# data[].attributes.body
Stanley Kubrick's 1968 masterpiece:
2001 A Space Odyssey.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-QFj59PON4

Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the moon, entered lunar orbit on Christmas Eve, Dec. 24, 1968. That evening, the astronauts-Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell, and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders-held a live broadcast from lunar orbit, in which they showed pictures of the Earth and moon as seen from their spacecraft. Said Lovell, "The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth." They ended the broadcast with the crew taking turns reading from the book of Genesis.

https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1249.html

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001ghdv

# data[].attributes.headline
January 2: poem 'Shoulders' by Naomi Shihab Nye 

# data[].attributes.subject
January 2: poem 'Shoulders' by Naomi Shihab Nye 

# data[].attributes.body
Shoulders
Naomi Shihab Nye (1952 - )

A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.

No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.

This man carries the world's most sensitive cargo
but he's not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.

His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy's dream
deep inside him.

We're not going to be able
to live in this world
if we're not willing to do what he's doing
with one another.

The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.

# data[].attributes.headline
January 3: Quaker Faith & Practice 26.32. Rufus Jones and joy in small things

# data[].attributes.subject
January 3: Quaker Faith & Practice 26.32. Rufus Jones and joy in small things

# data[].attributes.body
Perhaps more wonderful still is the way in which beauty breaks through. It breaks through not only at a few highly organised points, it breaks through almost everywhere. Even the minutest things reveal it as well as do the sublimest things, like the stars. Whatever one sees through the microscope, a bit of mould for example, is charged with beauty. Everything from a dewdrop to Mount Shasta is the bearer of beauty. And yet beauty has no function, no utility. Its value is intrinsic, not extrinsic. It is its own excuse for being. It greases no wheels, it bakes no puddings. It is a gift of sheer grace, a gratuitous largesse. It must imply behind things a Spirit that enjoys beauty for its own sake and that floods the world everywhere with it. Wherever it can break through, it does break through, and our joy in it shows that we are in some sense kindred to the giver and revealer of it.

Rufus Jones, 1920

Rufus Jones (quakersintheworld.org)

# data[].attributes.headline
January 5: The shepherds’ farewell by Hector Berlioz

# data[].attributes.subject
January 5: The shepherds’ farewell by Hector Berlioz

# data[].attributes.body
The shepherds’ farewell (Berlioz)
Thou must leave thy lowly dwelling, the humble crib, the stable bare.
Babe, all mortal babes excelling, content our earthly lot to share.
Loving father, Loving mother, shelter thee with tender care!

Blessed Jesus, we implore thee with humble love and holy fear.

In the land that lies before thee, forget not us who linger here!
May the shepherd's lowly calling, ever to thy heart be dear!

Blest are ye beyond all measure, thou happy father, mother mild!
Guard ye well your heav’nly treasure, the Prince of Peace, The Holy Child!
God go with you, God protect you, guide you safely through the wild!

http://www.cantatedomino.org/cd/thou-must-leave-thy-holy-dwelling---the-shepherds--farewell--berlioz-.php

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Royal Choral Society: The Shepherds' Farewell, Hector Berlioz

# data[].attributes.headline
January 6: excerpt from "The Little Prince"

# data[].attributes.subject
January 6: excerpt from "The Little Prince"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Little Prince (French: Le Petit Prince, pronounced [ləp(ə)tipʁɛ̃s]) is a novella written and illustrated by French aristocrat, writer, and military pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It was first published in English and French in the United States by Reynal & Hitchcock in April 1943 and was published posthumously in France following liberation; Saint-Exupéry's works had been banned by the Vichy Regime. The story follows a young prince who visits various planets, including Earth, and addresses themes of loneliness, friendship, love, and loss. Despite its style as a children's book, The Little Prince makes observations about life, adults, and human nature.

The Little Prince became Saint-Exupéry's most successful work, selling an estimated 140 million copies worldwide, which makes it one of the best-selling in history. The book has been translated into over 505 different languages and dialects worldwide, being the second most translated work ever published, trailing only the Bible. The Little Prince has been adapted to numerous art forms and media, including audio recordings, radio plays, live stage, film, television, ballet, and opera.

The narrator begins with a discussion on the nature of grownups and their inability to perceive "important things". As a test to determine if a grownup is as enlightened as a child, he shows them a picture depicting a boa constrictor that has eaten an elephant. The grownups always reply that the picture depicts a hat, and so he knows to only talk of "reasonable" things to them, rather than the fanciful.

The narrator becomes an aircraft pilot, and one day, his plane crashes in the Sahara desert, far from civilization. The narrator has an eight-day supply of water and must fix his aeroplane. Here, he is greeted unexpectedly by a young boy nicknamed "the little prince." The prince has golden hair, a loveable laugh, and will repeat questions until they are answered.

The prince asks the narrator to draw a sheep. The narrator first shows him the picture of the elephant inside the snake, which, to the narrator's surprise, the prince interprets correctly. After three failed attempts at drawing a sheep, the frustrated narrator draws a simple crate, claiming the sheep is inside. The prince exclaims that this was exactly the drawing he wanted.

Over the course of eight days in the desert, while the narrator attempts to repair his plane, the prince recounts his life story. He begins describing his tiny home planet: in effect, a house-sized asteroid known as "B 612" on Earth. The asteroid's most prominent features are three minuscule volcanoes (two active, and one dormant or extinct) and a variety of plants.

The prince describes his earlier days cleaning the volcanoes and weeding unwanted seeds and sprigs that infest his planet's soil; in particular, pulling out baobab trees that are constantly on the verge of overrunning the surface. If the baobabs are not rooted out the moment they are recognised, their roots can have a catastrophic effect on the tiny planet. Therefore, the prince wants a sheep to eat the undesirable plants, but worries it will also eat plants with thorns.

The prince tells of his love for a vain and silly rose that began growing on the asteroid's surface some time ago. The rose is given to pretension, exaggerating ailments to gain attention and have the prince care for her. The prince says he nourished the rose and tended to her, making a screen and glass globe to protect her from the cold and wind, watering her, and keeping the caterpillars off.

Although the prince fell in love with the rose, he also began to feel that she was taking advantage of him, and he resolved to leave the planet to explore the rest of the universe. Upon their goodbyes, the rose apologises for failing to show that she loved him. She wishes him well and turns down his desire to leave her in the glass globe, saying she will protect herself. The prince laments that he did not understand how to love his rose while he was with her and should have listened to her kind actions, rather than her vain words.

The prince has since visited six other planets, each of which was inhabited by a single, irrational, narrow-minded adult, each meant to critique an element of society. They include:

A king with no subjects, who only issues orders that will be followed, such as commanding the sun to set at sunset.

A conceited man who only wants the praise which comes from admiration and being the most admirable person on his otherwise uninhabited planet.

A drunkard who drinks to forget the shame of drinking.

A businessman who is blind to the beauty of the stars and instead endlessly counts and catalogues them in order to "own" them all (critiquing materialism).

A lamplighter on a planet so small, a full day lasts a minute. He wastes his life blindly following orders to extinguish and relight the lamppost every 30 seconds to correspond with his planet's day and night.

An elderly geographer who has never been anywhere, or seen any of the things he records, providing a caricature of specialisation in the contemporary world.

It is the geographer who tells the prince that his rose is an ephemeral being, which is not recorded, and recommends that the prince next visit the planet Earth. The visit to Earth begins with a deeply pessimistic appraisal of humanity. The six absurd people the prince encountered earlier comprise, according to the narrator, just about the entire adult world. On earth there were:

111 kings ... 7,000 geographers, 900,000 businessmen, 7,500,000 tipplers, 311,000,000 conceited men; that is to say, about 2,000,000,000 grown-ups.

Since the prince landed in a desert, he believed that Earth was uninhabited. He then met a yellow snake that claimed to have the power to return him to his home, if he ever wished to return. The prince next met a desert flower, who told him that she had only seen a handful of men in this part of the world and that they had no roots, letting the wind blow them around and living hard lives. After climbing the highest mountain he had ever seen, the prince hoped to see the whole of Earth, thus finding the people; however, he saw only the enormous, desolate landscape. When the prince called out, his echo answered him, which he interpreted as the voice of a boring person who only repeats what another says.

The prince encountered a whole row of rosebushes, becoming downcast at having once thought that his own rose was unique and thinking his rose had lied about being unique. He began to feel that he was not a great prince at all, as his planet contained only three tiny volcanoes and a flower that he now thought of as common. He laid down on the grass and wept, until a fox came along.

The fox desired to be tamed and taught the prince how to tame him. By being tamed, something goes from being ordinary and just like all the others to being special and unique. There are drawbacks since the connection can lead to sadness and longing when apart.

From the fox, the prince learns that his rose was indeed unique and special because she was the object of the prince's love and time; he had "tamed" her, and now she was more precious than all of the roses he had seen in the garden. Upon their sad departing, the fox imparts a secret: important things can only be seen with the heart, not the eyes.

The prince finally met two people from Earth:

A railway switchman who told him how passengers constantly rushed from one place to another aboard trains, never satisfied with where they were and not knowing what they were after; only the children among them ever bothered to look out the windows.

A merchant who talked to the prince about his product, a pill that eliminated the need to drink for a week, saving people 53 minutes.

Back in the present moment, it is the eighth day after the narrator's plane crash and the narrator and the prince are dying of thirst. The prince has become visibly morose and saddened over his recollections and longs to return home and see his flower.

The prince finds a well, saving them. The narrator later finds the prince talking to the snake, discussing his return home and his desire to see his rose again, who, he worries, has been left to fend for herself. The prince bids an emotional farewell to the narrator and states that if it looks as though he has died, it is only because his body was too heavy to take with him to his planet. The prince warns the narrator not to watch him leave, as it will upset him. The narrator, realising what will happen, refuses to leave the prince's side. The prince consoles the narrator by saying that he only need look at the stars to think of the prince's loveable laughter, and that it will seem as if all the stars are laughing. The prince then walks away from the narrator and allows the snake to bite him, soundlessly falling down.

The next morning, the narrator is unable to find the prince's body. He finally manages to repair his aeroplane and leave the desert. It is left up to the reader to determine if the prince returned home or died. The story ends with a drawing of the landscape where the prince and the narrator met and where the snake took the prince's corporeal life. The narrator requests to be immediately contacted by anyone in that area encountering a small person with golden curls who refuses to answer any questions.

The story of The Little Prince is recalled in a sombre, measured tone by the pilot-narrator, in memory of his small friend, "a memorial to the prince-not just to the prince, but also to the time the prince and the narrator had together." The Little Prince was created when Saint-Exupéry was "an ex-patriate and distraught about what was going on in his country and in the world." According to one analysis, "the story of the Little Prince features a lot of fantastical, unrealistic elements.... You can't ride a flock of birds to another planet... The fantasy of the Little Prince works because the logic of the story is based on the imagination of children, rather than the strict realism of adults."

An exquisite literary perfectionist, akin to the 19th century French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, Saint-Exupéry produced draft pages "covered with fine lines of handwriting, much of it painstakingly crossed out, with one word left standing where there were a hundred words, one sentence substitut[ing] for a page..." He worked "long hours with great concentration." According to the author himself, it was extremely difficult to start his creative writing processes. Biographer Paul Webster wrote of the aviator-author's style: "Behind Saint-Exupéry's quest for perfection was a laborious process of editing and rewriting which reduced original drafts by as much as two-thirds." The French author frequently wrote at night, usually starting at about 11 p.m. accompanied by a tray of strong black coffee. In 1942 Saint-Exupéry related to his American English teacher, Adèle Breaux, that at such a time of night he felt "free" and able to concentrate, "writing for hours without feeling tired or sleepy", until he instantaneously dozed off. He would wake up later, in daylight, still at his desk, with his head on his arms. Saint-Exupéry stated it was the only way he could work, as once he started a writing project it became an obsession.

While Saint-Exupéry was a native speaker of French, he was never able to achieve anything more than haltingly poor English. Adèle Breaux, his young Northport English tutor to whom he later dedicated a writing ("For Miss Adèle Breaux, who so gently guided me in the mysteries of the English language"), related her experiences with her famous student as Saint-Exupéry in America, 1942-1943: A Memoir, published in 1971.

"Saint-Exupéry's prodigious writings and studies of literature sometimes gripped him, and on occasion he continued his readings of literary works until moments before take-off on solitary military reconnaissance flights, as he was adept at both reading and writing while flying. Taking off with an open book balanced on his leg, his ground crew would fear his mission would quickly end after contacting something 'very hard'. On one flight, to the chagrin of colleagues awaiting his arrival, he circled the Tunis airport for an hour so that he could finish reading a novel. Saint-Exupéry frequently flew with a lined carnet (notebook) during his long, solo flights, and some of his philosophical writings were created during such periods when he could reflect on the world below him, becoming 'enmeshed in a search for ideals which he translated into fable and parable'."

Saint-Exupéry next to his downed Simoun (lacking an all-critical radio) after crashing into the Sahara about 3 am during an air race to Saigon, Vietnam. His survival ordeal was about to begin (Egypt, 1935).

In The Little Prince, its narrator, the pilot, talks of being stranded in the desert beside his crashed aircraft. The account clearly drew on Saint-Exupéry's own experience in the Sahara, an ordeal described in detail in his 1939 memoir Wind, Sand and Stars (original French: Terre des hommes).

On 30 December 1935, at 2.45am, after 19 hours and 44 minutes in the air, Saint-Exupéry, along with his copilot-navigator André Prévot, crashed in the Sahara desert. They were attempting to break the speed record for a Paris-to- Saigon flight in a then-popular type of air race called a raid, that had a prize of 150,000 francs. Their plane was a Caudron C-630 Simoun, and the crash site is thought to have been near to the Wadi Natrun valley, close to the Nile Delta.

Both miraculously survived the crash, only to face rapid dehydration in the intense desert heat. Their maps were primitive and ambiguous. Lost among the sand dunes with a few grapes, a thermos of coffee, a single orange, and some wine, the pair had only one day's worth of liquid. They both began to see mirages, which were quickly followed by more vivid hallucinations. By the second and third days, they were so dehydrated that they stopped sweating altogether. Finally, on the fourth day, a Bedouin on a camel discovered them and administered a native rehydration treatment, which saved Saint-Exupéry's and Prévot's lives.

In the novella, the fox, believed to be modelled after the author's intimate New York City friend, Silvia Hamilton Reinhardt, tells the prince that his rose is unique and special, as she is the one he loves. The novella's iconic phrase, "One sees clearly only with the heart" is believed to have been suggested by Reinhardt.

The fearsome, grasping baobab trees, researchers have contended, were meant to represent Nazism attempting to destroy the planet. The little prince's reassurance to the pilot that the prince's body is only an empty shell resembles the last words of Antoine's dying younger brother François, who told the author, from his deathbed: "Don't worry. I'm all right. I can't help it. It's my body".

The Rose in The Little Prince was likely inspired by Saint-Exupéry's Salvadoran wife, Consuelo (Montreal, 1942)

Many researchers believe that the prince's kindhearted, but petulant and vain, Rose was inspired by Saint-Exupéry's Salvadoran wife Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, with the small home planet being inspired by El Salvador where he crashed and stayed to recover while being within view of 3 volcanoes, one of which was Ilamatepec, also known as The Santa Ana Volcano. Despite a tumultuous marriage, Saint-Exupéry kept Consuelo close to his heart and portrayed her as the prince's rose, whom he tenderly protects with a wind screen and places under a glass dome on his tiny planet. Saint-Exupéry's infidelity and the doubts of his marriage are symbolized by the vast field of roses the prince encounters during his visit to Earth.

This interpretation was described by biographer Paul Webster who stated she was "the muse to whom Saint-Exupéry poured out his soul in copious letters ... Consuelo was the rose in The Little Prince. "I should have judged her by her acts and not by her words", says the prince. "She wrapped herself around me and enlightened me. I should never have fled. I should have guessed at the tenderness behind her poor ruses."

Saint-Exupéry probably has drawn inspiration for the prince's character and appearance from his own self as a youth, as during his early years friends and family called him le Roi-Soleil ("the Sun King") because of his golden curly hair.[citation needed ] The author had also met a precocious eight-year-old with curly blond hair while he was residing with a family in Quebec City in 1942, Thomas De Koninck, the son of philosopher Charles De Koninck. Another possible inspiration for the little prince has been suggested as Land Morrow Lindbergh, the young, golden-haired son of fellow aviator Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, whom he met during an overnight stay at their Long Island home in 1939.

Some have seen the prince as a Christ figure, as the child is sin-free and "believes in a life after death", subsequently returning to his personal heaven. When Life photojournalist John Phillips questioned the author-aviator on his inspiration for the child character, Saint-Exupéry told him that one day he looked down on what he thought was a blank sheet and saw a small childlike figure: "I asked him who he was", he replied. "I'm the Little Prince" was the reply.

One of Saint-Exupéry's earliest literary references to a small prince is to be found in his second news dispatch from Moscow, dated 14 May 1935. In his writings as a special correspondent for , the author described traveling from France to the Soviet Union by train. Late at night, during the trip, he ventured from his first-class accommodation into the third-class carriages, where he came upon large groups of Polish families huddled together, returning to their homeland. His commentary not only described a diminutive prince but also touched on several other themes Saint-Exupéry incorporated into various philosophical writings:

I sat down [facing a sleeping] couple. Between the man and the woman a child had hollowed himself out a place and fallen asleep. He turned in his slumber, and in the dim lamplight I saw his face. What an adorable face! A golden fruit had been born of these two peasants..... This is a musician's face, I told myself. This is the child Mozart. This is a life full of beautiful promise. Little princes in legends are not different from this. Protected, sheltered, cultivated, what could not this child become? When by mutation a new rose is born in a garden, all gardeners rejoice. They isolate the rose, tend it, foster it. But there is no gardener for men. This little Mozart will be shaped like the rest by the common stamping machine.... This little Mozart is condemned.

-  A Sense of Life: En Route to the U.S.S.R.

The writer-aviator on Lac Saint-Louis during a speaking tour in support of France after its armistice with Germany. He started his work on the novella shortly after returning to the United States (Quebec, 1942).

Upon the outbreak of the Second World War, a laureate of several of France's highest literary awards and a successful pioneering aviator prior to the war, Saint-Exupéry initially flew with a reconnaissance squadron as a reserve military pilot in the Armée de l'Air (French Air Force). After France's defeat in 1940 and its armistice with Germany, he and Consuelo fled Occupied France and sojourned in North America, with Saint-Exupéry first arriving by himself at the very end of December 1940. His intention for the visit was to convince the United States to quickly enter the war against Nazi Germany and the Axis forces, and he soon became one of the expatriate voices of the French Resistance. In the midst of personal upheavals and failing health, he produced almost half of the writings for which he would be remembered, including a tender tale of loneliness, friendship, love and loss, in the form of a young prince visiting Earth.

An earlier memoir by the author recounted his aviation experiences in the Sahara, and he is thought to have drawn on the same experiences as plot elements in The Little Prince.

He wrote and illustrated the manuscript during the summer and fall of 1942. Although greeted warmly by French-speaking Americans and by fellow expatriates who had preceded him in New York, his 27-month stay would be marred by health problems and racked with periods of severe stress, martial and marital strife. These included partisan attacks on the author's neutral stance towards supporters of both ardent French Gaullist and Vichy France. Saint-Exupéry's American translator (the author spoke poor English) wrote: "He was restless and unhappy in exile, seeing no way to fight again for his country and refusing to take part in the political quarrels that set Frenchman against Frenchman." However, the period was to be both a "dark but productive time" during which he created three important works.

Between January 1941 and April 1943, the Saint-Exupérys lived in two penthouse apartments on Central Park South, then the Bevin House mansion in Asharoken, New York, and still later at a rented house on Beekman Place in New York City.

The couple also stayed in Quebec for five weeks during the late spring of 1942, where they met a precocious eight-year-old boy with blond curly hair, Thomas, the son of philosopher Charles De Koninck, with whom the Saint-Exupérys resided. During an earlier visit to Long Island in August 1939, Saint-Exupéry had also met Land Morrow Lindbergh, the young, golden-haired son of the pioneering American aviator Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh.

After returning to the US from his Quebec speaking tour, Saint-Exupéry was pressed to work on a children's book by Elizabeth Reynal, one of the wives of his US publisher, Reynal & Hitchcock. The French wife of Eugene Reynal had closely observed Saint-Exupéry for several months, and noting his ill health and high stress levels, she suggested to him that working on a children's story would help. The author wrote and illustrated The Little Prince at various locations in New York City but principally in the Long Island north-shore community of Asharoken in mid-to-late 1942, with the manuscript being completed in October.

The Bevin House on Long Island, one of the locations in which The Little Prince was written during the summer and fall of 1942.[50]

Although the book was started in his Central Park South penthouse, Saint-Exupéry soon found New York City's noise and sweltering summer heat too uncomfortable to work in and so Consuelo was dispatched to find improved accommodations. After spending some time at an unsuitable clapboard country house in Westport, Connecticut, they found Bevin House, a 22-room mansion in Asharoken that overlooked Long Island Sound. The author-aviator initially complained, "I wanted a hut, and it's the Palace of Versailles." As the weeks wore on, the author became invested in his project and the home would become "a haven for writing, the best place I have ever had anywhere in my life." He devoted himself to the book on mostly midnight shifts, usually starting at about 11 pm, fueled by helpings of scrambled eggs on English muffins, gin and tonics, Coca-Colas, cigarettes and numerous visits by friends and expatriates who dropped in to see their famous countryman. One of the visitors was his wife's Swiss writer paramour Denis de Rougemont, who also modeled for a painting of the Little Prince lying on his stomach, feet and arms extended up in the air. De Rougemont would later help Consuelo write her autobiography, The Tale of the Rose, as well as write his own biography of Saint-Exupéry.

While the author's personal life was frequently chaotic, his creative process while writing was disciplined. Christine Nelson, curator of literary and historical manuscripts at the Morgan Library and Museum which had obtained Saint-Exupéry's original manuscript in 1968, stated: "On the one hand, he had a clear vision for the shape, tone, and message of the story. On the other hand, he was ruthless about chopping out entire passages that just weren't quite right", eventually distilling the 30,000 word manuscript, accompanied by small illustrations and sketches, to approximately half its original length. The story, the curator added, was created when he was "an ex-patriate and distraught about what was going on in his country and in the world."

The large white Second French Empire-style mansion, hidden behind tall trees, afforded the writer a multitude of work environments, but he usually wrote at a large dining table. It also allowed him to alternately work on his writings and then on his sketches and watercolours for hours at a time, moving his armchair and paint easel from the library towards the parlor one room at a time in search of sunlight. His meditative view of sunsets at the Bevin House were incorporated in the book, where the prince visits a small planet with 43 daily sunsets, a planet where all that is needed to watch a sunset "is move your chair a few steps."

The original 140-page autograph manuscript of The Little Prince, along with various drafts and trial drawings, were acquired from the author's close friend Silvia Hamilton in 1968 by curator Herbert Cahoon of the Pierpont Morgan Library (now The Morgan Library & Museum) in Manhattan, New York City. It is the only known surviving handwritten draft of the complete work. The manuscript's pages include large amounts of the author's prose that was struck-through and therefore not published as part of the first edition. In addition to the manuscript, several watercolour illustrations by the author are also held by the museum. They were not part of the first edition. The institution has marked both the 50th and 70th anniversaries of the novella's publication, along with the centenary celebration of the author's birth, with major exhibitions of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's literary works. Physically, the manuscript's onion skin media has become brittle and subject to damage. Saint-Exupéry's handwriting is described as being doctor-like, verging on indecipherable.

The story's keynote aphorism, On ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux ("One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye") was reworded and rewritten some 15 times before achieving its final phrasing. Saint-Exupéry also used a Dictaphone recorder to produce oral drafts for his typist. His initial 30,000-word working manuscript was distilled to less than half its original size through laborious editing sessions. Multiple versions of its many pages were created and its prose then polished over several drafts, with the author occasionally telephoning friends at 2:00 a.m. to solicit opinions on his newly written passages.

Many pages and illustrations were cut from the finished work as he sought to maintain a sense of ambiguity to the story's theme and messages. Included among the deletions in its 17th chapter were references to locales in New York, such as the Rockefeller Center and Long Island. Other deleted pages described the prince's vegetarian diet and the garden on his home asteroid that included beans, radishes, potatoes and tomatoes, but which lacked fruit trees that might have overwhelmed the prince's planetoid. Deleted chapters discussed visits to other asteroids occupied by a retailer brimming with marketing phrases, and an inventor whose creation could produce any object desired at a touch of its controls. Likely the result of the ongoing war in Europe weighing on Saint-Exupéry's shoulders, the author produced a sombre three-page epilogue lamenting "On one star someone has lost a friend, on another someone is ill, on another someone is at war...", with the story's pilot-narrator noting of The Prince: "he sees all that. . . . For him, the night is hopeless. And for me, his friend, the night is also hopeless." The draft epilogue was also omitted from the novella's printing.

In April 2012 a Parisian auction house announced the discovery of two previously unknown draft manuscript pages that included new text. In the newly discovered material the Prince meets his first Earthling after his arrival. The person he meets is an "ambassador of the human spirit". The ambassador is too busy to talk, saying he is searching for a missing six letter word: "I am looking for a six-letter word that starts with G that means 'gargling' ", he says. Saint-Exupéry's text does not say what the word is, but experts believe it could be "guerre" (or "war"). The novella thus takes a more politicized tack with an anti-war sentiment, as 'to gargle' in French is an informal reference to 'honour', which the author may have viewed as a key factor in military confrontations between nations.

Saint-Exupéry met Léon Werth (1878-1955), a writer and art critic, in 1931. Werth soon became Saint-Exupery's closest friend outside of his Aeropostale associates. Werth was an anarchist, a leftist Bolshevik supporter of Jewish descent, twenty-two years older than Saint-Exupéry.

Saint-Exupéry dedicated two books to him, ( Letter to a Hostage) and Le Petit Prince ( The Little Prince), and referred to Werth in three more of his works. At the beginning of the Second World War while writing The Little Prince, Saint-Exupéry lived in his downtown New York City apartment, thinking of his native France and his friends. Werth spent the war unobtrusively in Saint-Amour, his village in the Jura, a mountainous region near Switzerland where he was "alone, cold and hungry", a place that had few polite words for French refugees. Werth appears in the preamble to the novella, where Saint-Exupéry dedicates the book to him:

To Leon Werth

I ask children to forgive me for dedicating this book to a grown-up. I have a serious excuse: this grown-up is the best friend I have in the world. I have another excuse: this grown-up can understand everything, even books for children. I have a third excuse: he lives in France where he is hungry and cold. He needs to be comforted. If all these excuses are not enough then I want to dedicate this book to the child whom this grown-up once was. All grown-ups were children first. (But few of them remember it.) So I correct my dedication:

To Leon Werth,

When he was a little boy

Saint-Exupéry's aircraft disappeared over the Mediterranean in July 1944. The following month, Werth learned of his friend's disappearance from a radio broadcast. Without having yet heard of The Little Prince, in November, Werth discovered that Saint-Exupéry had published a fable the previous year in the U.S., which he had illustrated himself, and that it was dedicated to him. At the end of the Second World War, which Antoine de Saint-Exupéry did not live to see, Werth said: "Peace, without Tonio (Saint-Exupéry) isn't entirely peace." Werth did not see the text for which he was so responsible until five months after his friend's death, when Saint-Exupéry's French publisher, Gallimard, sent him a special edition. Werth died in Paris in 1955.

All of the novella's simple but elegant watercolour illustrations, which were integral to the story, were painted by Saint-Exupéry. He had studied architecture as a young adult but nevertheless could not be considered an artist - which he self-mockingly alluded to in the novella's introduction. Several of his illustrations were painted on the wrong side of the delicate onion skin paper that he used, his medium of choice. As with some of his draft manuscripts, he occasionally gave away preliminary sketches to close friends and colleagues; others were even recovered as crumpled balls from the floors in the cockpits he flew. Two or three original Little Prince drawings were reported in the collections of New York artist, sculptor and experimental filmmaker Joseph Cornell. One rare original Little Prince watercolour would be mysteriously sold at a second-hand book fair in Japan in 1994, and subsequently authenticated in 2007.

An unrepentant lifelong doodler and sketcher, Saint-Exupéry had for many years sketched little people on his napkins, tablecloths, letters to paramours and friends, lined notebooks and other scraps of paper. Early figures took on a multitude of appearances, engaged in a variety of tasks. Some appeared as doll-like figures, baby puffins, angels with wings, and even a figure similar to that in Robert Crumb's Keep On Truckin' of 1968. In a 1940 letter to a friend, he sketched a character with his own thinning hair, sporting a bow tie, viewed as a boyish alter-ego, and he later gave a similar doodle to Elizabeth Reynal at his New York publisher's office. Most often the diminutive figure was expressed as "...a slip of a boy with a turned up nose, lots of hair, long baggy pants that were too short for him and with a long scarf that whipped in the wind. Usually the boy had a puzzled expression... [T]his boy Saint-Exupéry came to think of as "the little prince", and he was usually found standing on top of a tiny planet. Most of the time he was alone, sometimes walking up a path. Sometimes there was a single flower on the planet." His characters were frequently seen chasing butterflies; when asked why they did so, Saint-Exupéry, who thought of the figures as his alter-egos, replied that they were actually pursuing a "realistic ideal". Saint-Exupéry eventually settled on the image of the young, precocious child with curly blond hair, an image which would become the subject of speculations as to its source. One "most striking" illustration depicted the pilot-narrator asleep beside his stranded plane prior to the prince's arrival. Although images of the narrator were created for the story, none survived Saint-Exupéry's editing process.

To mark both the 50th and 70th anniversaries of The Little Prince's publication, the Morgan Library and Museum mounted major exhibitions of Saint-Exupéry's draft manuscript, preparatory drawings, and similar materials that it had obtained earlier from a variety of sources. One major source was an intimate friend of his in New York City, Silvia Hamilton (later, Reinhardt), to whom the author gave his working manuscript just prior to returning to Algiers to resume his work as a Free French Air Force pilot. Hamilton's black poodle, Mocha, is believed to have been the model for the Little Prince's sheep, with a Raggedy Ann type doll helping as a stand-in for the prince. Additionally, a pet boxer, Hannibal, that Hamilton gave to him as a gift may have been the model for the story's desert fox and its tiger. A museum representative stated that the novella's final drawings were lost.

Seven unpublished drawings for the book were also displayed at the museum's exhibit, including fearsome looking baobab trees ready to destroy the prince's home asteroid, as well as a picture of the story's narrator, the forlorn pilot, sleeping next to his aircraft. That image was likely omitted to avoid giving the story a 'literalness' that would distract its readers, according to one of the Morgan Library's staff. According to Christine Nelson, curator of literary and historical manuscripts at the Morgan, "[t]he image evokes Saint-Exupéry's own experience of awakening in an isolated, mysterious place. You can almost imagine him wandering without much food and water and conjuring up the character of the Little Prince." Another reviewer noted that the author "chose the best illustrations... to maintain the ethereal tone he wanted his story to exude. Choosing between ambiguity and literal text and illustrations, Saint-Exupéry chose in every case to obfuscate." Not a single drawing of the story's narrator-pilot survived the author's editing process; "he was very good at excising what was not essential to his story".

In 2001 Japanese researcher Yoshitsugu Kunugiyama surmised that the cover illustration Saint-Exupéry painted for Le Petit Prince deliberately depicted a stellar arrangement created to celebrate the author's own centennial of birth. According to Kunugiyama, the cover art chosen from one of Saint-Exupéry's watercolour illustrations contained the planets Saturn and Jupiter, plus the star Aldebaran, arranged as an isosceles triangle, a celestial configuration which occurred in the early 1940s, and which he likely knew would next reoccur in the year 2000. Saint-Exupéry possessed superior mathematical skills and was a master celestial navigator, a vocation he had studied at Salon-de-Provence with the Armée de l'Air (French Air Force).

Stacy Schiff, one of Saint-Exupéry's principal biographers, wrote of him and his most famous work, "rarely have an author and a character been so intimately bound together as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and his Little Prince", and remarking of their dual fates, "the two remain tangled together, twin innocents who fell from the sky". Another noted that the novella's mystique was "enhanced by the parallel between author and subject: imperious innocents whose lives consist of equal parts flight and failed love, who fall to earth, are little impressed with what they find here and ultimately disappear without a trace."

Only weeks after his novella was first published in April 1943, despite his wife's pleadings and before Saint-Exupéry had received any of its royalties (he never would), the author-aviator joined the Free French Forces. He would remain immensely proud of The Little Prince, and almost always kept a personal copy with him which he often read to others during the war.

As part of a 32 ship military convoy he voyaged to North Africa where he rejoined his old squadron to fight with the Allies, resuming his work as a reconnaissance pilot despite the best efforts of his friends, colleagues and fellow airmen who could not prevent him from flying. He had previously escaped death by the barest of margins a number of times, but was then lost in action during a July 1944 spy mission from the moonscapes of Corsica to the continent in preparation for the Allied invasion of occupied France, only three weeks before the Liberation of Paris.

Many of the book's initial reviewers were flummoxed by the fable's multi-layered story line and its morals, perhaps expecting a significantly more conventional story from one of France's leading writers. Its publisher had anticipated such reactions to a work that fell neither exclusively into a children's nor adult's literature classification. The New York Times reviewer wrote shortly before its publication "What makes a good children's book? ... The Little Prince, which is a fascinating fable for grown-ups [is] of conjectural value for boys and girls of 6, 8 and 10. [It] may very well be a book on the order of Gulliver's Travels, something that exists on two levels"; "Can you clutter up a narrative with paradox and irony and still hold the interest of 8 and 10-year olds?" Notwithstanding the story's duality, the review added that major portions of the story would probably still "capture the imagination of any child." Addressing whether it was written for children or adults, Reynal & Hitchcock promoted it ambiguously, saying that as far as they were concerned "it's the new book by Saint-Exupéry", adding to its dustcover "There are few stories which in some way, in some degree, change the world forever for their readers. This is one."

Others were not shy in offering their praise. Austin Stevens, also of The New York Times, stated that the story possessed "...large portions of the Saint-Exupéry philosophy and poetic spirit. In a way it's a sort of credo." P.L. Travers, author of the Mary Poppins series of children books, wrote in a New York Herald Tribune review: " The Little Prince will shine upon children with a sidewise gleam. It will strike them in some place that is not the mind and glow there until the time comes for them to comprehend it."

British journalist Neil Clark, in The American Conservative in 2009, offered an expansive view of Saint-Exupéry's overall work by commenting that it provides a "...bird's eye view of humanity [and] contains some of the most profound observations on the human condition ever written", and that the author's novella "doesn't merely express his contempt for selfishness and materialism [but] shows how life should be lived."

The book enjoyed modest initial success, residing on The New York Times Best Seller list for only two weeks, as opposed to his earlier 1939 English translation, Wind, Sand and Stars which remained on the same list for nearly five months. As a cultural icon, the novella regularly draws new readers and reviewers, selling almost two million copies annually and also spawning numerous adaptations. Modern-day references to The Little Prince include one from The New York Times that describes it as "abstract" and "fabulistic".

Two editions of The Little Prince (lower left in French and upper right in English, artwork not shown) in the Saint-Exupéry permanent exhibit at the French Air and Space Museum, Le Bourget, Paris (2008)

Some of the more than 250 translations of The Little Prince, these editions displayed at the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Japan (2013)

As of April 2017, The Little Prince became the world's most translated non-religious book (into 300 languages) together with Italian novel The Adventures of Pinocchio.

Katherine Woods (1886-1968) produced the first English translation of 1943, which was later joined by several other English translations. Her translation contained some errors. Mistranslations aside, one reviewer noted that Wood's almost "poetic" English translation has long been admired by many Little Prince lovers, who have spanned generations (it stayed in print until 2001), as her work maintains Saint-Exupéry's story-telling spirit and charm, if not its literal accuracy. As of 2019 at least seven additional English translations have been published:

Irene Testot-Ferry, (ISBN 0-7567-5189-6, 1st ed. 1995)

T.V.F. Cuffe, (ISBN 0-14-118562-7, 1st ed. 1995)

Ros and Chloe Schwartz, (ISBN 9781907360015, 1st ed. 2010)

David Wilkinson, (bilingual English-French student edition, ISBN 0-9567215-9-1, 1st ed. 2011)

Michael Morpurgo, (ISBN 978-1784874179, 1st ed. 2018)

Guillain Méjane, (translated via the PoesIA project, a convolutional neural network, ISBN 9798621081355, 1st ed. 2020)

The Little Prince was also translated by Bonnie Greer for a BBC radio adaptation in 1999.

Each translation approaches the essence of the original with an individual style and focus.

Le Petit Prince is often used as a beginner's book for French-language students, and several bilingual and trilingual translations have been published. As of 2017, it has been translated into more than 300 languages and dialects, including Sardinian, the constructed international languages of Esperanto and Klingon, and the Congolese language Alur, as well as being printed in Braille for blind readers. It is also often used as an introduction into endangered varieties with very few speakers like Maya (2001), Aromanian (2006) or Banat Bulgarian (2017). It is one of the few modern books to have been translated into Latin, as Regulus, vel Pueri soli sapiunt in 1961 by Auguste Haury (1910-2002) and as Regulus in 2010 by Alexander Winkler. In 2005, the book was also translated into Toba Qom, an indigenous language of northern Argentina, as So Shiyaxauolec Nta'a. It was the first book translated into that language since the New Testament. It was also translated to a northern Italian dialect, Vogherese. Anthropologist Florence Tola, commenting on the suitability of the work for Toban translation, said there is "nothing strange [when] the Little Prince speaks with a snake or a fox and travels among the stars, it fits perfectly into the Toba mythology".

Linguists have compared the many translations and even editions of the same translation for style, composition, titles, wordings and genealogy. As an example: as of 2011 there are approximately 47 translated editions of The Little Prince in Korean, and there are also about 50 different translated editions in Chinese (produced in both mainland China and Taiwan). Many of them are titled Prince From a Star, while others carry the book title that is a direct translation of The Little Prince. By studying the use of word phrasings, nouns, mistranslations and other content in newer editions, linguists can identify the source material for each version: whether it was derived from the original French typescript, or from its first translation into English by Katherine Woods, or from a number of adapted sources.

The first edition to be published in France, Saint-Exupéry's birthplace, was printed by his regular publisher in that country, Gallimard, only after the German occupation of France ended. Prior to France's liberation new printings of Saint-Exupéry's works were made available only by means of secret print runs, such as that of February 1943 when 1,000 copies of an underground version of his best seller Pilote de guerre, describing the German invasion of France, were covertly printed in Lyon.

Commemorating the novella's 70th anniversary of publication, in conjunction with the 2014 Morgan Exhibition, Éditions Gallimard released a complete facsimile edition of Saint-Exupéry's original handwritten manuscript entitled Le Manuscrit du Petit Prince d'Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Facsimilé et Transcription, edited by Alban Cerisier and Delphine Lacroix. The book in its final form has also been republished in 70th anniversary editions by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (in English) and by Gallimard (in French).

A Portuguese translation of the novella in 2007, edited by Eidouro Gráfica e Editora Ltda and presented at the XIII Biannual Book Fair of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, holds the Guinness World Record for world's largest book published. The impressive tome measures 2.01 m (6 ft 7 in) high and 3.08 m (10 ft 1 in) wide when open, containing 128 pages.

It has been translated into minority languages, such as the Irish language, by Éabhloid publishers in 2015.

After being translated by Bonifacio del Carril, The Little Prince was first published in Spanish as El principito in September 1951 by the Argentine publisher Emecé Editores. Other Spanish editions have also been created; in 1956 the Mexican publisher Diana released its first edition of the book, El pequeño príncipe, a Spanish translation by José María Francés. Another edition of the work was produced in Spain in 1964 and, four years later, in 1968, editions were also produced in Colombia and Cuba, with translation by Luis Fernández in 1961. Chile had its first translation in 1981; Peru in February 1985; Venezuela in 1986, and Uruguay in 1990. The book is among the few books in the Castilian cant Gacería (as El pitoche engrullón) or the Madrid slang Cheli (as El chaval principeras).

The Little Prince has an adaptation for the inhabitants of Bavaria, Austria and South Tyrol, covering for a large variety of the Bavarian language. The book was adapted by Johannes Limmer and published in 2019. It is called Da gloane Prinz and contains the original pictures of Saint-Exupéry.

The Little Prince is one of the most popular and beloved foreign works of literature in China. It is reported that there are more than 70 Chinese translations of the novella. According to the official website of the Succession Antoine de Saint-Exupéry-d'Agay, the version translated by Li Jihong, which was published in January 2013, sold over two million copies in less than four years. Cheng Li-chun published a translation in Taiwan in May 2022.

Due to Saint-Exupéry's wartime death, his estate received the civil code designation Mort pour la France (English: Died for France), which was applied by the French government in 1948. Amongst the law's provisions is an increase of 30 years in the duration of copyright; thus most of Saint-Exupéry's creative works will not fall out of copyright status in France for an extra 30 years. So the original French text was in copyright almost everywhere in the world until 1 January 2015, remains under copyright in the US until 2039 and will remain in copyright in France until 2032. EU law on copyright, however, fluctuates country by country, despite years of attempts to harmonize it at 70 years. French law allows for a copyright of 70 years from the author's death. Saint-Exupery, because of extraordinary service to his nation, is granted an additional 30 years, meaning, in France, Le Petit Prince does not actually fall out of copyright until the end of 2044.[contradictory ]

A short 45 RPM demo recording by Richard Burton narrating The Little Prince with music by Mort Garson, excerpted from a longer 33⅓ RPM vinyl record album. Burton won the Best Children's Album Grammy Award for his narration (1975).

A typeface inspired by The Little Prince designed by Graphic Designer You Lu

The wide appeal of Saint-Exupéry's novella has led to it being adapted into numerous forms over the decades. Additionally, the title character himself has been adapted in a number of promotional roles, including as a symbol of environmental protection, by the Toshiba Group. He has also been portrayed as a "virtual ambassador" in a campaign against smoking, employed by the Veolia Energy Services Group, and his name was used as an episode title in the TV series .

The multi-layered fable, styled as a children's story with its philosophical elements of irony and paradox directed towards adults, allowed The Little Prince to be transferred into various other art forms and media, including:

Vinyl record, cassette and CD: as early as 1954 several audio editions in multiple languages were created on vinyl record, cassette tape and much later as a CD, with one English version narrated by Richard Burton.

Radio broadcasts: radio plays were produced in the United States, with Raymond Burr, in 1956, and most recently in the United Kingdom on BBC in a 1999 dramatization by Bonnie Greer, produced by Pam Fraser Solomon.[118]

Film and TV: the story has been created as a movie as early as 1966 in a Soviet-Lithuanian production, with its first English movie version in 1974 produced in the United States featuring Bob Fosse, who choreographed his own dance sequence as "The Snake", and Gene Wilder as "The Fox". In 1987, a Turkish version was adopted into a direct-to-video film by Remzi Aydin Jonturk. Starting in 2010, a three-season-long animated series was made that expanded upon the book. In 2015, a major new 3D film, combining computer animation and stop motion animation, was released as The Little Prince in English and Le Petit Prince in French.[119][120] In 2023, a 2D-animated series will be released.[121]

Stage: The Little Prince's popular appeal has lent itself to widespread dramatic adaptations in live stage productions at both the professional and amateur levels. It has become a staple of numerous stage companies, with dozens of productions created.

Graphic novel: a new printed version of the story in comic book form, by Joann Sfar in 2008, drew widespread notice.

Pop-Up Book: a new printed edition, using the original text (as translated by Richard Howard in 2000) and St. Exupery's original drawings as the basis for elaborate pop-up illustrations, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (ISBN 978-0-547-26069-3, 1st ed. 2009).

Opera and ballet: several operatic and ballet versions of the novella have been produced as early as the Russian Malen′kiy prints by Lev Knipper, first performed in 1978 with a symphony score composed in the 1960s.

Concert music: Concert Suite on Le Petit Prince for solo violin, solo harp and chamber orchestra by Jean-Pascal Beintus (premiered by the DSO Berlin - Kent Nagano - 2008)

One of numerous stage adaptations of Saint-Exupéry's child and adult fable, this one at the University of Minnesota's Rarig Center Proscenium (2010)

Anime: a Japanese animation TV series was made in 1978, Hoshi no Ōjisama: Petit Prince, containing 39 episodes that do not follow the plot of the original novella. Each episode contains an adventure on a planet, usually Earth, where the little prince meets different people each time and makes friends. Some key elements of the original story have been kept. Namely, the little prince's golden hair, his scarf, laughter, his planet name (B-612), the rose and the three volcanoes. The anime had been aired and dubbed into several languages including Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish. The English dub's title is The Adventures of the Little Prince.[122]

Other: a number of musical references, game boards and a video game version of the novella have been released.

In 1997, Jean-Pierre Davidts wrote what could be considered a sequel to The Little Prince, entitled Le petit prince retrouvé ( The Little Prince Returns). In this version, the shipwrecked narrator encounters the little prince on a lone island; the prince has returned to seek help against a tiger who threatens his sheep. Another sequel titled The Return of the Little Prince was written by former actress Ysatis de Saint-Simone, niece of Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry.

New York City's Morgan Library & Museum mounted three showings of the original manuscript, with its first showing in 1994, on the occasion of the story's 50th anniversary of publication, followed by one celebrating the author's centennial of birth in 2000, with its last and largest exhibition in 2014 honouring the novella's 70th anniversary.

The 1994 exhibition displayed the original manuscript, translated by the museum's art historian Ruth Kraemer, as well as a number of the story's watercolours drawn from the Morgan's permanent collection. Also included with the exhibits was a 20-minute video it produced, My Grown-Up Friend, Saint-Exupéry, narrated by actor Macaulay Culkin, along with photos of the author, correspondence to Consuelo, a signed first edition of The Little Prince, and several international editions in other languages.

In January 2014, the museum mounted a third, significantly larger, exhibition centered on the novella's creative origins and its history. The major showing of The Little Prince: A New York Story celebrated the story's 70th anniversary. It examined both the novella's New York origins and Saint-Exupéry's creative processes, looking at his story and paintings as they evolved from conceptual germ form into progressively more refined versions and finally into the book's highly polished first edition. It was as if visitors were able to look over his shoulder as he worked, according to curator Christine Nelson. Funding for the 2014 exhibition was provided by several benefactors, including The Florence Gould Foundation, The Caroline Macomber Fund, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Air France and the New York State Council on the Arts.

The new, more comprehensive exhibits included 35 watercolor paintings and 25 of the work's original 140 handwritten manuscript pages, with his almost illegible handwriting penciled onto 'Fidelity' watermarked onion skin paper. The autograph manuscript pages included struck-through content that was not published in the novella's first edition. As well, some 43 preparatory pencil drawings that evolved into the story's illustrations accompanied the manuscript, many of them dampened by moisture that rippled its onion skin media. One painting depicted the prince floating above Earth wearing a yellow scarf was wrinkled, having been crumpled up and thrown away before being retrieved for preservation. Another drawing loaned from Silvia Hamilton's grandson depicted the diminutive prince observing a sunset on his home asteroid; two other versions of the same drawing were also displayed alongside it allowing visitors to observe the drawing's progressive refinement. The initial working manuscript and sketches, displayed side by side with pages from the novella's first edition, allowed viewers to observe the evolution of Saint-Exupéry's work.

Shortly before departing the United States to rejoin his reconnaissance squadron in North Africa in its struggle against Nazi Germany, Saint-Exupéry appeared unexpectedly in military uniform at the door of his intimate friend, Silvia Hamilton. He presented his working manuscript and its preliminary drawings in a "rumpled paper bag", placed onto her home's entryway table, offering, "I'd like to give you something splendid, but this is all I have". Several of the manuscript pages bore accidental coffee stains and cigarette scorch marks. The Morgan later acquired the 30,000-word manuscript from Hamilton in 1968, with its pages becoming the centrepieces of its exhibitions on Saint-Exupéry's work. The 2014 exhibition also borrowed artifacts and the author's personal letters from the Saint-Exupéry-d'Gay Estate, as well as materials from other private collections, libraries and museums in the United States and France. Running concurrent with its 2014 exhibition, the Morgan held a series of lectures, concerts and film showings, including talks by Saint-Exupéry biographer Stacy Schiff, writer Adam Gopnik, and author Peter Sís on his new work The Pilot and The Little Prince: The Life of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,

Additional exhibits included photos of Saint-Exupéry by photojournalist John Phillips, other photos of the author's New York area homes, an Orson Welles screenplay of the novella the filmmaker attempted to produce as a movie in collaboration with Walt Disney, as well as one of the few signed copies extant of The Little Prince, gifted to Hamilton's 12-year-old son.

In Le Bourget, Paris, France, the Air and Space Museum of France established a special exhibit honoring Saint-Exupéry, and which displays many of his literary creations. Among them are various early editions of The Little Prince. Remnants of the Free French Air Force P-38 Lightning in which he disappeared, and which were recovered from the Mediterranean in 2004, are also on view.

In Hakone, Japan there is the Museum of The Little Prince featuring outdoor squares and sculptures such as the B-612 Asteroid, the Lamplighter Square, and a sculpture of the Little Prince. The museum grounds additionally feature a Little Prince Park along with the Consuelo Rose Garden; however the main portion of the museum are its indoor exhibits.

In Gyeonggi-do, South Korea, there is an imitation French village, Petite France, which has adapted the story elements of The Little Prince into its architecture and monuments. There are several sculptures of the story's characters, and the village also offers overnight housing in some of the French-style homes. Featured are the history of The Little Prince, an art gallery, and a small amphitheatre situated in the middle of the village for musicians and other performances. The enterprise's director stated that in 2009 the village received a half million visitors.[94][134][135]

The Little Prince as part of a street art project in Funchal (Madeira)

In 1996 the Danish sculptor Jens Galschiøt unveiled an artistic arrangement consisting of seven blocks of granite asteroids 'floating' in a circle around a 2-metre tall planet Earth. The artistic universe was populated by bronze sculpture figures that the little prince met on his journeys. As in the book, the prince discovers that "the essential is invisible to the eye, and only by the heart can you really see". The work was completed at the start of 1996 and placed in the central square of Fuglebjerg, Denmark,[136] but was later stolen from an exhibition in Billund in 2011.[137]

During 2009 in São Paulo, Brazil, the giant Oca Art Exhibition Centre presented The Little Prince as part of The Year of France and The Little Prince. The displays covered over 10,000 square metres on four floors, examining Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince and their philosophies, as visitors passed through theme areas of the desert, different worlds, stars and the cosmos. The ground floor of the exhibit area was laid out as a huge map of the routes flown by the author and Aeropostale in South America and around the world. Also included was a full-scale replica of his Caudron Simoun, crashed in a simulated Sahara Desert.[138][139][140]

In 2012 the Catalan architect Jan Baca unveiled a sculpture in Terrassa, Catalonia showing the Little Prince along with the sentence, "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye".[141]

In February 2022, nearly eight decades after it was written, "The Little Prince" has arrived in Paris. The exhibit began on February 17 and will end on June 26. It contains 600 items, including photographs, poems, and newspaper clippings relating to "The Little Prince."[142]

Sculpture of the lamplighter in a "story playground" themed after The Little Prince in Holon, Israel

One of the "story playgrounds" - a series of playgrounds themed after famous children's stories in Holon, Israel - is themed after The Little Prince. It features sculptures and play structures depicting scenes and characters from the book.

L'école Le Petit Prince is the public elementary school in the small community of Genech in northern France, dedicated in 1994 upon the merger of two former schools. With nine classrooms and a library, its building overlooks the village's Place Terre des Hommes,[143] a square also named in tribute to Saint-Exupéry's 1939 philosophical memoir, Terre des hommes.

A K-6 elementary school on Avro Road in Maple, Ontario, Canada, was also opened in 1994 as L'école élémentaire catholique Le Petit Prince. Its enrollment expanded from 30 students in its first year to some 325 children by 2014. One of Saint-Exupéry's colourful paintings of the prince is found on its website's welcome page.[144]

In southern Brazil, in the city of Florianópolis, there is the Avenida Pequeno Príncipe (Little Prince Avenue in Portuguese), whose name is a tribute to Saint-Exupéry, who passed through the city during his aviator career, an event that became part of the local culture.[145]

The fighter jet insignia of the [GR I/33 fr], bearing an image of the Little Prince at top

Prior to its decommissioning in 2010, the [GR I/33 fr] (later renamed as the 1/33 Belfort Squadron), one of the French Air Force squadrons Saint-Exupéry flew with, adopted the image of the Little Prince as part of the squadron and tail insignia of its Dassault Mirage fighter jets. Some of the fastest jets in the world were flown with The Prince gazing over their pilots' shoulders.

The Little Prince Literary Award for Persian fiction by writers under the age of 15, commemorating the title of Saint-Exupéry's famous work, was created in Iran by the Cheragh-e Motale'eh Literary Foundation. In 2012, some 250 works by young authors were submitted for first stage review according to the society's secretary Maryam Sistani, with the selection of the best three writers from 30 finalists being conducted in Tehran that September.[147][148]

Several other Little Prince Awards have also been established in Europe, meant to promote achievement and excellence in a variety of fields such as in assistance to autistic children, child literacy, children's literature (by adults), Puppetry theatre and theatre arts.[149][150][151]

Before France adopted the euro as its currency, Saint-Exupéry and drawings from The Little Prince were on the 50-franc banknote; the artwork was by Swiss designer Roger Pfund.[74][152] Among the anti-counterfeiting measures on the banknote was micro-printed text from Le Petit Prince, visible with a strong magnifying glass.[153] Additionally, a 100-franc commemorative coin was also released in 2000, with Saint-Exupéry's image on its obverse, and that of the Little Prince on its reverse.[154]

In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the writer's untimely death, Israel issued a stamp honoring "Saint-Ex" and The Little Prince in 1994.[155] Philatelic tributes have been printed in at least 24 other countries as of 2011.[156]

The B612 Foundation is a private foundation created to track Near-Earth objects that might pose a threat to Earth, and is dedicated to protecting the planet from asteroid strikes, similar to the Tunguska event of 1908. The private foundation was founded by a group of U.S. scientists and astronauts, including Clark Chapman, Piet Hut, Rusty Schweickart and Ed Lu in October 2002. The non-profit organization is named in honour of the prince's home asteroid.[157]

An asteroid discovered in 1975, 2578 Saint-Exupéry, was also named after the author of The Little Prince.[158]

Another asteroid discovered in 1993 was named 46610 Bésixdouze, which is French for "B six twelve". The asteroid's number, 46610, becomes B612 in hexadecimal notation. B-612 was the name of the prince's home asteroid.

In 2003 a small asteroid moon, Petit-Prince, discovered earlier in 1998, was named in part after The Little Prince.[159]

French professional wrestler Daniel Dubail was billed as Le Petit Prince. Pakistani-British professional wrestler Mohammed Allam was billed as The Little Prince

Since 2020, June 29 is International Little Prince Day. This date was chosen to commemorate the birth of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, which occurred on June 29, 1900. The Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Foundation started the initiative striving to promote the humanist values carried by the book published in 1943. Mark Osborne was one of the first personalities to participate in the Little Prince Day 2020.

List of The Little Prince adaptations, a listing of The Little Prince story adapted into various media.

The Little Prince (1974 film), a 1974 musical film directed by Stanley Donen

The Little Prince (play), a theatrical adaptation

The Little Prince (opera), an opera in two acts by Rachel Portman to an English libretto by Nicholas Wright

The Adventures of The Little Prince (TV series), an anime series

The Little Prince and the Aviator, a 1981 musical theatre adaptation

Eloise at the Plaza, a 2003 TV film in which many references to The Little Prince can be identified

The Little Prince (TV series), a 2010 TV series

The Little Prince (2015 film), a 2015 animated film directed by Mark Osborne

Invisible Essence: The Little Prince, a 2018 documentary film about the book

Beaumont, Peter (1 August 2010). "Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Little Prince Poised for a Multimedia Return to Earth: The Boy Who Lived on an Asteroid Whose Tale Was Told in a Classic French Novella Is Being Revived on TV, Film And In Print". The Observer.

Brown, Hannibal (2004). ("The Country Where the Stones Fly". Visions of a Little Prince. Archived from the original documentary research) on 29 March 2007.

Dunning, Jennifer (12 May 1989). "In the Footsteps of Saint-Exupery". The New York Times.

Heuré, Gilles (2006). L'insoumis: Léon Werth, 1878-1955. Paris: Éditions Viviane Hamy. ISBN 978-2878582192.

Saint-Exupéry, Consuelo de (2003). The Tale of the Rose: The Love Story Behind The Little Prince. Translated by Allen, Esther. New York City: Random House. ISBN 978-0-8129-6717-3.

Schiff, Stacy (1996). Saint-Exupéry: A Biography. Vintage Canada. ISBN 978-0-679-30822-5.

Schiff, Stacy (2006). Saint-Exupéry: A Biography. Henry Holt. ISBN 978-0-805-07913-5.

Severson, Marilyn S. (2004). Masterpieces of French Literature: Greenwood Introduces Literary Masterpieces. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-313-31484-1.

Webster, Paul (1993). Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: The Life and Death of The Little Prince. London: Pan Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-333-61702-1.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Little Prince (French: Le Petit Prince, pronounced [ləp(ə)tipʁɛ̃s]) is a novella written and illustrated by French aristocrat, writer, and military pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It was first published in English and French in the United States by Reynal & Hitchcock in April 1943 and was published posthumously in France following liberation; Saint-Exupéry's works had been banned by the Vichy Regime.

# data[].attributes.body
let’s begin with Archplot, the classic Story structure, sometimes referred to as the “quest” narrative.

In summary, it has the following qualities:

In a consistent and cause/effect reality like the one we all inhabit in our everyday lives, Archplots feature a single active protagonist. This lead character pursues an object of desire (a new job, the love of his life, a college education etc.) while confronting primarily external forces of antagonism (more qualified candidates, a better looking suitor, a high school teacher out to get him). The story ends “closed” with absolute and irreversible change in the life of the protagonist. There is no going back to the way things were at the beginning of the story. Novels like The Firm, Sense and Sensibility, Carrie, The Hobbit and movies like The Fugitive, Chinatown, Kramer vs. Kramer and plays like Death of a Salesman, A Raisin in the Sun, and The Importance of Being Ernest are all Archplots.

Archplot is human life Story, the one we all use to evaluate and direct our own lives. This is why Archplot has the greatest potential for the largest possible audience. Every person on the planet is a potential reader/viewer.

The Archplot is the narrative form made famous and delineated so well by Joseph Campbell in his seminal work The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Having evolved over thousands of years, it has the structure that every single human being on earth can relate to. We see our own lives within the frame of Archplot. We all strive to fulfill our desires, be they material, romantic, or professional and believe that there are forces aligned against us to keep us from what we really want and deserve. It is only through active confrontation and defeat of these antagonistic forces do we believe we achieve anything of value.

Once we achieve or fail to achieve our desires however, we find that we can’t go back again. Once we’ve left our hometown and conquered the big city or fallen flat on our face, going back to the way things used to be is impossible. It is like Adam and Eve eating the fruit of knowledge. At the end of a particular quest—getting into college, finding the right mate—we can’t reverse course and go back to the way we saw and felt before we successfully attained or unsuccessfully botched it.

Archplot is linear.  This is the way we view our own lives.

We love Archplots because they mirror the way we choose to privately examine ourselves. There is nothing more powerful in a Story than having a lead character desperately pursuing something. The reader or viewer cannot help but attach himself to that character because he has objects of desire too. If the lead character in a Story gets what he wants, our brains are wired to believe that we can too. Stories fuel our courage and offer the cautions that we believe will help guide our own paths.

Whether you know it or not, your desire to write comes from the urge to not just be “creative,” it’s a need (one every human being on earth has) to help others. A well-told Story is a gift to the reader/listener/viewer because it teaches them how to confront their own discomforts.

In his wonderful book The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves, psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz tells the story of Marissa Panigrosso, who worked on the 98th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. She recalled that when the first plane hit the North Tower on September 11, 2001, a wave of hot air came through her glass windows as intense as opening a pizza oven.

Panigrosso did not hesitate. She didn’t even pick up her purse, make a phone call or turn off her computer. She walked quickly to the nearest emergency exit, pushed through the door and began the ninety-eight-stairway descent to the ground. What she found curious is that far more people chose to stay right where they were. They made outside calls and even an entire group of colleagues went into their previously scheduled meeting.

Why would they choose to stay in such a vulnerable place in such an extreme circumstance?

Because they were human beings and human beings find change to be extremely difficult, practically impossible. To leave without being instructed to leave was a risk. What were the chances of another plane hitting their tower, really? And if they did leave, wouldn’t their colleagues think that they were over-reacting, running in fear? They should stay calm and wait for help, they must have thought to themselves, maintain an even keel. And that’s what they did. I probably would have too.

Grosz suggests that the reason every single person in the South Tower didn’t immediately leave the building is that they did not have a familiar story in their minds to guide them. This from his book:

We are vehemently faithful to our own view of the world, our story. We want to know what new story we’re stepping into before we exit the old one. We don’t want an exit if we don’t know exactly where it is going to take us, even – or perhaps especially – in an emergency. This is so, I hasten to add, whether we are patients or psychoanalysts. (Grosz, Stephen. The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves (p.123) W. W. Norton & Company)

Even among those people who chose to leave, there were some who went back to the floor to retrieve personal belongings they couldn’t bear to part with. One woman was walking down alongside Panigrosso when she stopped herself and went back upstairs to get the baby pictures of her children left on her desk. To lose them was too much for her to accept.

That decision was fatal.

When human beings are faced with chaotic circumstances, our impulse is to stay safe by doing what we’ve always done before. To change our course of action seems far riskier than to keep on keeping on. To change anything about our lives, even our choice of toothpaste, causes great anxiety.

How we are convinced finally to change is by hearing stories of other people who risked and triumphed. Not some easy triumph, either. But a hard fought one that takes every ounce of the protagonist’s inner fortitude. Because that’s what it takes in real life to leave a dysfunctional relationship, move to a new city, or quit your job.  It takes guts, moxie, inner fire, the stuff of heroes.

Change, no matter how small, requires loss. And the prospect of loss is far more powerful than potential gain. It’s difficult to imagine what a change will do to us. This is why we need stories so desperately.

Stories give us scripts to follow. It’s no different than young boys hearing the story of how an orphan in Baltimore dedicated himself to the love of a game and ended up the greatest baseball player of all time. If George Herman Ruth could find his life’s work and succeed from such humble origins, then maybe they could became big league ball players too.

We need stories to temper our anxieties, either as supporting messages to stay as we are or inspiring road maps to get us to take a chance. Experiencing stories that tell the tale of protagonists for whom we can empathize gives us the courage to examine our own lives and change them.

So if your story doesn’t change your lead character irrevocably from beginning to end, no one will deeply care about it. It may entertain them, but it will have little effect on them. It will be forgotten. We want characters in stories that take on the myriad challenges of changing their lives and somehow make it through, with invaluable experience. Stories give us the courage to act when we face confusing circumstances that require decisiveness.

These circumstances are called CONFLICTS. What we do or don’t do when we face conflict is the engine of storytelling.

What I’m describing is the Archplot’s inherent quest. It is the structural narrative of humanity and it’s irresistible.

Primal Archplot (from cave drawings to oral tradition) is all about external antagonism. There is little, if any internal struggle in the lead character. Which makes sense. When life’s concerns are all about finding water, food, and shelter, there is very little time to indulge one’s inner development. The equivalent Archplots today live inside the External Action Genre.

Pure action genre protagonists are not plagued by inner doubts or perversions or deeply seated anxieties. In these Stories, a heroic protagonist overcomes Arch Villains and/or Nature and ultimately sacrifices himself in order to save another human being or even the entire planet from annihilation. While often derided, the Action/Comic Book Story is one of the most difficult to write/innovate and thus is rife with cliché. It’s been with us since the first campfire story, so it ain’t easy to reinvent.

The commercial Story marketplace is Archplot central and is the stuff of 200 million dollar movie budgets from film studios and blockbuster novels from big publishing. Pure Archplot is all about external conflicts. And there is nothing wrong with a great fastball external-only Archplot story. When done well, they’re better than peanuts and popcorn.

But, Archplot can also be used to explore inner conflict. The way a writer can do so is to combine a big external content genre with a compelling internal content genre. This is exactly what Thomas Harris chose to do in The Silence of the Lambs. The result is an Archplot structure for his global external and internal content genres. The conventions and obligatory scenes of the serial killer thriller drives the external, while the internal hinges on the progression of the protagonist from blind belief to disillusionment. Much more on both the external and internal content genres to come.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Download the Math of Storytelling Infographic
Moving on to the fourth leaf of our Five Leaf Genre Clover, let's begin with Archplot, the classic Story structure, sometimes referred to as the "quest" narrative.

In summary, it has the following qualities:

In a consistent and cause/effect reality like the one we all inhabit in our everyday lives, Archplots feature a single active protagonist. This lead character pursues an object of desire (a new job, the love of his life, a college education etc.) while confronting primarily external forces of antagonism (more qualified candidates, a better looking suitor, a high school teacher out to get him). The story ends "closed" with absolute and irreversible change in the life of the protagonist. There is no going back to the way things were at the beginning of the story. Novels like The Firm, Sense and Sensibility, Carrie, The Hobbit and movies like The Fugitive, Chinatown, Kramer vs. Kramer and plays like Death of a Salesman, A Raisin in the Sun, and The Importance of Being Ernest are all Archplots.

Archplot is human life Story, the one we all use to evaluate and direct our own lives. This is why Archplot has the greatest potential for the largest possible audience. Every person on the planet is a potential reader/viewer.

The Archplot is the narrative form made famous and delineated so well by Joseph Campbell in his seminal work The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Having evolved over thousands of years, it has the structure that every single human being on earth can relate to. We see our own lives within the frame of Archplot. We all strive to fulfill our desires, be they material, romantic, or professional and believe that there are forces aligned against us to keep us from what we really want and deserve. It is only through active confrontation and defeat of these antagonistic forces do we believe we achieve anything of value.

Once we achieve or fail to achieve our desires however, we find that we can't go back again. Once we've left our hometown and conquered the big city or fallen flat on our face, going back to the way things used to be is impossible. It is like Adam and Eve eating the fruit of knowledge. At the end of a particular quest-getting into college, finding the right mate-we can't reverse course and go back to the way we saw and felt before we successfully attained or unsuccessfully botched it.

Archplot is linear. This is the way we view our own lives.

We love Archplots because they mirror the way we choose to privately examine ourselves. There is nothing more powerful in a Story than having a lead character desperately pursuing something. The reader or viewer cannot help but attach himself to that character because he has objects of desire too. If the lead character in a Story gets what he wants, our brains are wired to believe that we can too. Stories fuel our courage and offer the cautions that we believe will help guide our own paths.

Whether you know it or not, your desire to write comes from the urge to not just be "creative," it's a need (one every human being on earth has) to help others. A well-told Story is a gift to the reader/listener/viewer because it teaches them how to confront their own discomforts.

In his wonderful book The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves, psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz tells the story of Marissa Panigrosso, who worked on the 98 th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. She recalled that when the first plane hit the North Tower on September 11, 2001, a wave of hot air came through her glass windows as intense as opening a pizza oven.

Panigrosso did not hesitate. She didn't even pick up her purse, make a phone call or turn off her computer. She walked quickly to the nearest emergency exit, pushed through the door and began the ninety-eight-stairway descent to the ground. What she found curious is that far more people chose to stay right where they were. They made outside calls and even an entire group of colleagues went into their previously scheduled meeting.

Why would they choose to stay in such a vulnerable place in such an extreme circumstance?

Because they were human beings and human beings find change to be extremely difficult, practically impossible. To leave without being instructed to leave was a risk. What were the chances of another plane hitting their tower, really? And if they did leave, wouldn't their colleagues think that they were over-reacting, running in fear? They should stay calm and wait for help, they must have thought to themselves, maintain an even keel. And that's what they did. I probably would have too.

Grosz suggests that the reason every single person in the South Tower didn't immediately leave the building is that they did not have a familiar story in their minds to guide them. This from his book:

We are vehemently faithful to our own view of the world, our story. We want to know what new story we're stepping into before we exit the old one. We don't want an exit if we don't know exactly where it is going to take us, even - or perhaps especially - in an emergency. This is so, I hasten to add, whether we are patients or psychoanalysts. (Grosz, Stephen. The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves (p.123) W. W. Norton & Company)

Even among those people who chose to leave, there were some who went back to the floor to retrieve personal belongings they couldn't bear to part with. One woman was walking down alongside Panigrosso when she stopped herself and went back upstairs to get the baby pictures of her children left on her desk. To lose them was too much for her to accept.

That decision was fatal.

When human beings are faced with chaotic circumstances, our impulse is to stay safe by doing what we've always done before. To change our course of action seems far riskier than to keep on keeping on. To change anything about our lives, even our choice of toothpaste, causes great anxiety.

How we are convinced finally to change is by hearing stories of other people who risked and triumphed. Not some easy triumph, either. But a hard fought one that takes every ounce of the protagonist's inner fortitude. Because that's what it takes in real life to leave a dysfunctional relationship, move to a new city, or quit your job. It takes guts, moxie, inner fire, the stuff of heroes.

Change, no matter how small, requires loss. And the prospect of loss is far more powerful than potential gain. It's difficult to imagine what a change will do to us. This is why we need stories so desperately.

Stories give us scripts to follow. It's no different than young boys hearing the story of how an orphan in Baltimore dedicated himself to the love of a game and ended up the greatest baseball player of all time. If George Herman Ruth could find his life's work and succeed from such humble origins, then maybe they could became big league ball players too.

We need stories to temper our anxieties, either as supporting messages to stay as we are or inspiring road maps to get us to take a chance. Experiencing stories that tell the tale of protagonists for whom we can empathize gives us the courage to examine our own lives and change them.

So if your story doesn't change your lead character irrevocably from beginning to end, no one will deeply care about it. It may entertain them, but it will have little effect on them. It will be forgotten. We want characters in stories that take on the myriad challenges of changing their lives and somehow make it through, with invaluable experience. Stories give us the courage to act when we face confusing circumstances that require decisiveness.

These circumstances are called CONFLICTS. What we do or don't do when we face conflict is the engine of storytelling.

What I'm describing is the Archplot's inherent quest. It is the structural narrative of humanity and it's irresistible.

Primal Archplot (from cave drawings to oral tradition) is all about external antagonism. There is little, if any internal struggle in the lead character. Which makes sense. When life's concerns are all about finding water, food, and shelter, there is very little time to indulge one's inner development. The equivalent Archplots today live inside the External Action Genre.

Pure action genre protagonists are not plagued by inner doubts or perversions or deeply seated anxieties. In these Stories, a heroic protagonist overcomes Arch Villains and/or Nature and ultimately sacrifices himself in order to save another human being or even the entire planet from annihilation. While often derided, the Action/Comic Book Story is one of the most difficult to write/innovate and thus is rife with cliché. It's been with us since the first campfire story, so it ain't easy to reinvent.

The commercial Story marketplace is Archplot central and is the stuff of 200 million dollar movie budgets from film studios and blockbuster novels from big publishing. Pure Archplot is all about external conflicts. And there is nothing wrong with a great fastball external-only Archplot story. When done well, they're better than peanuts and popcorn.

But, Archplot can also be used to explore inner conflict. The way a writer can do so is to combine a big external content genre with a compelling internal content genre. This is exactly what Thomas Harris chose to do in The Silence of the Lambs. The result is an Archplot structure for his global external and internal content genres. The conventions and obligatory scenes of the serial killer thriller drives the external, while the internal hinges on the progression of the protagonist from blind belief to disillusionment. Much more on both the external and internal content genres to come.

But next up is the second structural genre, Miniplot.
For new subscribers and OCD Story nerds like myself, all of The Story Grid posts are now in order on the right hand side column of the home page beneath the subscription shout-out. Download the Math of Storytelling Infographic
Share this Article:

Sign up below and we'll immediately send you a coupon code to get any Story Grid title - print, ebook or audiobook - for free.

(Browse all the Story Grid titles)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Download the Math of Storytelling Infographic Moving on to the fourth leaf of our Five Leaf Genre Clover, let's begin with Archplot, the classic Story structure, sometimes referred to as the "quest" narrative. In summary, it has the following qualities: In a consistent and cause/effect reality like the one we all inhabit in our everyday lives, Archplots feature a single active protagonist.

# data[].attributes.body
Many, many are the stories and myths told, to enable [people] to move themselves into a position of realization of the true nature of the self. The final goal of all of these true spiritual paths is humility and a willingness to surrender that clay, the pride, the arrogance, the unworthiness and fear, to surrender all these emotions utterly to the power and peace of knowing that you are love. This you can know only by faith, and faith can be strengthened only through contact in silence within the self, gazing at nothing, thinking nothing, expecting nothing, allowing all distractions to fade away, condemning yourself for no thought which takes you from this condition of emptiness, but rather, giving it position to have an irrelevance to the state of mind which your heart has wrapped around you for the meditative process of learning through silence.

There are no mistakes for any portion of the one Creator which seeks its source and its unity with all. There is in this illusion that you now inhabit, the great desire to seek, to love, and to be loved, for this is the lesson before you. The ability to know whether or not one has served well, is not a portion of this illusion, for it is that which partakes of wisdom. In this illusion one cannot know anything for certain. One can seek. One can desire. One can build the framework, the foundation for the metaphysical self, and build this foundation securely without knowing anything in detail or in particular. For there is in this illusion the great interplay and interchange of energies as each relates in one form of relationship to each other [person] within the illusion. The many steps forward, backward, sideways, missteps, bumped feelings and knees, all of this great cacophony of experience is that which eventually informs each [person] precisely as that [person] needs be informed. It is a great dance of the one Creator and Its many portions with Itself and though there seem to be many missteps and paths travelled that one may not wish to travel beforehand by [people], indeed, each step is taken with perfection. The ability to learn from what you call the mistake is oftentimes more valuable than avoiding the mistake, as it is called, originally.

There are forces, subconscious energies, in each [person]. There are teachers of an unseen nature for each [person]. All work in this great musical effort, this great dance that all participate in, allows each to exchange energies with others that are necessary to be exchanged. We applaud each [person’s] desire to move in a certain direction, metaphysically speaking. However, it is not so much the direction that is important as it is the desire that is important, the faith that such movement is possible, the faith that it occurs though one may not see it or measure it in any knowable degree. However, the faith that such movement is possible and the desire to move in the direction of love and light is that which is of importance.

Remember at all times when you see hardheartedness in others or yourself, that you are powerful to serve as messengers of love, peace and joy. You may encourage, exhort, commune and just be with one who is having difficulty, and by your mirroring forgiveness and love to the one you wish to aid, you are connecting your subconscious and your companion’s subconscious in great echoes of compassion. Sometimes no word needs to be said for this comforting effect to take place. Never doubt your value to one another, for you are the Creator. You are love, each to the other. May you dwell in a world where forgiveness is actively sought and joy is nourished by all conversation.

http://www.ascensionnow.co.uk/quo--angels.html

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
ABOUT THE CONTENTS OF THIS TRANSCRIPT:
This telepathic channeling has been taken from transcriptions of the weekly study and meditation meetings of the Rock Creek Research & Development Laboratories and L/L Research. It is offered in the hope that it may be useful to you. As the Confederation entities always make a point of saying, please use your discrimination and judgment in assessing this material. If something rings true to you, fine. If something does not resonate, please leave it behind, for neither we nor those of the Confederation would wish to be a stumbling block for any.

Saturday Meditation - February 12, 2011
Jim: The question this evening has to do with the concept of .
We would like to ask just what angels are and how we can interact with them. Are they different from or similar to guides?

(Carla channeling)
We are known to you as the Principle of Q'uo. We greet you in the love and in the light of the One Infinite Creator, in whose service we come to you this evening. We are privileged indeed to have been called to your circle of seeking and are very happy to be a part of this working. It is our pleasure to speak with you concerning angels.

However, before we begin, as always, we would simply ask you to take responsibility for your responses to those things which we say. Be conscious of whether or not you find our thoughts interesting. If you do, then they are yours to work with as you will. If they do not cause resonance to start in your heart, then let them go, for they are not for you. If you will use your discernment in this way and pick and choose between thoughts according to how they strike you, how they seem useful to you or not, that will enable us to feel that we are not disturbing your free will and it will allow us to feel freer to speak our thoughts to you. We thank you for this consideration.

In talking about angels, perhaps it is well to start talking about humans. We also talk about ourselves, for we also have been through third density. We also have been flung out by the Creator to skitter across the pond of the universe and move through many experiences and gather those pieces of information that interest us and seek what we desire.

We and you together have had cause to feel the distance between ourselves and the One Infinite Creator; not a physical distance but an emotional distance. Outer distances make far less of a difference to one's feelings than the inner distances and we often have felt very much apart from the Creator and from other selves. It is part of the challenge and part of the blessing of being a spark of the Creator.

You deal, my friends, with illusion with a thick veil, with chaos and seeming uncertainty, for your entire incarnation. In a way, your life is a race that goes not to the swift but to the perceiver of truth. You're racing not towards an object, but towards the correct perception of objects. Occasionally, one thing will come clear to you. You will have a realization about yourself. And you are one quantum step beyond where you were before, in understanding who you are.

However, as the one known as G said, it is very easy to become lost in the tangle of thoughts that clutter the mind. The mind is a complex thing because you are using both your intellect and your consciousness. Your consciousness takes its information from Love itself. Consciousness, by definition, is the consciousness of All That There Is, that which holds all things together.

Your mind, on the other hand, is like a library, with your information either filed fairly neatly or filed chaotically, so that you have to send one of the librarians scurrying after information-someone's name, the proper word that means such-and-such. The gaps in memory are notorious among the old, but they exist for everyone.

So that is what it is to be human, among other things. It is standing in two camps, one foot in each, on the one foot space/time, the everyday consensus reality, the matrix, call it what you will. Your other foot is in the inner world, in Consciousness, in Love.

Furthermore, that is the point of your being who you are. You are a place where two lands come together. You are the bridge between finity and infinity, between limits and limitlessness. You bring, if you choose, limitless and infinite love into a world that is starving for love. You bring infinite and limitless light through your energy body and ground it into Earth's energy if you choose.

You ask a great deal of yourself in third density, in that you ask yourself to wake up from a very comfortable slumber and become aware of the limitless potential that you contain. You become aware of your power and you seek its right use. You become aware that you do not know yourself very well and that you have been giving yourself a difficult time of it, looking with eyes of judgment rather than eyes of love upon what you do, what you think and how you feel.

You become aware that you have allowed a clutter of meaningless details to distract you from love itself, from the devotion of your deepest heart, from the hopes and dreams that you carry like treasure within yourself. And you become aware that you have the choice of how you shall be, thought by thought by thought.

And so, you choose to take on the challenge of third density as a person who is awake, aware and conscious and attentive and you make of your life a beautiful pattern, a pattern of learning and service, a pattern of responsibilities taken and manifested, and as you get to know yourself, you begin finally to forgive yourself for being human. And in the fullness of time you fall in love with yourself. And from that point on, your incarnation is easier, for the harshest critic is always the self. Yet there is no end to the challenges of life behind the veil of forgetting.

This is not the case with the angels. You have observed, as students, the regularity and predictability and hierarchical nature of the world as scientists have come to know it. The elements of which you are familiar and many of which you are unfamiliar, make up, not simply a random collection of elements but elements that have an arrangement because of their nature. They fit together in a certain way. And there is a hierarchy of energies. You, yourself, are a perfect example of that hierarchy of energies-the energy field of the entire physical body holding within it the energy fields of each organ, each system of hormones, and so forth. Down to the cellular level, your body understands its own hierarchy and it functions well.

The hierarchy of the angels of which you have asked us is just as regular and predictable. You have angels at the level of Creator, and you have angels at the level of personal angels. You have everything in between. They carry responsibilities according to their hierarchy.

What makes angels unique is that they have never left the vibration of the Creator. They have never departed from the One Original Thought of Unconditional Love. They have never incarnated and they never will.

While they have characteristics that can seem to be like a personality, to say that angels have a personality is to anthropomorphize [1] incorrectly.

Angels are love. Angels are love responsible for realms in a hierarchical manner. There are those which work with your sub-Logos, the sun, in creating the archetypal mind and the blueprint for the densities in this particular creation. There are angels who are attracted to vibrations and flock to those whose vibrations are beautiful to them. You may not feel beautiful, dear ones, especially when you are struggling, yet to those who vibrate in unconditional love, the qualities of one who is seeking to learn and to serve are irresistible. It takes a great deal of courage to persist in a spiritual pre-occupation, and each of you is very beautiful to us and to the angels.

There are two basic energies which angels have to offer. One is the simple energy of love itself and the other is a feeling of safety, which could be called a healing energy. Both of those aspects are the resources which angels have to offer. Angels also have connections with the four elements and the four directions [2] so that as you become more and more aware of the correspondences between certain archangels and certain energies, certain powers and certain directions, you become more able to cleanse your habitation or the area around you with the help of the archangels.

There is another class of angels that is indeed angelic and yet [these angels] have had incarnations. Those are the entities who have chosen to be angels but were not angels from the Creator. Yet between incarnations it became apparent to these souls that the work that they wished to do was angelic. And so these entities were incarnated and lived for a short time on this terrestrial ball you call Earth. And then, seemingly far before their time, they were taken. Instead of moving into the healing of the incarnation and the choosing of another incarnation, these particular entities move into the angelic realm. They are able to become angels because of their innocence within incarnation. These little ones are especially fond of those whose hearts are open and are very grateful to rest in that open heart that will accept them.

As this instrument mentioned before the meditation began, it is critical, if you wish to work with angels, to thank them, and to ask them to participate in your life, to be with you and to share their love and their healing and their feeling of safety. If you do not ask them, they cannot break free will. Therefore, it is important to remember each day to thank the angels that are around you and to ask them to continue helping you.

One way that this instrument and the one known as Jim ask for the angels' help is when they bathe, for angels are very good at magnetizing such substances as water or oil. And if asked, angels can place healing energy into the bathwater or shower so that the water carries the vibration of love and of healing. This is also true of substances such as food. If you ask the angels to help with the preparation of a food, they are able to help you magnetize love into the food. Homely chores such as chopping wood or cleaning house are ennobled by the angels as they aid you in magnetizing love to the motions that you make with your body and the thoughts that you think with your mind.

We find it stupendous to contemplate the generosity of the Infinite Creator in enriching the experience of each of those it has sent out to gain experience by making sure that there is no corner of the Creation that is not full of love, not only on a passive level, but on the active level of those who love, those who care.

You have this capacity within you to make heaven of hell or hell of heaven. We encourage you to believe in the truth, which is that heaven lies within you. It is accessible. It is as if you were looking at a closed door. The key to that door is silence. Open it. Walk into your own heart and fly away. There you are safe. There you are loved. There you shall become capable of loving. We are with you; the angels are with you.

At this time we find that it is time to leave this group and this instrument, leaving each in the love and in the light of the One Infinite Creator. We are known to you as those of Q'uo.

Adonai. Adonai my friends.

[1] To anthropomorphize is to attribute to non-humans the characteristics of being human.

[2] The four elements or powers are earth, air, fire and water. The four directions are north, south, east and west.

Copyright © 2011 L/L Research
All rights reserved. All of the material on this website (L/L Research) is intended for your personal use only and is protected by copyright. Please do not duplicate it for any commercial means and please do not repost it on any website, unless you have obtained prior written permission from the authors. Feel free to post a link back to it on www.llresearch.org. Thank you.
[Note: L/L Research have very kindly given me written permission to use their material in this website. Messenger Spirit]

www.llresearch.org
http://store.bring4th.org/index.php Note: The Ra Material can be purchased from its authors at their online store
http://lawofone.info

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
ABOUT THE CONTENTS OF THIS TRANSCRIPT: This telepathic channeling has been taken from transcriptions of the weekly study and meditation meetings of the Rock Creek Research & Development Laboratories and L/L Research. It is offered in the hope that it may be useful to you.

# data[].attributes.headline
January 9: poem "Thrushes" by Siegfried Sassoon

# data[].attributes.subject
January 9: poem "Thrushes" by Siegfried Sassoon

# data[].attributes.body
Tossed on the glittering air they soar and skim,
Whose voices make the emptiness of light
A windy palace. Quavering from the brim

Of dawn, and bold with song at edge of night,
They clutch their leafy pinnacles and sing
Scornful of man, and from his toils aloof

Whose heart's a haunted woodland whispering;
Whose thoughts return on tempest-baffled wing;
Who hears the cry of God in everything,
And storms the gate of nothingness for proof.

Siegfried Sassoon: A poet of little note before the war, he became one of the best-known - and most controversial - poets and novelists to emerge from the First World War as a result of his increasingly anti-war stance. Following his enlistment, in 1915 Sassoon was commissioned into the Royal Welch Fusiliers.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Siegfried Loraine Sassoon, (8 September 1886 - 1 September 1967) was an English poet, writer, and soldier. Decorated for bravery on the Western Front, he became one of the leading poets of the First World War. His poetry both described the horrors of the trenches and satirised the patriotic pretensions of those who, in Sassoon's view, were responsible for a jingoism-fuelled war.

# data[].attributes.headline
January 10: Quaker Faith & Practice 24:24 The dilemmas of the pacifist stand

# data[].attributes.subject
January 10: Quaker Faith & Practice 24:24 The dilemmas of the pacifist stand

# data[].attributes.body
Now, in the war, I do not think that any of us could doubt the colossal quality of the evil represented by Nazi philosophy. And I do not think that, in political terms, it was possible to contemplate coming to any sort of political compromise with it… Speaking personally as a Christian pacifist, I had a far deeper sense of spiritual unity with those of my friends in the fighting services who, detesting war as deeply as I did, yet felt that there was no other way in which they could share in the agony of the world, than I had with those pacifists who talked as if the suffering of the world could be turned off like a water tap if only politicians would talk sensibly together. Where men have sinned as grievously and as long as we have done in our social and international relations with one another, there can be no easy end to the consequences… We could not engage in warlike activity in the hope of relieving the suffering of the Jews or of other oppressed peoples in Europe and Asia. We had, somehow, to try to participate in their suffering and to express the conviction that it is ultimately the power of suffering in love that redeems men from the power of evil.

Roger Wilson, 1949

# data[].attributes.headline
January 11: poem "The Thought Fox" by Ted Hughes

# data[].attributes.subject
January 11: poem "The Thought Fox" by Ted Hughes

# data[].attributes.body
The Thought Fox (1957)
by

Ted Hughes

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

The Thought Fox - A Poem by Ted Hughes | Sergio Caredda

# data[].attributes.headline
January 12: Anointing the World by Ian Adams

# data[].attributes.subject
January 12: Anointing the World by Ian Adams

# data[].attributes.body
ANOINTING THE WORLD
The anointing that you received from him abides in you;
1 John 2
An ending, Time to look back.
To ask what the year has brought.
And to reflect what you have brought to the year.
May there be thankfulness for all that has been good.
And healing for all that has been hurt, lost or neglected.
Healing too from all the dehumanizing stuff out there that
has at times sapped your will and hope.
You have been blessed – in John’s language anointed –
in fragrant healing balm.
So too the world yearns for healing,
For anointing. This year may you become
some small gift for the world’s anointing
wherever you go.
Healing balm.

From Some small heaven – seeking light in Winter, Advent, Christmas and Epiphany by Ian Adams.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Some Small Heaven Seeking Light in Winter: Advent, Christmas and Epiphany by Ian Adams - Paperback - 9781848259935

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Buy Some Small Heaven Seeking Light in Winter: Advent, Christmas and Epiphany by Ian Adams Paperback from Canterbury Press - ISBN: 9781848259935

# data[].attributes.headline
January 13: extract from "Living Our Beliefs"

# data[].attributes.subject
January 13: extract from "Living Our Beliefs"

# data[].attributes.body
Lying upon a mound of rocks in a field somewhere near Yealand. Looking at the sky in total silence created an atmosphere of stillness and peace. It was the only meeting I have ever done outside and this made the silence seem so much more pure. The meeting halls of Bootham and Brigflatts may be beautiful but they were beaten by the beauty of having nothing. The darkness cast a spell over the meeting and closed the world in, making our togetherness feel absolute.
Felix Charteris, student,
Bootham School, York

Quaker Bookshop. Living our beliefs

# data[].attributes.headline
January 14: Poem "On those days" by Pauline Prior-Pitt

# data[].attributes.subject
January 14: Poem "On those days" by Pauline Prior-Pitt

# data[].attributes.body
on those days
when we wake
to the sun
edging in

when we wake
to the silence
of no wind

when we amble
half moon beaches
apples in our pockets

when we sit small
on headland rocks
watching the sea

on those days
if this is all there is
it is enough.

by Pauline Prior-Pitt.

# data[].attributes.headline
January 15: The story of 'the man who planted trees'

# data[].attributes.subject
January 15: The story of 'the man who planted trees'

# data[].attributes.body
The Man Who Planted Trees - Jean Giorno - Greenlife-exim

The Man Who Planted Trees (Short 1987) - IMDb

'The Man Who Planted Trees' School Assembly - Woodland Trust

The story itself is so touching that many readers have believed that Elzéard Bouffier was a genuine historical figure and that the narrator of the story was a young Jean Giono himself, and that the tale is part autobiographical. Certainly, Giono lived during this time. While he was alive, Giono enjoyed allowing people to believe that the story was real, and considered it as a tribute to his skill. His daughter, Aline Giono, described it as “a family story for a long time”. However, Giono himself explained in a 1957 letter to an official of the city of Digne: “Sorry to disappoint you, but Elzéard Bouffier is a fictional person. The goal was to make trees likeable, or more specifically, make planting trees likeable.”

Real-life people in other countries have produced similar effects. Abdul Karim in India created a forest out of “nothing” over a period of 19 years, using the same method as Bouffier. An organization called Trees for the Future has assisted more than 170,000 families, in 6,800 villages of Asia, Africa, and the Americas, to plant over 35 million trees. Wangari Maathai, 2004 Nobel Peace Prize recipient, founded the Green Belt Movement which planted over 30 million trees to restore the Kenyan environment. Shanghai Roots & Shoots, a division of the Jane Goodall Institute launched The Million Tree Project in Kulun Qi, Inner Mongolia to plant one million trees to stop desertification and alleviate global warming.

(sources: Wikipedia)

# data[].attributes.headline
January 16: a passage on 'Forgiveness' by John O'Donohue

# data[].attributes.subject
January 16: a passage on 'Forgiveness' by John O'Donohue

# data[].attributes.body
Forgiveness is one of the really difficult things in life. The logic of receiving hurt seems to run in the direction of never forgetting either the hurt or the hurter. When you forgive, some deeper, divine generosity takes over. When you can forgive, then you are free. When you cannot forgive, you are a prisoner of the hurt done to you. If you are really disappointed in someone and you become embittered, you become incarcerated inside that feeling. Only the grace of forgiveness can break the straight logic of hurt and embitterment. It gives you a way out, because it places the conflict on a completely different level. In a strange way, it keeps the whole conflict human. You begin to see and understand the conditions, circumstances, or weakness that made the other person act as they did.

John O’Donohue, excerpt from his book Eternal Echoes.

The Forgiveness Project

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Resources

John O Donohue has been one of my 'go to' writers and poet for many years after reading his first book Anam Cara at the turn of the millennium and then also listening to him share with his warm, lyrical Irish voice full of laughter at a GreenBelt Festival. Since then I have read all his books and regularly listening to his podcasts whilst travelling. They help me to gain a poetic sensibility of the world and my place within it, and have introduced me to a wider understanding of the role and beauty of prayer. John sadly died unexpectedly in 2008 in his sleep but his words and writings continue to shape and bless all who read them. Born and raised in Connemara, Western Ireland he spoke the native tongue of Gaelic, and his love of his homeland influenced much of his writing and spirituality. John trained and served as a Catholic priest before furthering his philosophical studies of Hegel in Germany. A became a highly respected poet and philosopher, lecturing in Europe and America and wrote a number of international bestsellers: Anam Cara, Eternal Echoes, Divine Beauty and Benedictus, which he completed shortly before he died. He also wrote two collections of poetry, Conamara Blues and Echoes of Memory, his first published work.

To read more of John O Donohues books then CLICK here

Below are a some quotes from Johns book Eternal Echoes: Exploring Our Hunger to Belong.

"The hunger to belong is at the heart of our nature. Cut off from others, we atrophy and turn in on ourselves. The sense of belonging is the natural balance of our lives. Mostly, we do not need to make an issue of belonging. When we belong, we take it for granted. There is some innocent childlike side to the human heart that is always deeply hurt when we are excluded. Belonging suggests warmth, understanding, and embrace. No one was created for isolation. When we become isolated, we are prone to being damaged; our minds lose their flexibility and natural kindness; we become vulnerable to fear and negativity. The sense of belonging keeps you in balance amidst the inner and outer immensities. The ancient and eternal values of human life-truth, unity, goodness, justice, beauty, and love are all statements of true belonging; they are the also the secret intention and dream of human longing."

"There is some strange sense in which distance and closeness are sisters, the two sides of the one experience. Distance awakens longing; closeness is belonging. Yet they are always in a dynamic interflow with each other. When we fix or locate them definitively, we injure our growth. It is an interesting imaginative exercise to interchange them: to consider what is near as distant and to consider the distant as intimate."

"The restlessness in the human heart will never be finally stilled by any person, project, or place. The longing is eternal. This is what constantly qualifies and enlarges our circles of belonging. There is a constant and vital tension between longing and belonging. Without the shelter of belonging, our longings would lack direction, focus, and context; they would be aimless and haunted, constantly tugging the heart in a myriad of opposing directions. Without belonging, our longing would be demented. As memory gathers and anchors time, so does belonging shelter longing. Belonging without longing would be empty and dead, a cold frame around emptiness. One often notices this in relationships where the longing has died; they have become arrangements, and there is no longer any shared or vital presence. When longing dies, creativity ceases. The arduous task of being a human is to balance longing and belonging so that they work with and against each other to ensure that all the potential and gifts that sleep in the clay of the heart may be awakened and realized in this one life."

"Our hunger to belong is the longing to find a bridge across the distance from isolation to intimacy. Every one longs for intimacy and dreams of a nest of belonging in which one is embraced, seen, and loved. Something within each of us cries out for belonging. We can have all the world has to offer in terms of status, achievement, and possessions. Yet without a sense of belonging it all seems empty and pointless."

"There is a desperate hunger for belonging. People feel isolated and cut off. Perhaps this is why a whole nation can assemble around the images of celebrities. They have no acquaintance with these celebrities personally. They look at them from a distance and project all their longings onto them. When something happens to a celebrity, they feel as if it is happening to themselves. There is an acute need for the reawakening of the sense of community."

"Our bodies know that they belong; it is our minds that make our lives so homeless. Guided by longing, belonging is the wisdom of rhythm. When we are in rhythm with our own nature, things flow and balance naturally. Every fragment does not have to be relocated, reordered; things cohere and fit according to their deeper impulse and instinct. Our modern hunger to belong is particularly intense. An increasing majority of people feel no belonging. We have fallen out of rhythm with life. The art of belonging is the recovery of the wisdom of rhythm."

"In post-modern culture there is a deep hunger to belong. An increasing majority of people feel isolated and marginalised. Experience is haunted by fragmentation. Many of the traditional shelters are in ruins. Society is losing the art of fostering community. Consumerism is now propelling life towards the lonely isolation of individualism. Technology pretends to unite us, yet more often than not all it delivers are simulated images. The "global village" has no roads or neighbours; it is a faceless limbo from which all individuality has been abstracted. Politics seems devoid of the imagination that calls forth vision and ideals; it is becoming ever more synonymous with the functionalism of economic pragmatism. Many of the keepers of the great religious traditions now seem to be frightened functionaries; in a more uniform culture, their management skills would be efficient and successful. In a pluralistic and deeply fragmented culture, they seem unable to converse with the complexities and hungers of our longing. From this perspective, it seems that we are in the midst of a huge crisis of belonging. When the outer cultural shelters are in ruins, we need to explore and reawaken the depths of belonging in the human mind and soul; perhaps, the recognition of the depth of our hunger to belong may gradually assist us in awakening new and unexpected possibilities of community and friendship."

"Perhaps your hunger to belong is always active and intense because you belonged so totally before you came here. This hunger to belong is the echo and reverberation of your invisible heritage. You are from somewhere else, where you were known, embraced and sheltered. This is also the secret root from which all longing grows. Something in you knows, perhaps remembers, that eternal belonging liberates longing into its surest and most potent creativity. This is why your longing is often wiser than your conventional sense of appropriateness, safety and truth... Your longing desires to take you towards the absolute realization of all the possibilities that sleep in the clay of your heart; it knows your eternal potential, and it will not rest until it is awakened."

For Belonging
by John O'Donohue
May you listen to your longing to be free. May the frames of your belonging be generous enough for your dreams. May you arise each day with a voice of blessing whispering in your heart. May you find a harmony between your soul and your life. May the sanctuary of your soul never become haunted. May you know the eternal longing that lives at the heart of time. May there be kindness in your gaze when you look within. May you never place walls between the light and yourself.
May you allow the wild beauty of the invisible world to gather you,
mind you, and embrace you in belonging.

Questions for Discussion and Reflection

1. Why is there such a crisis of belonging in our times? What are the characteristics of our fragmented and broken belonging? What are the voices of longing in your heart at this time in your life? Where do you think you were before you came here? What is the true relationship of longing and belonging? In your childhood, how did longing and belonging relate? In what ways do you actually belong in the world?

2. Human presence is unique, passionate and complex: discuss. What styles of presence do you have? How are you present to people who are angry, indifferent or threatening? Where is your anger? Is there any ascetic dimension to your life? Freedom also consists in keeping the contours of your choices porous: discuss. How do you incarnate longing?
3. What is false belonging? Why are you afraid of freedom? The images others make for us are never sufficient: discuss. How are guilt and shame related? Where is the haunted room in your mind? Where are the walls of your private prisons? Can you identify in your life the gifts brought to you by the angels of attraction and inspiration?

4. Suffering and evil are the most critical evidence against our belief in a good, kind God: discuss. Can there be growth and creativity without darkness? Why are we so vulnerable? Is spontaneity disappearing from our lives? Does suffering eventually give way to transformation? How important is failure in your life? No wound is ever silent: discuss.
5. What is your understanding of prayer? When and how do you pray? How does prayer help us to see things differently? How is wonder related to prayer? Why is wonder so vital to the world of spirituality? How does prayer change our experience of space and time? Write out your own prayer to suit the rhythm of your life and the shape of your soul.
6. What are the absences in your life? How does presence differ from absence? When do you experience real presence? When we talk too easily about ourselves, we cheapen our mystery: discuss. How does the role of participant and observer balance in your life? Discuss a philosophy of loss. What pathways toward new community lie hidden around us? What is the grief in your life? Who are the people you never hear from? What traditions do you really belong to? How can you reclaim the traditions that belong to you?
FOR LONGING by John O Donohue
blessed be the longing that brought you here
and quickens your soul with wonder.

may you have the courage to listen to the voice of desire
that disturbs you when you have settled for something safe.

may you have the wisdom to enter generously into your own unease
to discover the new direction your longing wants you to take.

may the forms of your belonging - in love, creativity, and friendship -
be equal to the grandeur and the call of your soul.

may the one you long for long for you.
may your dreams gradually reveal the destination of your desire.

may a secret providence guide your thought and nurture your feeling.

may your mind inhabit your life with the sureness
with which your body inhabits the world.

may your heart never be haunted by ghost-structures of old damage.

may you come to accept your longing as divine urgency.
may you know the urgency with which God longs for you.
Krista Tippet interviewed John O Donohue for her series of podcasts OnBeing, just a few months before he died. It is a delight to listen to this beautiful conversation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
John O Donohue: Celtic Reflections on our Yearning to Belong

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Resources John O Donohue has been one of my 'go to' writers and poet for many years after reading his first book Anam Cara at the turn of the millennium and then also listening to him share with his warm, lyrical Irish voice full of laughter at a GreenBelt Festival.

# data[].attributes.headline
January 17: two reflections on 'New Year, New Day'

# data[].attributes.subject
January 17: two reflections on 'New Year, New Day'

# data[].attributes.body
Write it on your heart
that every day is the best day in the year.
He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day
who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.
Finish every day and be done with it.
You have done what you could.
Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in.
Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day;
begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit
to be cumbered with your old nonsense.
This new day is too dear,
with its hopes and invitations,
to waste a moment on the yesterdays.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

You know how I always dread the whole year?  Well this year I'm only going to dread one day at a time.
Charlie Brown

# data[].attributes.headline
January 18: Poem "The Darkling Thrush" by Thomas Hardy

# data[].attributes.subject
January 18: Poem "The Darkling Thrush" by Thomas Hardy

# data[].attributes.body
I leant upon a coppice-gate.
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day,
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy
The wind his death lament,
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed favourless as I.

At once a voice arose around
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed hope of which he knew
And I was unaware.

Thomas Hardy, written December 1900

Poem of the week: The Darkling Thrush, by Thomas Hardy | Books | The Guardian

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Its musing tone, use of natural imagery to create and represent human moods and feelings, and the simple rhyme scheme are unobtrusive and powerful.

Thomas Hardy is reputed to have written ' The Darkling Thrush' on New Year's Eve, 1900, at the dawn of a new century. It commences in the personal, subjective mode, but the poet's feelings and mood are suggested by his observations of nature, rather than by direct statements.

The poem is written in the form of an ode, conventionally a lyric poem in the form of an address to a particular subject, often written in a lofty, elevated style giving it a formal tone. However, odes can be written in a more private, personal vein, as in the reflective way that Thomas Hardy writes this one.

The Darkling Thrush Thomas Hardy I leant upon a coppice gate When Frost was spectre-grey, And Winter's dregs made desolate The weakening eye of day. The tangled bine-stems scored the sky Like strings of broken lyres, And all mankind that haunted nigh Had sought their household fires. The land's sharp features seemed to be The Century's corpse outleant, His crypt the cloudy canopy, The wind his death-lament. The ancient pulse of germ and birth Was shrunken hard and dry, And every spirit upon earth Seemed fervourless as I. At once a voice arose among The bleak twigs overhead In a full-hearted evensong Of joy illimited; An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, In blast-beruffled plume, Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom. So little cause for carolings Of such ecstatic sound Was written on terrestrial things Afar or nigh around, That I could think there trembled through His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew And I was unaware.

The Poem Title - The Darkling Thrush

The title of a poem speaks volumes about it because, through it, the poem must convey the mood and tone of the poem in a very precise and economic way.

For 'The Darkling Thrush,' Thomas Hardy chose a word with tremendous history in poetry. 'Darkling' means in darkness, or becoming dark, for Hardy can still see the landscape, and the sun is 'weakening' but not completely set. The word itself goes back to the mid-fifteenth century. Milton, in Paradise Lost Book III, describes the nightingale: 'the wakeful Bird / Sings darkling, and in shadiest Covert hid / Tunes her nocturnal Note ...' Keats famously uses the word in his 'Ode to a Nightingale': 'Darkling, I listen ...'. Matthew Arnold, in 'Dover Beach' writes about the 'darkling plain'.

In other words, this title gives the poem a resonance of past poets and their thoughts and feelings on a similar subject; it makes specific allusions to these poets and poems; their echoes become a part of its tradition.

Analysis, Stanza by Stanza

Stanza One

In the first stanza, we are introduced to the poet, in the first person, 'I'. He is leaning on a gate in a little wood - it's traditionally a thinking pose, and the poem conveys his thoughts and feelings. The bitter hopelessness of a cold winter's evening is stressed by the imagery: 'Frost', 'spectre-gray', 'dregs', desolate', 'weakening', 'broken' and 'haunted' are unified and strengthened by their suggestions of cold, weakness, and death or ghostliness.

There are plenty of heavy, gloomy 'g' sounds: 'gate', 'gray', 'dregs', and equally heavy 'd' sounds: 'dregs', 'desolate' and 'day'. Even day, which might be cheering, is described as 'desolate' and having a 'weakening eye'. The only color left in the 'darkling' daylight is gray. There is a tiny whisper of sound in the repeated slight 's' sounds of coppice, spectre, dregs, and desolate. 'Frost' and 'Winter' have capital letters as if their presence is the most important.

The 'strings of broken lyres' is a classic image of disharmony, and perhaps points to a lack of joy in the poet's vision of life. Even the people who have gone home to the warmth of their fires seem to have assumed a ghostly quality, 'all mankind that haunted nigh'.

Stanza Two

The second stanza continues the model of the former if anything in even stronger terms. The whole past century is a 'corpse', the cloudy sky its tomb, and the winter wind like the century's death song. The personification of the century intensifies one's feeling that it is a real presence.

The imagery in this stanza continues and enlarges on the motif of death contained in the first. Despite the personal, subjective start of the poem, by the end of the second stanza, Hardy has made his mood an emblem for all life upon earth, and he even suggests that the very life force is 'shrunken hard and dry', that life itself is near to exhaustion and death. This is achieved in an undramatic, almost quiet, manner with a slow build-up to a terrifying vision of death, driven largely by natural images.

The alliteration in this stanza intensifies the atmosphere of gloom and death. Repeated cs link 'century's corpse', 'crypt' and 'cloudy canopy'. The rhymes of 'birth' and 'earth' are negated by 'dry' and 'I'. Everything is seen in terms of death: 'sharp features' (of a dead body), 'century's corpse', 'crypt', 'death- lament', 'shrunken hard and dry', 'fervourless'. It seems that it is not just the death of the old century that Hardy is describing, but the death of the pulse of life that vitalizes and energizes him and other people, the death of hope.

Stanza Three

In the third stanza, at the nadir of 'The Darkling Thrush,' the sudden hurling out of its song by a thrush might be seen as the injection of a rather fatuous optimism into the poem. The 'full-hearted evensong/Of joy illimited' is certainly a cause for hope.

The choice of bird here is what makes Hardy one of the finest poets: He chooses an old, frail, thin, scruffy-looking thrush, not the nightingale of Miltonic and Romantic tradition. It is an ordinary indigenous song-thrush, but one that is 'blast-beruffled': it has survived the strong winter winds, that the poet had hitherto painted as brutal and uncooperative. The 'aged' and 'frail' thrush is, perhaps facing its own imminent end, and yet it flings its soul ecstatically upon the darkening evening. The resultant picture of an ordinary, weather-beaten, thrush rising from the depths of the winter winds with their 'death lament' singing a beautiful song, is one of hope.

Three run-on lines take us at full tilt to its message: 'joy illimited' (unlimited). The very words with which Hardy introduces the song are lyrical, rhythmic, repetitive, like the thrush's song: 'At once a voice arose among/The bleak twigs overhead.' In perfect iambics, each prefaced by the vowel 'a', Hardy echoes the sound of the thrush's song: 'at once a voice arose among...'

Stanza Four

In the final stanza, the idea of religious faith is conveyed through the thrush's 'carolings', reminiscent of Christmas carols, and the 'blessed Hope' - hope to be one of the three great Christian virtues, faith, hope, and charity (love).

Hardy is careful not to be sentimental about the thrush. Hardy can see no cause for joy, but he can hope, that the thrush can see something he himself is unable to perceive. 'The Darkling Thrush' is thus finely balanced. It suggests there may be hope, and the very sound of the thrush and its defiance of the prevailing moods shows at the very least the existence of a tragic hope; life may be threatened, its physical existence at risk, but its spirit is indomitable and cannot be crushed.

Poetic Form

The overall rhythm of 'The Darkling Thrush' is regular iambic tetrameter alternating with iambic trimeter (8 syllables in a line, with the second line in each case having just 6 syllables); it's a ballad stanza rhythm. This regular rhythm seems to have a slow, joyless effect and makes the pace slow. The tight rhyming gives strength and authority to the poem, but the meter is more relaxed, giving a natural and free-flowing feeling to the lines.

A Final Note

'The Darkling Thrush' is typical of Hardy's work in that it shows life on Earth, human as well as animal, existing under the iron grip of an unsympathetic force, in this case, Nature. In praising defiance and the unconquerable spirit, it is also typical, and in its firm unwillingness to state a clear conclusion, balancing hope and pessimism, it could stand for Hardy's poems and novels. The musing tone, use of natural imagery to create and represent human moods and feelings, and the simple rhyme scheme are unobtrusive and powerful.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy - Poem Analysis

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Its musing tone, use of natural imagery to create and represent human moods and feelings, and the simple rhyme scheme are unobtrusive and powerful. Thomas Hardy is reputed to have written ' The Darkling Thrush' on New Year's Eve, 1900, at the dawn of a new century.

# data[].attributes.body
Bluebells

“One early morning last spring, I came and found the woods floor strewn with bluebells.  In the cool sunlight and the lacy shadows of the spring woods the blueness of those flowers, their elegant shape, their delicate fresh scent kept me standing and looking.  I found a delight in them that I cannot describe and that I will never forget.  Though I had been familiar for years with most of the spring woods flowers, I had never seen these and had not known they were here.  Looking at them, I felt a strange loss and sorrow that I had never seen them before.  But I was also exultant that I saw them now – that they were here.

For me, in the thought of them will always be the sense of the joyful surprise with which I found them – the sense that came suddenly to me that the world is blessed beyond my understanding, more abundantly than I will ever know…..Though as a man I inherit great evils and the possibility of great loss and suffering, I know that my life is blessed and graced by the yearly flowering of the bluebells.  How perfect they are! In their presence I am humble and joyful.  If I were given all the learning and all the methods of my race I could not make one of them, or even imagine one…..It is the privilege and labour of the apprentice of creation to come with his imagination into the unimaginable, and with his speech into the unspeakable”.

(Wendell Berry “A Native Hill” 1968, from “The World-Ending Fire”)

The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry review – how America’s farmers betrayed the land | Science and nature books | The Guardian

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Read 134 reviews from the world’s largest community for readers. In a time when our relationship to the natural world is ruled by the violence and greed of…

# data[].attributes.body
Master, they say that when I seem
To be in speech with you,
Since you make no replies, it’s all a dream
– One talker aping two.

They are half right, but not as they
Imagine; rather, I
Seek in myself the things I meant to say,
And lo! the wells are dry.

Then, seeing me empty, you forsake
The Listener’s role, and through
My dead lips breathe and into utterance wake
The thoughts I never knew.

And thus you neither need reply
Nor can; thus, while we seem
Two talking, thou art One forever, and I
No dreamer, but thy dream.

C.S. Lewis, 1964

# data[].attributes.headline
January 21: Quaker faith & practice 24.53

# data[].attributes.subject
January 21: Quaker faith & practice 24.53

# data[].attributes.body
The personal roots of conflict and education for peace

It should be the goal of understanding to pierce first through the thin layer of superficial familiarity and then through the hard rock of differing customs, habits and beliefs to discover the real humanity that lies beneath. National, racial and religious differences have not destroyed our common humanity, but they have given it different faces which may tempt us to forget that all the things that really matter, life and death, birth and love, joy and sorrow, poetry and prayer, are common to us all. The sense of our common humanity is latent within us, but only occasionally do we appreciate it as a living reality, as when at times of great stress we are upheld by strangers of an alien creed and tongue. Then the inward eye is opened and we see humanity standing above all nations, more humble, more patient and far more enduring than all the kingdoms of this earth. This is the ultimate justification for our peace-making.

J Duncan Wood, 1962

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Building the Institutions of Peace book. Read reviews from world's largest community for readers. The pacifist principle, so cogently expressed in the De...

# data[].attributes.headline
January 22: Beannacht: a Blessing for the New Year by John O'Donohue

# data[].attributes.subject
January 22: Beannacht: a Blessing for the New Year by John O'Donohue

# data[].attributes.body
For Josie

On the day when
The weight deadens
On your shoulders
And you stumble,
May the clay dance
To balance you.

And when your eyes
Freeze behind
The grey window
And the ghost of loss
Gets in to you,
May a flock of colours,
Indigo, red, green,
And azure blue,
Come to awaken in you
A meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
In the currach of thought
And a stain of ocean
Blackens beneath you,
May there come across the waters
A path of yellow moonlight
To bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
May the clarity of light be yours,
May the fluency of the ocean be yours,
May the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow
Wind work these words
Of love around you,
An invisible cloak
To mind your life.

[Note: "Beannacht" is the Gaelic word for "blessing." A "currach" is a boat used on the west coast of Ireland.]

ProgressiveChristianity.org : A Blessing for the New Year (John O’Donohue)

# data[].attributes.headline
January 23: a response by Ram Das on the question "How can I judge myself less harshly and appreciate myself more?"

# data[].attributes.subject
January 23: a response by Ram Das on the question "How can I judge myself less harshly and appreciate myself more?"

# data[].attributes.body
How can I judge myself less harshly and appreciate myself more?

Part of it is observing oneself more impersonally …
When you go out into the woods and you look at
trees, you see all these different trees.
And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight,
and some of them are evergreens, and some of
them are whatever.
And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is.
You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light,
and so it turned that way.
And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it.
You appreciate the tree.
The minute you get near humans, you lose all
that.
And you are constantly saying, “You’re too
this, or I’m too this.”
That judging mind comes in.
And so I practice turning people into trees.
Which means appreciating them just the way they are.

Ram Dass

Ram Dass - Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I think that part of [less self judgment] is observing oneself more impersonally. I often use this image:

When you go into the woods and you look at trees, you see all these different trees... and some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens and some of them are - whatever. And you look at the tree, and you just - allow it. You appreciate it. You see why it is the way it is, you sort of understand that it didn't get enough light, and so it turned that way, and you don't get all emotional about it, you just allow it. You appreciate the tree.

The minute you get near humans, you lose all that, and you're constantly saying, "You're too this," or "I'm too this," or - that judging mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees, which means appreciating them just the way they are.

There was a period of time where I used to have a picture of myself on my puja table, and people would come in and say, "My God, what an ego this guy's got; he's got his own picture on his puja table." But really, what it was, was a chance for me to practice opening my heart to myself, and to appreciate the predicament I'm in. And it's finding a place in yourself from which you see the unfolding of it all. That Mother did this, and Dad did this, drugs did this, Maharajji did this - all of it is just an unfolding of a storyline, a drama. The Ram Dass story. There he is. How will it come out? How did it come out? You're just sort of watching the stories unfold.

But at the same time, it's nothing to do with me, because I'm not that. That's just a set of phenomena happening. And when you look at yourself as a set of phenomena, what is there to judge? Is that flower less than that? It's just being different than that. You begin to appreciate your uniqueness without it being better or worse, because it's just different. Cultivating an appreciation of uniqueness rather than preference is a very good one.

It's just when you get inside identification with your personality that you get into the judging mode, because then you are a part of that lawful unfolding. You're not stepping outside of it all. The witness, or the spacious awareness, is outside of it. It's another contextual framework.

-Ram Dass

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I think that part of [less self judgment] is observing oneself more impersonally. I often use this image: When you go into the woods and you look at trees, you see all these different trees... and some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens and some of them are - whatever.

# data[].attributes.headline
January 24: Music "Winter Prayer" by Nick Farr

# data[].attributes.subject
January 24: Music "Winter Prayer" by Nick Farr

# data[].attributes.body
Composer/pianist Nick Farr's "Winter Prayer" from his album "The Ever Present Now" featuring Lyman Golden on guitar.
Information about the composer:
https://www.jango.com/music/Nick+Farr/_full_bio

# data[].attributes.body
‘SPEAK TO US OF GOD’ THE ALMOND TREE WAS TOLD, AND THE ALMOND TREE BLOSSOMED
MARY OLIVER

There is a Love-energy within you that makes you blossom, that makes you shine. You already carry the blessed seeds of your own flowering deep within. Every human heart is full of divine promise and power. Your human experiences of joy in your life, courage in your pain, freedom in your fear, letting go in your resentment, staying truthful in a web of lies, fighting depression, staying faithful to your promises, growing younger in spirit as you grow older in years—they are all, somehow, experiences of the infinite Source of Life. When you pause to explore any moment in your days—the bright and dark ones—and sense the Presence of a Greater Love, then you are truly blessed. Your True Self is living out the deep mystery of finding a divine beauty in the most ordinary of things. It doesn't have to be the blue iris; it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones. Just pay attention …(it) is the silence in which another voice may speak.

# data[].attributes.headline
January 26: a drawing by artist Sarah Woolfenden: "The Meeting"

# data[].attributes.subject
January 26: a drawing by artist Sarah Woolfenden: "The Meeting"

# data[].attributes.body
Prints — Sarah Woolfenden

# data[].attributes.headline
January 30: Imagine by John Lennon, sang by Pentatonix

# data[].attributes.subject
January 30: Imagine by John Lennon, sang by Pentatonix

# data[].attributes.body
Imagine there's no Heaven, it's easy if you try
No Hell below us, above us only sky
Imagine all the people living for today
Imagine there's no countries, it isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for, no and no religion too, oh
Imagine all the people living life in peace
You, you may say I'm a dreamer (Dreamer)
But I'm not the only one (Not the only one)
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of men
Imagine all the people sharing all the world
You may say I'm a dreamer (Dreamer)
But I'm not the only one (Not the only one)
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one
Live as one, will live as one
Live as one, live as one Will live as one, as one
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one (Not the only one)
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

# data[].attributes.headline
January 31: a Quaker fable from Emily Provance

# data[].attributes.subject
January 31: a Quaker fable from Emily Provance

# data[].attributes.body
Emily invited us to reflect on these questions:

What do you notice about Bee in this story?

What do you think that Bee might say?

If you could help Bee, how would you help him?

Emily is an American Friend who 'travels in the ministry' between Yearly Meetings. She has visited Britain on several occasions.