Heidi Barr's Blog, page 3

Impossibly Beautiful

Water droplets coated everything outside my house today. During my walk around the perimeter of our land, their tiny glistening bodies dripped steadily off the trees in the heavy air. Rain was never far off, and the view across the road into the fields beyond seemed out of focus in the foggy mist of a damp November day. Water puddled in the driveway ruts. It wasn’t bitterly cold, but in that sort of late autumn sogginess, a chill sticks to your bones with determination.

My community grieve...

A Tale of Three Otters

The lake ice was just barely holding on after a night of below freezing temperatures when I noticed my daughter, still in her PJs, transfixed on something out the back sliding door. I followed her gaze, and there they were– three slick brown creatures, slipping and sliding, jumping in and out of the water, scampering across the ice that would hold their weight. We see beavers regularly out on the lake, but these weren’t beavers. Every once in awhile someone sees something and says, “hey, I thin...

Wild Air and Fading Starlight

One late autumn morning a few years ago, I woke up to the sun rising in the east into a pink haze of clouds over a lake of utter stillness.  The air was colder than usual, which wasn’t saying much that year, after a fall of above average temperatures.  But I could see my breath and the grass by the lake was sparkling with frost. The water was like glass, the surface broken only by a tiny duck that had decided to stick around these parts for a little longer before heading south for the winter.  A...

A 30 Second Story: Rocks and Wishes

After a frustrating morning of remote work and distance learning, I followed my insistent 8 year old down to the water’s edge, begrudgingly taking a break from staring at a screen. She had a handful of rocks and offered no explanation other than, “It’s important.”  When we got to the end of the dock, she turned away from me to face the open water and dropped the rocks into the lake one at a time while whispering, “May you be happy.  May you be safe. May you be loved.” Starting with me, she bless...

Some Things That Happened When We Were Kids

Growing up in the 1980s, we didn’t have play dates or iPads or constant parental supervision/entertainment (at least not the helicopter kind that are so common today). Instead, we roamed: the prairie hillside where we lived in South Dakota, and the city neighborhood where we lived during a stint in Indiana.

The other day I saw some kids roaming in the rural neighborhood I currently call home. Three preteen boys on bikes that were too big for them kept riding back and forth in front of the house...

12 Tiny Things: The Book!

12 Tiny Things is available for pre-order! Help us spread the word!

12 Tiny Things has been an intentional community for almost three years now. Ellie Roscher and I started it by asking the question: What is enough? As in, what is just the right amount? It moved into an intentional living practice of embracing the tiny things that matter most.

We have a thriving Facebook community and page, as well as a new website that will be growing in its offerings durin...

5 Ways to Rewild Your Everyday

Work (whether it’s a paid position or not) takes up a lot of time for most people in modern culture. Leisure time is often relegated to the weekend (if it’s available at all), and evenings are often spent crashing out to one’s chosen streaming service (or catching up on work, especially for parents during pandemics).  It’s easy to just work work work and then not have anything left over for the rest of life.

Can you relate?

Do you ever feel like you spend more time at the office or behind the ti...

Celebrating Strong Women

I come from a family that celebrates strong women. My great aunt Hannah lived on her own well into her nineties, regularly taking baked goods by bike to what she called “the old folks’ home” in her small town. Great aunt Vera, now in her late 80s, still travels around the country visiting loved ones. Great aunt Martha ran her own business from her porch. My maternal grandmother Carol was the only girl on her community softball team growing up. She played first base, and she was good. She also co...

Hard Humbling Work

“This is hard, humbling work.” This is a sentence from 12 Tiny Things (a book that’s due out in early 2021), and it’s in reference to doing the work of tending to the self and embracing intentional, simple living. The sort of “intentional living” that we advocate for includes social justice, and committing to a life of anti-racism is also hard, humbling work- in fact, you could say it’s one of the hardest aspects of true intentional living. Being anti-racist isn’t just one piece of personal deve...

Let’s Talk about Growth

I’ve been running a lot lately – today was the sixth day in a row. This isn’t super out of the ordinary, since I’ve been a runner for years, but in the last few months I realized that running – always outside – is one of the few things that helps clear the fog of the times.  The flowering trees are blossoming at full force in my area right now, and they are spectacular.  Their scent, as much as their beauty, fills me up as I run my loop.  I don’t run far these days.  My usual loop is about 2 mil...