Kristie's Waldorf Journey

Dear Members,

Since we have so many new members this month I thought it might be good to re-introduce myself to some of you who may not know me very well. It has also come to my attention that some people have some misunderstandings about some things so I thought this might help :)

My name is Kristie Karima Burns, MH, ND and I have been the moderator of this list since 1999. I have other lists I have moderated since 1993.

Most of what I remember from childhood are trees and the sky! I left home when I was 16 to travel the world and returned briefly to finish college at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. I completed my last year of anthropology studies in Egypt where I also learned Arabic. At that time I started work as a professional photographer (http://www.imagenations.com/) and a healer.

I have been online running a natural healing newsletter and business since 1993. This quickly merged into a Waldorf/natural healing newsletter and website when my daughter was born in 1994. At that time I had to have my brother teach me HTML since there was no such thing as Weebly or Tripod! If I showed you my first Waldorf/Healing webpages you would just laugh!

I continued to run my home business and lovingly nurture its development for the next 15 years (until now). I had so many dreams and ideas about what I wanted to do with the website and business but many of them had to wait years because my priority was always my family and as little ones they were less independent.

My business was part-time for the first ten years and I was not very good at marketing so I only had a small clientele...but over the years some of my lists grew slowly to over 1,500 members and I started to develop close relationships with some clients and newsletter readers that I had known for over ten years! And that was with no advertising and just word of mouth!

Seven years ago, I started a Waldorf Enrichment School and once again my business online continued to thrive, but on a part-time basis. With the work I put into homeschooling my children and others, I didn't have time to be online full-time.

During the summers, when school was off, I would travel around the USA with my children, speaking at seminars and offering smaller seminars to people in their homes.

However, despite these limitations, I continued to work on my dreams and add new things every month and I started sharing my lesson plans with other mothers and teachers online in 1999. My herbal healing classes went online in 1996 so I was already familiar at that time with what it took to get things online, and what I wanted to do with the Waldorf lesson plans once they were ready.

In 2003 I spoke at a seminar and was videotaped. It was a new concept back then but it sparked the idea in my head for The Waldorf Channel, which I have been working on since 2003. However, before I could start hosting such a project I needed to have some videos to start with and a good video camera. A good video camera costs a lot of money so it was not until 2007 that dream finally came together and The Waldorf Channel was born.

In 2003, it was only natural to think of having a radio station along with a television station. However, I knew that running both would be impossible alone so I decided to leave the radio idea and see what emerged. Nothing emerged. I realized I loved the visual of the "mini shows" on The Waldorf Channel and I loved writing (the BLOG and newsletter) so I really had no desire to branch out beyond that.

However, in the winter of 2007, my daughter living overseas mentioned that she missed "story-time" so I told her I could record some of our storytime and send them to her. But it didn't work. She could not download the files without a lot of work. So I looked around for alternatives and found out that there are sites you can upload MP3s to and they will stream them on to the computer for you. She was thrilled! She jokingly called it her "own radio show". Then I realized that - hey! perhaps I can do a radio show. A "kinda one". I can just make it all about stories that I am doing anyway. So I decided to share our stories with everyone and of course I thought of the Waldorf community first.

I already owned a few different names that would work for a radio show. I own about 24 website names (some of them I don't use yet) because I have projects that have not yet emerged. I decided to use "Wadorf Radio" so it would match my other sites better (The Waldorf Channel, Waldorf School Online).

It is my daughter's storytime that I share with the world :) But even though it is a small little radio station it is fun and has helped me fulfill yet one more dream I had, but in a way I did not expect.

I have many other dreams for what I can do to help bring Waldorf to as many people as possible. I lived for so many years overseas and away from Waldorf resources that my heart really goes out to people who are inspired by Waldorf but do not have access to the resources to implement it.

I look forward to sharing many more of those dreams with you all in the future. I have a series of Children's Books I am working on. The first one is due out in the Spring. I am sorry to say, however, I don't plan on publishing anything other than Children's Books. I have come to enjoy the adaptive and "living" quality of the online E-books so much that I can't envision wanting to publish them in book form. The children's books are different, because I want them to be picture books as well as stories.

Waldorf E-cards, Online Waldorf Craft Contests....So many other ideas too!

So thank you for being part of this list and my life. I have enjoyed working with some of you for 13 years and others for only 3 weeks but you are all dear to my heart. I hope this letter helped you to get to know me better. There is so much more I would love to share but that would take hours!

There is a lot of professional information (my resume, etc...) online at my websites so I have not listed all that in this letter. You can look at my resumes online or references on my websites if you really want to know more but I wanted to make this letter more a "personal journey" letter. Thank you for listening!

Blessings & Health,
Kristie