Boy, what happened to Christmas? Every year it seems to be more and more about stuff.
Here’s a little antidote, a story for children about how life’s real treasure is to be found elsewhere.
This is one of the stories that I told my kids when they were little, and speaks about the enriching power of stories themselves.
There was once upon a time a jealous King who sent his spies to the palace of a neighbouring Queen whose treasure was reputed to be far greater than his own.
“Find her treasure!” he barked, “and bring it back to me!”
The poor spies spend months in the Queen’s palace and are still in the dark as to where she keeps her treasure. Eventually they are surprised to hear that, far from hoarding it, she regularly gives it away at grand banquets to which all her subjects are invited.
Filled with curiosity, they attend the next banquet, expecting to see the Queen hand out rubies and diamonds on silver platters. But they are disappointed. All the Queen does, to everyone’s delight except their own, is spend the evening telling story after story after story.
It takes them several months to figure out what is happening, that the “treasure” the Queen is sharing is the wisdom she has gained from a long life well lived. And after attending many more of these banquets, they themselves become quite wise.
Recognising that their commitment to their own King is long overdue, they return home and announce that they have indeed brought with them treasure from the Queen’s palace.
When the King hears their stories, he is so touched that he weeps for joy, and showers them with gold coins…. which they use for tiddlywinks, sitting in the kitchen, telling stories late into the night!
It was one of the sweetest joys to tell such stories to my children when they were younger. The Intuitive Storytelling method that I use allowed me to tap into my own store of inner wisdom and share in the most direct language that exists for communicating with children: the language of fairy tales.
If you’d like to learn how to tell intuitive stories to the children in your life, check out my course Telling Intuitive Stories to Children.
And you can find the story here: The Queen’s Treasure
