The Prince and The Snake

from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupér

Something happened to me this past weekend.

I was walking barefooted across a field of grass, making my way toward a destination, when a snake bit my heel.

The interesting thing about this experience — besides the pain, a pain so sharp I could not even cry — was that while I was in shock that it happened, I cannot say I was surprised. I had been warned, more than once, that a snake was lying in that grass. And yet I chose to walk through it just the same. No shoes, no guard. Only the belief that if I moved softly enough, showed up with an open enough heart, that would be sufficient.

I was wrong.

I keep returning to The Little Prince, a north star in my life since I was a small girl, and one I still draw upon to this day. There is a boy, and there is a snake. There is innocence, and there is the kind of wisdom that only arrives through living the hard lessons. Knowledge without personal experience is muted, emptied of the particular scream of pain that wakes us to what we believed, chose, acted upon, and must now live with.

The boy. The Prince. The part of us that is innocent and longs to learn but cannot yet read the map. We walk through fields of grass, eyes on the wildflowers, feeling the wind, fixed on the horizon our hearts are moving toward. As this little prince, we forget our shoes. We do not heed the warnings. We step off the path to chase the butterfly, the rabbit, the heart-shaped blue stone.

The snake is as old as time. It has traveled far and seen things that are difficult to explain. It understands, in its bones, that action and consequence are two faces of the same coin — inseparable. But its vision is narrow: green blades of grass, and whatever moves within reach. When something does, the bite is almost instantaneous. It does what it does.

Sometimes, in the bright and fleeting second before the fangs are drawn, the snake thinks: don't. And once in a while it is able to pull back, uncoil its scaly body and slip quietly away.

As I sit with this, I realize we carry both of them inside us. The Prince and the Snake. We walk barefooted. We bite. And sometimes we are the ones biting our own heels.

It is a humbling thing to understand this not-all-good and not-all-bad human condition, especially as I sit here in pain from the bite, mourning the destination I will not arrive at. The grief is real because I could see it so clearly. There was a place, beyond that field of grass, that I have been hoping to reach for a very long time. I need to sit with that. To mourn the fact that this particular path is not to be, and to trust that a new one will emerge, because the little prince in my heart still longs to get there.

But for now, I need to strap on some shoes, reclaim the caution I threw to the wind, and begin again.