Fireflies Healing Storytelling Mission
Why Tell Your Own Intentional Story for Healing, Teaching, or Inspiration to Children?
Why Should Elders be Encouraged to Share Their Stories with Youth?
You know YOUR child, YOUR student, YOUR classroom, YOUR patient or client -- their personalities, strengths, and their challenges. You know what they are facing in their day-to-day lives. You can intentionally provide healing for your child or teach them values through an enjoyable story.
You can personalize a story. Does the child love mountains, water, bears, and fish? What settings or characters speak most deeply to them?
You can have a choice of interaction and connection with storytelling. You can look into a child's eyes. If walking, you can hold their hand. You can tell a story anywhere. Sometimes it is better done privately, but a story can be told on a woodland path, in a canoe, or by sharing lunch.
There is something extraordinarily healing and reciprocal about elders sharing stories with children, and that is why, until the recent generational fragmentation of families, it has been an ancient practice in many cultures.
Our Mission
"Fireflies" seeks to create an environment where children can feel like their thoughts, feelings, ideas, and problems are heard and responded to in a loving and caring atmosphere by telling a story intended just for them.
Fireflies seeks to help elders experience appreciation and validation for their wisdom and life experiences through promoting the ancient practice of intergenerational storytelling. Fireflies works with elders in senior communities to help them shape stories of their lives, and creates opportunities to facilitate the sharing of these stories with children.
"Fireflies" seeks to teach the art of healing storytelling for children to as many families, teachers, healers, and caregivers as possible, and then encourage each one to teach one -- so that this good news of one way of giving loving attention, with loving intention through healing story may reach children everywhere, lighting up the night. And to uncover the hidden healing storyteller within each one of us.