STORIES TO LIVE BY

      What is our culture but a treasury
      of stories teaching us how we should live,
      amounting to our kind’s mythology
      of what to praise, condemn, or then forgive.

      We need these codes and customs to survive
      in our societies and to make sense,
      as stories do, by teaching us to thrive
      or deal with failure—a form of recompense.

      It’s meaning that our kind of mind demands,
      beyond what other creatures seem to need
      directed by exigencies and glands,
      while we require the guidance of a creed:

           a story that gives meaning to our lives,
           a goal toward which a hero stoutly strives.

*