Childhood. That time of life that is full of growth, learning, questions and change. A time that plays a part in defining our view of the world and what we hold as important. A time of cultivation. A time that needs wildness. Most of my childhood was spent living just outside of a small college … Continue reading How to Cultivate a Wild Child
May you be happy. May you be safe. May you be loved. Continue reading A 30 Second Story: Rocks and Wishes
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 … Continue reading Some Things That Happened When We Were Kids
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. … Continue reading Celebrating Strong Women
It’s Thanksgiving time [a complicated holiday if we look through the lens of colonization] here in the United States, and what a strange season we are in. The Amazon burns while floods swallow sea level neighborhoods. Planned power outages become business as usual to prevent wildfire while incredible amounts of energy are used to keep indoor ski resorts going in deserts. People in high office in too many countries seem to have missed the history lessons about the horrors that result from unchecked, systematic racism and the dangers in acting from fear and entitlement. Constant growth remains the goal while finite resources vanish. Work hours are long, jobs are lost, people are sick, loved ones are hurting, the dog is getting old. There are many things to lament and grieve. Grief and lament have their place in the world, and they are necessary. Yet so is giving thanks. Gratitude is nearly always possible.
Elie Wiesel wrote, “When a person doesn’t have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity. A person can almost be defined by his or her attitude toward gratitude.” Continue reading “Gratitude, anyway”
At a glance, today was a rather unremarkable day. Earlier this morning as the sun started to think about showing up for the day, the adults of the house drank coffee, the child of the house ate cereal, we all scrambled to get dressed, and then it was off to our individual task lists for … Continue reading Gifts of a Lifetime
It’s been almost two years now since I got the news that I was being laid off from a long time job – and in that time a short book about the experience has come into being, and as it gets closer to being released into the world, I am finding myself torn. On one … Continue reading Reason to Pause
Heidi Barr | Author 