Story: Compassion and the Labyrinth

I've said this before:

stories instruct us, entertain us, tease us, lead us.

Without story, what do we have?

The present moment, sure, but even this present only makes sense once you fit it into the fabric of your life, of your world, of your story?

Didn't one of Eugene O'Neill's characters claim, "The past is the present, isn't it? And the future too?" But only if you know the story, I claim, and you want to know the story. Don't you?

Here are two passages regarding story that resonate with me.

May they resonate with you too.

Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.

--Barry Lopez, from an interview in Poets and Writers, vol. 22, issue 2 (March/April 1994).

I found this quotation from Lopez in Charles de Lint's Someplace to Be Flying.

I hold with Barry Lopez--stories, compassion--but Rebecca Solnit, too, offers a real thread through the labyrinth of life.

‎A story can be a gift like Ariadne's thread, or the labyrinth, or the labyrinth's ravening Minotaur; we navigate by stories, but sometimes we only escape by abandoning them.

--Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide for Getting Lost