The Saga of the Stone is a short story I wrote back in 1997 (although it’s been revised a bit over the years).

To me it’s a very personal story – because the events and people in it are real. It covers a series of events that happened to me when I was 20, which very nearly cost me my life. But that said, it’s also a story I find inspirtational, as so much of what happened during that night echoes a lot of the trials we experience in life.

As I’ve said before in The Problems We Can’t Fix, we will all go through periods of our life when we experience deep personal problems. When I went through such a patch in 1997, I decided to look back to the events of the Saga of the Stone and write about the life and death struggle.  It felt like a powerful metaphor for getting through any kind of problem.

I think we all have a Saga of the Stone story in some way in our past. I certainly feel inspired hearing the tales of a friend named Jess Bromley talk about hers.  Her story and mine remind me that life is a gift, and one of the huge tragedies in life is, it takes tragedy or near-tragedy to appreciate it.