"The World is a Beautiful Place"

My grandmama cross-stitched some art for me as a very young child. This art hung on my wall, until i left home at 17 and 11 months. the cross-stitch read: THE WORLD IS A BEAUTIFUL PLACE.

As a kid learning to read, i used the crazy-long word "beautiful" as my launching pad, for practice. I would say it over and over the way we were taught, breaking up the syllables and figuring the word out that way: be-a-u-tee-full bee-a-u-tee-fulllllllllll...!

As a teenager, i looked at it and thought, "what a bunch of shit. The world is hardly beautiful. In fact, it's a prison."

Now, as a rapidly maturing real-live adult, i think about "the world is a beautiful place" and i say, yes, it really is, but with a touch of horror.