The Science Of Becoming

Mother Nature’s call, from cradle to grave, is like a honeybee beelining and taking a perfectly straight path back to its hive: to belong by knowing, and to do amazing things with what we know. To care for one another like we care for ourselves.

To fulfill the Golden Rule.

No wonder the color of honey is gold.

We hear about painters who master canvases, but rarely about painters who master both the arts and sciences with a brush. Da Vinci comes to mind. But it wasn’t until I learned about Samuel Morse that I understood what color had to do with time being 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 became of the essence.

He could not save Lucretia. But he could save time.

The painter who worked with color began to work with speed. He ultimately invented the telegraph and Morse code because he wished no one would ever have to waste precious time again. It was an idea, a dream, a wish to make time on Earth better for himself and for others.

The desire to communicate at the speed of light became the portal to his self-actualization. He reached the top of his own pyramid of needs by fulfilling the Golden Rule: caring for others as he cared for himself.

He became love in action and birthed a dream.

Realizing this dream did not erase Morse’s real-life pain of losing his wife to the inevitable fate we all face: mortality. But his suffering was eased by rooting for others—by relieving the suffering of the world. In a biological world where mortality is a clock and pain is inevitable, the Golden Rule is our antidote. 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 race.

We are here to complete a cycle: to belong, become, and birth the life we were meant to live. To grow so abundantly fulfilled by who we are and what we do that we are driven to eliminate suffering by helping others do the same.

If you are reading this, you are in the middle of that climb. 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.

Time is truly of the essence.

Samuel Morse came to know this, and he did something about it.

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 that made me beeline toward belonging.

It was 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. And 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. But the first step on my list wasn’t divorce. I was willing to give it a fair chance, and I did so, for ten years.

It was a sense of belonging I felt compelled to build, right where I was.

As a child, my grandparents’ house was where I spent most of my time. I played with friends, flew kites, raced paper boats down street gutters in the pouring rain, and rode my purple bike around their cul-de-sac, singing at the top of my lungs until my parents picked me up to go home.

During those rides, lost in time yet entirely present, I fell in love with light, color, and life itself. But I also remember something else about those daily commutes: I would look into other people’s cars and imagine riding around in them instead. A different driver would be at the wheel. I would be a passenger, surrounded by strangers, on my way to an unknown destination.

As a kid, I couldn’t imagine myself as the driver. Those thoughts terrified me.

Because they meant I would be someone else, living another life.

I loved my life. I loved the red Naugahyde seats in that black car, the white house my grandparents lived in, my purple bike, and the colorful, sparkling paradise I was part of. I didn’t want to be anyone else.

My childhood commutes stopped when my parents separated, and my mother and I moved in with my grandparents. Things didn’t seem all that different—until the day my dad came to pick me up in another car.

I felt a feeling I had never felt before. A profound foreshadowing.

I knew something I hadn’t known before I saw that car. No one told me, but the message was clear: I would never ride in an Impala with red Naugahyde seats again. My life as I knew it would change forever. I was on my way to a different destination, just like the strangers I had watched on the road.

My backseat fears were coming true.

Shortly after my dad sold that car, my mother remarried and tried to transplant me from the smooth paved cul-de-sacs of the Caribbean to the gravel country roads of Oregon. The contrast was too dramatic to bear. No matter how beautiful Oregon’s vast fir trees and mountain peaks were, I knew there was an aquamarine sky behind its wooly-gray blanket of rain.

The beautiful Oregon Coast everyone raved about was just a bittersweet reminder of the warm Caribbean shores I used to effortlessly float on for hours. I had no interest in looking out car windows.

I couldn’t adapt.

For the next seven years, instead of a car that looked like a spaceship, I commuted to my grandparents’ home on a silver-winged vessel full of strangers. I averaged 3,700 miles each way, bouncing between contrasting lifestyles, cultures, and climates.

Eventually, I no longer felt I was part of either one.

When I permanently moved to Oregon in 1979 to attend college and live with my mother, I promised never to look back. 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 running aground. By choice.

I had been a sea bean long enough.

It was time to root down and become the driver. 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. Time became of the essence.

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

First on the agenda: paint a new world.

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 into 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.

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

Dear Baby,

Welcome to Mother Earth.

You are here to belong, to become, and to birth a beautiful world, starting with your own. The path is paved for you to climb from survival to belonging, from love to purpose, with a view at the top of dreams that are not just possible—they are expected. You will never be alone.

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.

You are born with an insatiable curiosity—not for certainty, but to know the world and to know yourself. Your knowing will be your gift to the world. The root of knowing is our nature: a climb to realize our lives from root to fruit, and to share that fruit with others.

I only have one rule. Care for all creatures, great and small, from this state of abundance.

Real love is care in action.

Yours truly,

Your Mother Nature

 Send this to someone you know. 

Gretchen.

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.

This is my way of sharing what I know.