February has gone and we are in another month. While things are always ending, becoming continues. Break the word becoming apart and there is BE and Coming. It is a wise guru word because when we fully enter being that which truly belongs to us can’t help but keep coming.
Phrases posted on Facebook, March 2025
Think of a pond. At its bottom is a spring that flows continuously. Should it stop, the pond would soon silt in and stagnate. It is the same for us. Without becoming we stagnate. What is alive at our core ,when nourished, will save us.
We might call someone attractive and say, “She’s really becoming.” That may be about physical attributes, but when our essence shines through (no matter what we look like) there’s something truly becoming there. We are seeing inner beauty.
Whenever we try hard to become more loving, conscious and present we are barking up the wrong tree. Trying will be about compensation for some sense of lack we feel. Whatever we are doing will be about self-judgment and effort and will be short lived. What if we could trust that already Love, Consciousness and Presence are present and that all of us have “that of God” in us as the Quakers put it? If we allow that inner being to become, we cannot help but notice how goodness is around us.
As Spring approaches, we can see the beginning of small buds on the trees, the first snow drops, and we hear more bird song. Spring is becoming and it is slow, almost imperceptible at first. Like the becoming of Spring we, too, become in an organic way. it will also be slow and yet precisely on time.
This may seem to make no sense, but is, if we use our senses aright, we will realize that we are actually moving closer to who we already are a little bit at a time. There are delays, of course, but the course can’t be stopped. Even if we make no effort whatever, we are still becoming. We might as well make it becoming love. That’s already in our blood.
I love that the word becoming contains both the present and the future. To “be” is always about now. “Coming “is the now extending into the not yet. When we embrace becoming, we embrace both what is in the present and what might be in the future. Not a bad mandate to have!
I remember my partner, Stanley, a wonderful potter. When things didn’t come out of the kiln the way he wanted he’d say, “learned something new” and kept on enlarging his skill as a craftsman. Failures can be our friends sometimes, an instigation we need for more becoming.
Yesterday was St. Patrick’s Day. We celebrate those who demonstrate that becoming more helpful, more present, more loving and illumined is the direction we humans are meant to take. It is about becoming less self-absorbed and becoming more consciousness. It is good to have these illumined ones to show us the way because we can’t do it alone!
Now more than ever I feel the need to cultivate peace within even when I’m hurting or when things are not to my liking. If I have that peace, becoming will be on course despite circumstances.
I used to make six loaves of bread at a time when the kids were teenagers. They could inhale half a loaf at a time. Doing this baking over and over made it a contemplative practice. It was much more than making bread, and it felt as if something was becoming inside me. Years later my book Becoming Bread came out. It’s still in print. . . hard to believe!
In my book, Becoming Bread, I use the metaphor of making bread to show the transformation process of becoming the stuff of love and life and how we need each other
to do that. I was floored when Bishop Desmond M. Tutu endorsed the book with these words: “I was almost breathless with wonder at the beauty of Gunilla Norris’s words–so simple and yet so profound, striking home gently because they are so true, so authentic” Let’s face it, sometimes we can’t do very much. Our offerings are like crumbs. In the book I write, “Take care of the crumbs: a look, a laugh, a smile, a teardrop, an open hand. Take care of the crumbs. They are food also.”
I’d like to share another snippet from the book:
“Here is the kitchen. Will you enter it with me? Let us share the heart of the house. Here dwelling and becoming are like angels to wrestle with. Here limitation will be our friend and we can grow into love, into bread. You, a sustenance for me, and I, a sustenance for you.”
This quote comes towards the end of the book: “It is ultimately our vulnerability and our powerlessness that God loves the most, I believe. For there we can and do receive, “must” receive, and know that everything is a gift. Even our suffering. Full of that knowledge, that sustenance, we cannot help but share our love and our lives with each other. Then we are not only becoming bread . . . we are bread.”
In the end nothing belongs to us. We essentially own nothing, but I believe we are here to love and become agents of possibility without any rights of ownership.
