You Could Make This Place Beautiful

by Maggie Smith

I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.

When you lose someone you love, you start to look for new ways to understand the world.

How I picture it: We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves—all of our selves—wherever we go.

Everything we learn, we learn from someone who is imperfect.

In life there are people in pain, people who are broken and making decisions from a place of brokenness, people living with wounds we can’t see—and these people, these fallible human beings, are our mothers and fathers, our husbands and wives, our sisters and brothers, our children, our teachers.

the best things remain.

Under all comedy is tragedy. Under the boat, the water that holds us is dark and full of things we can’t see.

Sometimes yes looks like reminding yourself of what is still possible.

The way you’ll be remembered is the way you’re living now, I tell myself. If you don’t like it, change it.

Life, like a poem, is a series of choices.