Today we celebrate a man who looked down at the Earth from high above, and then looked deeper still - into the human soul. You might not know his name, but you know his words. Or maybe you've seen that little guy standin’ on a planet, wearin’ a scarf and talkin' to a rose. Yeah, you know the one. I'm talkin' about Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
He was a flyer. Born with his head in the clouds, literally. Born in France, 1900. Back when the sky still had mystery. Back when you could get lost in it and many did.
Saint-Ex was an airmail pilot, flyin’ over the Sahara and the Andes in planes that rattled like loose bones. He wasn't flyin’ for glory, he was flyin’ to connect people. Back then, carryin’ a letter over the mountains was like bein’ a cowboy with wings. Dangerous work. Romantic, too.
But he wasn’t just flyin’. He was writin’. Wrote books like Wind, Sand and Stars and Night Flight, stories that read like dreams dusted with engine grease. You can hear the wind howlin’ through his sentences.
And then there's The Little Prince. That book’s a miracle in paperback. Written while he was grounded in New York during the war. He was a long way from home. The kind of lonely that digs under your skin. And outta that loneliness, he wrote about a little boy from another world. A boy askin' big questions about love, about loss, about sheep in boxes. Some folks think it’s a kid’s book. But grown-ups… they miss the point. That’s kinda the point.
Saint-Ex flew one last time in 1944. He took off from Corsica in a Lockheed Lightning and never came back. Disappeared into the blue. No wreckage, no radio calls. Just gone. Like a whisper in the wind.
Years later, they found pieces of his plane. But Saint-Ex? He’s still up there, somewhere between the stars and the sand.
So today, pour yourself a glass of ice tea for the sky riders, the dreamers, and the poets with dirt under their fingernails.
Antoine, the pilot who taught us that what's essential is invisible to the eye.
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