I’ve tried to write this post in plain language a few times, but the words aren’t coming.  So instead, let me tell you a story:

Long ago in a place far away there was a young prince with a hard heart.  His pride was like poison and he became ruthless.  He cruelly punished villagers who poached deer from his expansive forest.  He brought the law down without mercy on the heads of the weak and powerless.  One day he was visited in the night by an old and bent woman with hair in tangles and torn robes.

“My prince, my prince,” the hag said, “I beg you a night to sleep in the kitchens by the fire, for it is cold and I am weak and far from home.”

“I wouldn’t let you sleep with the pigs,” the prince retorted, “who are you to beg anything of me?  Leave this place!”

The woman looked on the prince with sorrow and said, “would that you had shown me the kindness a boy would show a dog,” with tears continuing, “for a curse you have brought down on yourself with your hard heart.  The winds will change and this land will fall fallow, you will be left with nothing but your walls and possessions, without a single person to be your companion through the long winter.”

Time passed and the lands fell fallow.  One by one the prince was forced to release his servants as there was no longer food to keep them.  Quietly in the night the serfs who worked the fields crept away, until nothing was left of his kingdom but the castle and surrounding forest.  The road through his kingdom fell into disrepair, into the hands of thieves and slave traders.

The winter was, indeed, long.  It was cold in the castle without servants to tend the fire.  The Prince grew thin and weak without anyone to cook for him.  His appearance changed from the softness of youth into something far more haggard and grim.

Then, one night, he heard a voice call out.  It was a woman’s voice, high and desperate.  It was curiousity and boredom that first motivated him to don his riding garb and to go out in search of the voice.  Curiousity and boredom, that was, until he saw her.  Brown hair fell over pale cheeks and hands red and broken from the cold held her frail form upright against a tree.  Tears were pouring down her face and she was trembling.  “Is there anyone?”  She called, again and again, “anyone to hear me?  Anyone to keep me from dying alone?”

The Prince’s hard heart felt the first fingers of spring grasping for purchase.  He rushed to her side and held her up.  “Who are you,” she whispered.  “Are you real?”

The Prince made no reply.  He simply carried her into the castle and put her in his bed.  He scrounged through the pantries to find bread to feed her, he killed the last of his chickens to make broth for her to drink.  He went out into the forest and felled dead trees to cut wood to keep the fires burning.  All that he would not do to ease his own discomfort he did for the sake of the strange girl.  And over the weeks as the snow outside began to thaw, the girl’s condition improved.  By the time the flowers were peeking out from under the last fall’s leaves, she was walking again.  And in time she started to talk, and told the Prince the story of her father’s death and her own loss of home and security, how she had fled an abusive suitor to fall into the hands of slave runners, and how at last she had escaped their clutches just to lose herself in the forest.

“And now I am here.” She said, “but why are you?”

“Why am I here?” The Prince replied.

“Yes,” the girl said.

And so the Prince told her the story of his lost kingdom and the curse that had left him alone through the long winter.  “If only I could have learned of compassion, if only I could have governed like my father, in fairness and love for my people.  But I brought my curse down on my head, and now I live alone.”

“Is that what you wish for?”  The girl asked.

“My father was a good man,” the prince replied.  “He was loved by all, and he returned their love.  He gave to those who were weak, he studied the words of the elders.  There is a story of a time that he came to the defense of a man who was to be hanged for poaching in the forest.  He said, ‘I kill the deer here every month, shall I be hanged as well?’ and he killed a deer for the man’s family to eat.”

“And you are not like him?”

“He died when I was very young,” the Prince replied, “I forgot who he was until I was left alone.”

“But you took me in,” the girl said, “you fed me from your table, you gave me your bed, you built a fire to keep me warm.”

“There was no one else to save you,” the Prince said.

“All that you wish for you already are,” the girl replied, “you just haven’t realized it yet.”

* * *

And somewhere in that story was what I really wanted to say about reconciling our potential for change with the truth of who we are.

Somewhere.

I hope.