, I understood what the art dealer had given me:

the gift of her knowing.

Her knowing confirmed mine. My dream was not over. It had simply outgrown its container. And like every seed before it, it was asking for fertile soil.

I beelined toward my knowing.

One year later, our oldest daughter bought me an astrological birth chart reading for my birthday.

I was stunned at how accurate it was.

Halfway through, the astrologer asked, “You’re still in San Juan?”

“No, in Portland, Oregon.”

“Do you feel connected to Portland?”

“Are you kidding me?” I shared how I had to create an entire paint company to paint a version of life that felt like home.

Then she said, “I think this will blow your mind.”

She showed me where the lines of Neptune, the planet of inspiration, dreams, and spiritual attunement, intersected, and where Mars, the planet of energy, action, and desire, crossed and connected in only one place in the world, driving me toward spiritual transformation:

Portland, Oregon.

I didn’t even know what to say.

“How do you feel about mortality, as in fecundity?” she asked.

I had no idea what that meant. And she had no idea that I had rooted and birthed an entire life full of relationships, dreams, and passion in Oregon after arriving there as an only child with one person: my mother. Later, my grandmother joined us. Then we were three.

My mother still doesn’t know how she found the courage to leave the codependency and dysfunction of her family behind in what must have seemed like a reckless move at the time. 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 the Portland International Airport in 1972, the cab driver asked where she was going.

“Hillsboro.”

“Hillsboro? Where is that?”

He had to take out his 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 the window at a cloudy, starless night, seeing different shapes of black pine trees and mountains and sprinkles of lights on the side of the road here and there, because I saw it on her face when she told me the story.

On that drive, she became her own headlights.

Just like a happy, curious baby, she somehow found the courage to beeline toward knowing without certainty.

When she woke up the next day in Oregon, she felt the opposite of me when I followed months later.

She thought she had gone home.

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

My mother went on to divorce and remarry three more times. Each time she got divorced, it was as if she had a special reset button. She would get rid of everything and buy it all new again. She only kept her important papers and my artwork in case she had to move again.

Her dream was to make things better next time.

To some, getting rid of all your stuff only to buy it again might seem financially foolish or emotionally frivolous. For my mother, replacing everything when things fell apart symbolized resilience, a source of strength she relied on to move forward and do better next time.

She could rebuild again, and again, and again, without failures or catastrophes defining her.

Coming home to my mother’s new environment never seemed like dysfunction. It always felt like forward motion, even though sometimes it might have looked like she was going around in circles.

Motion, according to how the universe works, is always good.

Watching my mom build and rebuild her life every time she got divorced significantly shaped my design work. I dig deep and look for meaning underneath people’s relationships with things and their color baggage so I can harmonize their homes with meaningful color synchronicity. I shovel through doubt, regret, and helplessness to make their paths more straightforward and help people get where they are trying to go.

My mom finally arrived at her destination when she stopped marrying other people and wed herself.

For the first time, she wanted to paint her walls in color and chose Sun Rays from the golden sun.

The woman who once seemed flippant about stuff became almost a packrat. Her home glows with color and cheer, yellow with optimism. It is a full expression of who she is: independent, resilient, and rooted in the better life she made for herself and her daughter when she came to America and kept beginning again as many times as she needed to.

I watched my mother grow old and birth art late in life. She will tell you she was a late bloomer.

She did not just survive a life she was supposed to know how to create on her own.

She continued to try, and try again, to become what she already was all along.

Despite the changes, struggles, and setbacks, she became.

In her eighties, she became an artist, painting all night and day, a vision of life that reflects her richly fecund life.

I remember her as a young mother always coloring with me and thinking her pages were beautiful and brilliant.

All babies should be this lucky.

 Send this to someone you know. 

Gretchen.