La Vie de Mimi

“The hunter sinks his arrows into the trees and then paints the targets around them. The trees imagine they are deers. The deers imagine they are safe. The arrows: they have no imagination.”

“Don’t be afraid to suffer—take your heaviness / and give it back to the earth’s own weight; / the mountains are heavy, the oceans are heavy.”

“Stop cringing — at your future, at your failure, at yourself in the mirror — and stand up and look directly at who you are. Not who you should’ve been, but who you are now. Let that person in. Let her be as mediocre and wrong and shameful and sad and miserable and brilliant and hilarious as she wants to be, because she knows exactly what you need to feel good. She has plans for you. She wants to show you what comes next. She wants to take you into the future you’re dreading and say, “See? You never would’ve imagined this.”

“The difference between comfort and nurture is this: if you have a plant that is sick because you keep it in a dark closet, and you say soothing words to it, that is comfort.If you take out of the closet and put in the sun, give it something to drink, and then talk to it, that is nurture”