THE BLOOM OF BECOMING

Becoming isn't about achievement. It's about potential. The proof is our biological clock.

We are not here to grow up. We are here to reach our potential, so we can expand our lives and create more with the time we have. Time is of the essence the minute we are born. But timing is everything.

We are really good at making sure children are safe and thrive with our help. Somewhere along the way, we stop wanting the same thing for adults. Without care, potential is thwarted. That's how we know every one of us is destined to root for ourselves, others, and the world—and why we continually tell ourselves people should know better. Becoming isn't about achievement, or even prosperity. It's about potential. Time is of the essence, but timing is everything.

Have you ever heard about the painter who mastered time? It wasn't until I learned about Samuel Morse that I understood what color had to do with light and transformation—and why time is of the essence, but timing is everything.

In 1825, artist Samuel Morse was at the height of his career. He was commissioned by the City of New York to paint a full-length portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette, the French hero of the American Revolution. In the middle of this enormous achievement, a letter arrived by horse messenger. His wife, Lucretia, had fallen gravely ill.

By the time a second letter arrived with news of her death, days had passed. By the time he finally made it home, she had already been buried.

Time had been of the essence. He could not save Lucretia.

The painter who worked with color began to work with speed. He ultimately invented the telegraph and Morse code, transforming how quickly people could communicate across great distances. I see his desire to communicate at the speed of light as a way of self-actualizing his potential: an idea, a dream, a wish to make time on Earth better for himself and for others.

Realizing that dream could not erase the pain of losing his wife to the inevitable fate we all face: mortality. But what came from that pain could serve others. In a biological world where mortality is a clock and pain is inevitable, the Golden Rule is our antidote.

Fast forward 165 years.

In 1990, "Hold On" by Wilson Phillips was the number one single. Pretty Woman was the number one movie. The country had entered a recession. And my first child was born.

Unlike Samuel, I was not an established artist. It wasn't death and mortality that made time of the essence. It was fertility and birthing a child.

I always knew I would be a caring mother, despite never feeling the urge to hold someone else's baby. But the day I decided I was ready, I simply knew.

From the moment my daughter arrived, I could foresee three things. One: I was going to give her the best life I could ever imagine, even though I didn't yet know how to create it for myself. Two: I was going to have another child right away, so she wouldn't be an only child like me. Three: early on, it was clear that the marriage I was in didn't have what it took to go the distance.

I should have known better than to marry him.

They say opposites attract. That is true when it comes to magnets. It is also true when it comes to color. But people are more like color.

Colors are in a relationship that changes with light and each other's reflections, not a circuit. There are no bad colors, only bad color relationships.

In color, it's called Simultaneous Contrast. A color will look lighter beside a darker one. A warm color will look even warmer beside a cool one. A vibrant color can dull the one next to it. How a color reflects its true nature depends on the company it keeps—other colors, surfaces, and light conditions.

That's why we can't really feel a space by its color, only by its harmony. Our relationship wasn't bad because either one of us was a bad color.

Fear not. Both of us found our beauty, harmony, and meaningful connection with other people.

We simply did not create beauty, harmony, and meaningful connection together. Of course, I didn't understand any of this until I started working with color, creating palettes whose success depended on transforming people's homes—baggage and all—through beauty, harmony, and meaningful connection.

Looking back, I learned that the attractions that led me to marry him—my knowing—hadn't misled me or let me down. They gave me something to experience, something to become through, and eventually something to bear and share with you.

As a young adult, I felt like a different person every other day, riding in other cars to unknown destinations. I wore out many tires, overheated many engines, ran into dead ends, and swerved off the road several times. Luckily, I never crashed.

My marriage wasn't a crash, either. It was more like a boat that slowly ran aground.

I had been a sea bean long enough.

It was time to root down and become the driver in my own car ride. I had two little girls in the back seat with dreams and destinies of their own. They needed to look out the window and see the magical spectacle of their lives through light.

I needed to root for them and root them into life.

Once I surrendered to time, timing took over.

Color has the power to change how everything looks and feels at the speed of light. I quit my job to become a stay-at-home mom.

For the first time, I unpacked a bag full of colorful memories I had hidden in a dark closet along with my previous life. I began to physically root—where else, but in the garden.

I planted my very first tree as a symbol of adaptation: a Mimosa Silk Tree. It is known as the Tree of Happiness, and it was my stand-in for the red-blooming Flamboyan—the Royal Poinciana of the Caribbean, known as the Flame of the Forest.

Dylan Thomas wrote of "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower," that blind, urgent, irresistible pull toward life and becoming. Planting that tree was my green fuse. I felt it take hold.

From there, a garden grew: cosmos, yuccas, jasmine, roses, grasses, and, of course, ferns, just like my grandmother's backyard.

Then I began to root inside, too. I learned to cook, sew, and make my own Christmas ornaments. Being home with my girls in our little paradise was bliss.

First, I captured that feeling in art for my walls. Then I used my walls as the canvas to paint those feelings. How life felt changed overnight.

It didn't save me from the pain of knowing my marriage was not going to last. But it eased the suffering while I did my best to make it work.

And it worked.

This is what I know.

Becoming is what happens when what saves us becomes what we give.

I was driven to grow toward the light, just like a plant seeking to thrive and fulfill its purpose. By making my daughters' lives more beautiful with what I had to give—who I was, what I loved, what I desired for myself and for them—I attracted more of the same.

I made the world I was living in a more beautiful place every day. Soon, others began to ask me to help them do the same.

This is how I beelined and learned what it felt like to belong again. How I became the home, the path, and the destination.

It is how I learned to relieve my own suffering, then relieve the same suffering in other people's lives by helping them paint a beautiful world within a world full of change, challenges, losses, endings, and beginnings.

What had helped me root became something I could give. What I gave helped other people create worlds of their own.

I have my daughters to thank. Because of them, I learned to care for them as I cared for myself. I learned to root for others.

Whether you believe this is the master plan of biology or benevolent gods, all roads are designed to reach the same destiny. We are not here to win a race that ends in death. We are here to grow so abundantly fulfilled by who we are and what we do that we are driven to relieve suffering by helping others do the same.

What I never imagined in my wildest dreams is that I would be building a new dream when my grandchildren arrived.

Time became an illusion.

If you are reading this, you are in the middle of a climb. A pyramid of needs.

With the help of people who lifted you from a priceless baby to the grown adult you are, you have made it past survival, protection, belonging, and esteem so you can birth dreams and reach an endless potential that is not subject to fertility, mortality, or anyone else's clock.

It is what I would tell every baby who arrives on Earth today.

Dear Baby,

Welcome to Mother Earth. There is already a Care Reflex built into Motherhood that will meet your needs so you survive until you learn to meet them yourself.

There will be struggles and riddles, but you will always find people who care. When you ask for help, as long as people are healthy and of sound mind, they will care for you as they care for themselves.

You are living proof.

I only have one rule. Care for all creatures, great and small, from this state of abundance. This is what it means to live the potential of your fertility, fecundity, and mortality.

Real love is care in action.

Yours truly,

Your Mother Nature

This is my way of sharing what I know.

Becoming isn't about achievement. It's about potential.

Time tells us we have to become. Time combined with knowing allows us to become what we're 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.