The Wisdom of the Little Prince




 I am following a thread and it is leading me to wondrous spaces! As I watch the Olympics, I am often met with the, wait-for-it, screen which offers a beautiful image of Paris. So I go back, too many years, to the summer before my senior year at Williams. Sitting on the Seine, exploring the galleries, feasting on salad and ice cream, and exploring gardens and palaces.


The most wondrous experiences, the most formative, were wandering through Notre Dame and Chartres cathedrals. It was then I fell in love with religious sculpture and stained glass. It was then I began to fathom the time, the perseverance, the arduousness of art, the amazement of human creativity inspired by the Spirit. The stories the spaces told…


And so with Paris prompting my pondering, I also remember The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. I was so affected by that charming book that my roommate and I prepared a puppet show for a presentation in Drama class (drama was not my forte but pointing to beauty and inspiration helped ?!). 


Here’s the thing: in my aging I have come to appreciate wonder more and more, not to mention recovery of wondrous memories. And I recall in following this French thread the words of the Little Prince; “it is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”


only with the heart…


When I remember wonder, when I experience wonder, analytic questions of “why” evaporate and only a receptive soul meeting something ineffable matter. As Pema Chodron points out: Wonder is that seeing of the world without preconception. 


While we certainly touch and even hold onto tangibles, in photographs and videos, in stories and the emulsion sheets of our minds (John Muir), it is an invisible, uncapturable grace which has simply and beautifully glimmered and shimmered to remind us of some infinite eternal beauty and truth toward which we journey.

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