Flow

Ha ha! Very Good! Very Good! Yay!
(à la Laughter Yoga, just one of many modalities I've rediscovered and enjoyed teaching this week :)

Almost 7 years later...a lifetime according to the Ancient Greeks...here I am blogging again and introducing my brand new baby to the world.

Yes indeed, it has taken a good decade to recover from creating/adopting & raising my own dear children, with half that time dedicated to pioneering Imhoff Waldorf High School, which has been absolutely a labour of love, and entailed teaching (aka loving) other people's children as though they are my own.

Here's a little slideshow I made for an Open Day featuring these young people and the work that consumed my every waking hour and many of my restless sleeping ones too.

I even got acknowledged! Look, I won an award #proudmoment #notevenahumblebrag
(Um, so the school removed all trace of the High School that was painstakingly built up by we the dedicated self-sacrificing teachers from their website. Nice one. I'm removing the dead links...along with our dead dreams. Oh wait, found one living link for now...http://www.imhoffwaldorf.org/class-11/)

I taught so many incredible Waldorf Main Lessons, here's my last one, it also happened to be the first Main Lesson I taught way back in 2013, which I completely relished with the sweetest young people on earth.

I pioneered our first Parsival Journey, Class 12 Plays, Projects, Dinner, a gazillion outings, festivals and numerous other "threshold experiences." I have struggled, sacrificed so much, experienced great joy and way too much stress. None of it possible without the support of my long suffering husband and my absolutely AMAZING colleagues! Here we are at the last Class 12 Dinner made fabulous by Tracey and I, with my tall hubby staple-gunning fabrics to the ceiling all morning. Then there was the fab food courtesy of Janis!

Have you kissed the feet of your children's teachers today?!

Let me just say that I didn't have a single grey hair going into this and now I'm quite the silver fox, if I say so myself ;) I wonder why I did it? Why did I entirely give over the last 5 years of my life to painstakingly building something up which is now folding? Was it a fool's errand? SO MUCH ENERGY. So much love. All done with good intentions and in good faith. I have learned a heap about my own strength. Boundaries. Teenagers! Schooling. And I do so love to learn. It was a pretty steep learning curve that's for sure.

No regrets.

Easy to type, less easy to embrace entirely.   

Then there was the watershed year of my life thus far.
2015 was the year I learned about loss  ~ starting with the tragic death by car accident of High School friend Jose and life-long friend Rokela in December 2014, she and her little daughter were on their first holiday in ages staying with us. It was a hell of a shock. Then the hectic wildfires that nearly wiped out our home in February and changed the face of our beloved mountains, my brother's suicide in June, our Class 8 student Amani's tragic death in September which sparked off hectic riots in the Southern Peninsula and changed our communities forever, then Franziska's, a student at our sister school Constantia Waldorf.
The horror.
Absolute mind-numbing grief.
After putting one foot in front of the other for more than two years I finally feel ... well, I finally feel again.

Meanwhile my children grew up! They are absolutely delightful.

Now for a brand new chapter: -

Just look at my pretty website: 

https://charisselouw.wixsite.com/flow

And here's my Facebook Page: 

tps://www.facebook.com/GoFlow42/ 

I've also finally jumped on the Instagram bandwagon: 

https://www.instagram.com/goflow42/

Spread the good word! I am spreading my wings!