Becoming

The organic grocery store in my neighborhood has started carrying blood oranges from Spain. They are so delicious I can hardly stop myself at one.

It amazes me how dark they get. I grew up only on plain oranges, maybe the occasional clementine. And while they turn a lovely shade of orange, I love the dark, juicy red of a ripe blood orange. It is somehow more delightful. It somehow tastes better, even though my colleague told me today as I offered her a precious sliver that it tastes just like any other orange.

The thing that hit me as I sat last night eating yet another blood orange was how the most recent batch I’d bought were so much darker than the last ones. Which got me thinking about the process of ripening, which led my always over-analytical mind to the idea of becoming.

I have for a long time now been slightly obsessed with the idea of becoming and have found great comfort in it. It probably stems in part from my perfectionist tendencies.

I like processes. I don’t often like what they feel like when you’re in the middle of them, but I like to know that I am a work in progress. There is a lot of hope in that. It’s what I connect to in modern art, which is so often about the process. It’s about the making of something – and the triumph that innately stems from a simple act of creation.

I love this idea of becoming because it is about grace in the end. I am critical of myself to a fault, always thinking that who I am is not enough. But if I am in process, if I am becoming, then these things are only a part of my refining.

I do believe that we are supposed to love who we are, as we are. And I am, slowly, growing more comfortable in my own skin. But there are moments when I need the hope of more, moments when it’s good to remember that I am still in process.