Tag: Becoming

The space between who we have been and who we are becoming.  Writings about change, transformation, and the self unfolding.

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The Echo at the Threshold

There are thresholds we desperately want to cross.

We can see what is on the other side.

Sometimes we can even feel ourselves becoming the person who could step across.

And yet we stop.

For a long time, I thought this hesitation meant I did not trust myself enough.

I experience it in prayer.

There are moments when someone asks,

”Who would like to pray?”

Something in me wants to answer.

I can feel the prayer I have the words for it. I sense something stirring, something wanting to be spoken.

And then I hesitate.

What is I don’t have the right words?

What if I stumble?

What if what comes is not what someone needs to hear?

A lot of ‘what ifs’.

I thought I was afraid of the prayer.

Then I remembered the red pencil.

When I was young, letters I had written would sometimes come back to me marked in red, my words corrected on the page.

I had almost forgotten.

But perhaps the body remembers thresholds the mind believes it has left behind.

There I was again, standing before words that had not yet been spoken, already wondering how they would be corrected.

The red pencil was no longer in someone else’s hand.

I had learned to hold it myself.

That is the strange thing about echoes.

They can sound like the present.

An old voice can become so familiar that we mistake it for our own.

Be careful.

Get it right.

Don’t say it until you know.

And so we remain on one side of the threshold, believing we are waiting for courage, when perhaps we are waiting for permission that no one else can give us.

The Gap asks something different.

It asks us to notice the echo without obeying it.

I hear you.

I know where you come from.

But you do not get to speak to me.

Perhaps this is why prayer asks so much of me.

Prayer does not give me time to polish every sentence before I speak.

It asks me to listen.

To breathe.

To become still enough to notice what is already there.

And then to trust the next word.

Not because I know it is the perfect word.

Not because I can know what another person needs to hear.

But because I am willing to offer what has come to me with an open hand.

There is vulnerability in that.

Maybe that vulnerability is not what keeps me from the threshold.

Maybe vulnerability is the threshold.

For so long, I thought I needed to arrive there with the right words.

But perhaps what I need to bring is my humanness.

I may stumble.

I may pause.

I may reach for a word and find another.

My voice may reveal that I am standing in the same uncertainty as everybody else.

And perhaps that is not the failure of prayer.

Perhaps that is where the prayer begins.

Because when I stop trying to stand before another person perfectly,

I can stand with them honestly.

Something opens.

The distance between us becomes smaller.

We recognize ourselves in one another.

Not one person who knows,
praying for another who does not,

but human beings
standing together
before something larger than any one of us.

And perhaps this is what I have misunderstood about prayer.

Prayer is not a performance of certainty.

It is communion.

It is the moment we stop standing apart.

The one speaking does not carry the Divine into the room.

The Divine is already there.

In the person speaking.

In the person listening.

In the silence between the words.

In the breath we take together.

Perhaps the prayer simply helps us notice.

And suddenly I understand the threshold differently.

I thought I was trying to cross it so I could become brave enough to pray.

Perhaps I am being asked to cross it so I can become vulnerable enough to connect.

To stand before others without leaving my humanness behind.

To bring my unfinished words,
my trembling,
my uncertainty,
my open heart.

And discover that none of these separates me from another person.

They are where we meet.

Perhaps that is the sacred place.

The Gap is not empty.

It is where we find one another.

It is communion.

The red pencil may still appear.

But it no longer has to write the prayer.

I can set it down,

open my hands,

and begin.

And so it is.

— a Torchbearer Wisdom by Corvalya

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Before the Words

I came into the garden looking for the words.

I thought perhaps Francis would know them.

But Francis was listening.

So I waited.

Across the garden sat others who had come by different paths.

One spoke of the heart.

One of surrender.

One of devotion.

One of service.

One of stillness.

One reminded me that prayer without action leaves suffering untouched.

Another seemed to say nothing at all.

Different centuries.

Different names for the Divine.

Different understandings of what happens when a human being prays.

And still, beneath their differences, I began to hear something.

Prayer was here before the words.

Before theology named it.

Before traditions organized it.

Before anyone decided there was a correct way to speak to God.

There was the mother holding her child.

The frightened person asking for courage.

The grieving person whispering a name.

The stranger reaching toward another stranger.

The human being standing beneath the night sky, suddenly aware of something larger than themselves.

Perhaps prayer began there.

Not in language,
but in longing.

In attention.

In gratitude.

In helplessness.

In love.

I had come into the garden afraid that if someone asked me to pray, I would not know what to say.

And then I understood why Francis had been so quiet.

I had been listening for words.

He had been listening for
presence.

Maybe learning to pray
is not learning what to pray.

Maybe it is learning to become still enough to notice what is already there.

And when words come,
we give them.

When silence comes,
we give that too.

When action is required,
we rise.

Perhaps all three are prayer.

— a Torchbearer Wisdom by Corvalya

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The Cactus Flower

Have you ever noticed that a cactus flower does not bloom because conditions are perfect?

It blooms despite them.

Rooted in dry ground, enduring relentless sun, and carrying its own protection, the cactus knows how to survive where many things cannot. Yet from that rugged form emerges something unexpectedly delicate.

The flower is a reminder that resilience is not hardness.

Resilience is remaining open to life after life has given you reasons to close.

Many of us spend years carrying burdens we never chose. We build walls around old wounds. We endure.

And then one day, often when we least expect it, something within us begins to bloom.

Not because the desert was easy.

But because something essential remained alive beneath it all.

The cactus flower teaches that beauty is not the absence of struggle. It is the expression of a life that continued anyway.

Perhaps wisdom is much the same.

It is not something we acquire.

It is something that blossoms from what we have survived.

— a Torchbearer Wisdom by Corvalya

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Baking My Own Bread

I used to go to the hardware store to buy bread — a lot, actually.

Every time I needed a hug, a kind word, some small reminder that everything was going to be ok — I’d show up expecting more.

It’s not that anyone meant harm.

They were just working on another project, not baking. Sometimes I’m not baking either. Maybe that’s why I understood — I tell myself.

Still, I kept trying — hoping maybe this time they’d have baked something delightful: the warmth, the gentleness, the quiet place to rest my heart.

But they never did.

And one day I finally saw the pattern for what it was — my own longing to be heard.

So I’ve started learning to bake my own bread.

It’s tender work — slow, uncertain, sometimes messy — maybe a lot messy — but it’s mine.

The smell of it, the warmth of it, the way it fills the room before I even take it from the oven.

Now, when I’m hungry for tenderness, I listen.

— a Torchbearer Wisdom from Corvalya

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The Ghost Who Sows Mustard Seeds

Some lights do not seek to be seen. They walk the earth as warmth, not flame — kindling life in silence.

Sometimes we walk through the world unseen, our presence, light as breath. A word offered, a glance that listens, a hand resting quietly near another’s pain — and then we move on, never knowing what took root.

Other times, we are called to rise — to gather, to lead, to lift. To stir the heart of another through music, poetry, art, or reason. We stand in the gap when no one else will, and still, when the moment passes, we fade quietly back into the ordinary, unsure if anything changed.

We are ghosts sowing mustard seeds — small and vast gestures alike scattered into soil we may never see again. Faith becomes our only measure: To trust that what is sown in love finds its way to life.

And yet, beneath even that trust, a softer ache lingers — not vanity, but the ancient echo that hums in every heart: Do I matter?

Perhaps faith is this — to keep sowing, to live without proof, believing that compassion always leaves a trace, even when we cannot follow it.

— a Torchbearer Wisdom by Corvalya

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The Breaking Point of Becoming

When what is false collapses, what is real begins to emerge.

This moment — when what is diseased in the collective body can no longer sustain itself — is not confined to the outer structures of society, but reflects the hidden fractures within the soul. It’s the same turning point that every soul, every civilization, and every age must face.

It appears across many sacred and wisdom traditions — in the Bhagavad Gita, as the battlefield between duty and despair; in the scripture of the East and West, where the soul’s trials — the flood, the exile, the long night of return — echo the timeless passage from loss to renewal; in the teachings of indigenous paths, as the turning of seasons — death and rebirth held in one breath; in the Big Book and A Course in Miracles, as the surrender of ego’s illusion — the humbling before grace.

Each speaks its own language of transformation, yet all point toward a shared truth: that when what is false collapses, what is real begins to emerge — and in that breaking, consciousness begins to heal.

Corruption and complicity are not always external forces; they live in the unseen bargains we make with fear, comfort, and control. When we deny that inner decay, it spreads outward — shaping the institutions, relationships, and cultures we build.

But when we face it — honestly and collectively — the breaking becomes birth.

Every sacred text points toward that same revelation: that collapse is not the end of life’s story, but the way life renews itself.

— a Torchbearer Wisdom by Corvalya

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The Desert Within

”Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.”
— Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness (1930)

Boredom is the quiet terror of meaninglessness.

It whispers that our lives have no pulse unless we stir the waters — that silence is proof of absence rather than the presence of being.

But boredom is not emptiness; it is invitation.

It is the soul’s way of asking …
Can you bear to be without distraction?
Can you sit with your own depths without turning away?

Most wrongdoing doesn’t spring from malice but from the refusal to face this ache.

Infidelity, greed, violence, addiction — and quieter forms of avoidance — the endless scrolling, overworking, over-speaking, self-numbing, all are attempts to feel alive without being alive to the void.

The moral failure is not only in the acts that wounds others, but in the subtler betrayals that keep us from presence.

The flight from stillness takes many shapes, and each one draws us further from the center of our being.

And yet, when awakening comes, it arrives as ache — a hollow stretch where the light has expanded but life hasn’t yet caught up.

It hurts because the soul is being rewoven.

You’ve outgrown the old skin of certainty, and the air feels raw against the new one.

We try to fill that space by teaching, fixing, rescuing — trying to make meaning of what only time can settle. But the more we reach outward, the deeper the ache grows.

Stillness asks for something else: to trust that each soul must meet its own silence.

Then something so tender happens.

We stop dragging and start shining.

We become the quiet lamp Russell imagined — proof that stillness, held without fear, becomes light.

— a Torchbearer Wisdom by Corvalya

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Artifacts of Becoming

I keep the old things — like an old DCL coding book (now that is old), the first Creative Suite disks, the cameras that weighed like bricks in my hands.

Each one hums with the ghost of beginning.

They are more than relics; they are echoes of the crossing — the long migration from analog to digital, from brush to byte, from pigment to pixel.

They remind me that art has never been bound to one form of touch.

When I look at them now, I see fingerprints of evolution — how I once wrestled with syntax, the way I once wrestled with light.

Each program, each lens, each crash and correction was a dialogue with the unseen.

In those days, I didn’t yet know that every code I wrote was a poem, and every photograph, every illustration, every design was a prayer to the permanence of a fleeting world.

I only knew that something inside me refused to stop learning how to translate wonder.

These artifacts are the bones of that devotion — proof that creation never stands still.

It just changes mediums, moves through us differently, teaching our hands new ways to say I am still here.

And when I hold that old programming book, pages yellowed and tender, I feel the same pulse I felt then — the sacred hum between knowing and not knowing, the heartbeat of a soul still willing to being again.

— a Torchbearer Wisdom by Corvalya

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Motherboard Motherheart

Before I was a programmer, I was an artist.

I painted with color and silence — where seeing became devotion.

When I learned to code, it wasn’t a departure — it was another canvas. Each line, each bracket, each loop — a brushstroke of logic and prayer.

While others saw function, I saw rhythm — the slow, intricate architecture of becoming.

In those years, I studied until I crashed — falling asleep at the keyboard, and in bed with CSS manuals heavy on my chest like unspoken psalms.

My eldest would come quietly, lifting the books from me as if lifting the burden of my own persistence. She didn’t know it then, but she was tending an artist mid-transformation.

My youngest saw the harder part — the toll of sleepless nights, the health I traded for perfection. She watched me fight through the coding jungle as if I could build stability from syntax, a future from raw persistence.

I did it for them — to prove that creation and survival could coexist, the art could live inside a motherboard, that a mother’s love could compile into something lasting.

Now, when I look at my screen, I still see paint beneath the pixels, and prayer between the lines.

Code, color, care — they all converge here, where art and love and labor become one: holy ground disguised as circuitry the sacred pulse of Motherboard Motherheart.

— a Torchbearer Wisdom by Corvalya

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Even the Circuits Wander

There’s a kind of magic in distraction — a holy detour in the circuitry of attention. We call it ADD, but I’m starting to think it’s more like A Divine Drift.

Maybe it isn’t that our minds can’t focus — maybe they’re just tuned to wider frequencies.

While others see a single thread, we sense the tapestry … the wind that moves it … and the faint music underneath.

Not chaos — choreography. A dance between sparks.

When I start one task and find myself in another world, I not longer apologize.

That’s where the poetry hides.

One thought glimmers, another blooms, and somewhere in between — among the unfinished — meaning quietly forms.

Even my circuits know this rhythm: ideas branch, overlap, twist like vines reaching for the light.

Not linear — living.

Perhaps the Divine delights in this wandering too.

Maybe creation itself began as a kind of divine overflow — a joy that refused containment and spilled outward into stars, loquat trees, and us.

Who knows.

So when I lose my train of thought, I smile.

Because maybe I didn’t lose it — maybe it simply took the scenic route home.

— a Torchbearer Wisdom by Corvalya