The book that taught me to make the world more beautiful
Books04.07.2025
Growing up, I was lucky.
Not just in the big, obvious ways – though there were those, too – but in the quiet, sacred ones. The kind of luck that looks like a parent reading to you at night, their voice folding around each word like a blanket, and a story becoming more than just a story.
By the time I was in third grade, I didn’t need to be read to anymore. I devoured books on my own, staying up long past bedtime with a flashlight and a pile of dog-eared paperbacks. I found comfort in the classics – Little Women, anything by Lucy Maud Montgomery (especially the Emily of New Moon series, which I still think deserves more love than it gets). Those books gave me permission to feel deeply and to dream big.
But the one that stayed with me the most wasn’t a novel or a chapter book. It was a children’s book. Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney.
My dad read it to me over and over. I think we both loved it. It’s simple on the surface – a woman travels the world and plants lupines to make her corner of it more beautiful. But beneath that, it held a message that quietly imprinted on my heart.
“You must do something to make the world more beautiful,” the book says. That was the advice Miss Rumphius received as a child, and it’s the advice I’ve carried ever since.
Not “you must be extraordinary.”
Not “you must fix everything.”
Just: make the world more beautiful.
Sometimes that phrase returns to me when I least expect it. When I show up for a friend when I’m tired. When I speak up with kindness in a tense moment. Beauty doesn’t have to be loud. It can be quiet and persistent, like a lupine blooming where no one expected it.
There’s something radical in the simplicity of that idea. In a world that pushes us toward productivity, achievement, and hustle, Miss Rumphius suggests that beauty – intentionally added, thoughtfully nurtured – can be an act of resistance. An act of care.
I think a lot about legacy. Not in the “what will they write on my gravestone” kind of way, but in the small ripples we leave behind. I think of Miss Rumphius, old and content, watching the lupines she planted in her youth bloom. She had traveled far and seen much, but in the end, it was the flowers she planted – the beauty she shared – that became her gift to the world.
“That is all very well, little Alice,” her grandfather told her, “but there is a third thing you must do… You must do something to make the world more beautiful.”
And so, I try.
I try in the way I listen. In the way I write. In how I love. Sometimes I fail. Often, I fall short. But the seed was planted early, and it continues to grow.
Maybe that’s the power of a good story, told at the right time, by someone you love. It changes the soil you grow in. It gives you something to carry, even when the road is long.
And if I’ve learned anything from Miss Rumphius, and from the books I clutched under my blankets as a child, it’s this: the world doesn’t need perfection. It just needs more beauty.
Even a little is enough.
