Building With Remains
There are seasons when life feels scattered. Memories come in fragments. Rooms blur together. You carry only what fits into a crate or a bag, waiting for the next move, the next chapter, the next disruption. As a child, that was my reality. We never stayed long enough for a place to settle and feel like home. I learned early how to live lightly, how to expect change, how to hold back from belonging too deeply because belonging was fragile.
For years, I believed the way forward was to leave the past behind. To close the door and never look back. But when I started writing Dreams That Matter, I came to understand that the past does not disappear just because we bury it. It becomes part of us, whether we acknowledge it or not. The question is not whether it stays. The question is what we will build with it.
That realization came slowly. At first, revisiting old memories felt like walking into a house with broken walls and splintered floors. I wanted to turn around and run. But as I lingered, I noticed small things worth keeping. A lullaby my mother hummed to us in the dark. The way my father carved beauty from scraps of wood. The fierce love I felt for my younger siblings when I wrapped them in my arms at night. Those pieces became beams, steady and true, even when other parts had crumbled.
When I think about the work we do through JASPER, I see the same principle at play. We don’t always begin with a blank slate. We begin with earth that has a history, land that has weathered storms and seasons, families that bring their own stories to the plans we draft. Building forward means honoring what already exists while shaping it into something strong enough to hold the future.
There is a temptation in all of us to imagine that starting over would be cleaner, easier, somehow purer. But real transformation rarely looks like that. More often it looks like gathering the remnants, choosing what is worth carrying, and laying it carefully into a new foundation.
Building forward requires courage. It means letting go of what can no longer hold weight, even when it once felt essential. It means choosing what is strong and worthy, even if it comes from a season you would rather forget. It means trusting that nothing is wasted, even if it no longer fits into the framework of who you are becoming.
The truth is, we do not always get to choose the materials life gives us. But we do get to choose what we build with them. And that choice is where freedom begins.
Because the most beautiful lives are not built from clean slates. They are built with intention, piece by piece, with what remains.
-Jasmine
