Lately I feel like I’m rushing around all the time, even while I’m sitting still staring at my computer screen, waiting for something to happen. Does that ever happen to you? You feel somehow frantic and extremely bored at the same time, eyes anxiously skittering across bite-sized half-stories that don’t really have any true impact … Continue reading Lessons from Lichen
This morning I was milling around the house, stewing about some problems that have popped up recently, when I decided to read Sulelika Jaouad’s latest Isolation Journals installment. It is about shifting expectations, and how allowing all sorts of outcomes to be okay, from lowering them to hoping for the best, can foster the ways … Continue reading The Look of True Wellness
I’ve been reading more and more of my writer friends and colleagues’ work via substack, one of the many newsletter services out there these days. It seems easy to use and allows me to promote the work of other writers, so I took the plunge a few weeks ago. I’ll probably be writing there more … Continue reading Ordinary Collisions
It’s been a long, cold spring. After what felt like a long, cold winter. (And I like winter!) I don’t know about you, but if you’re anything like me, life has felt really hard for quite some time now. It’s been a trying several months for many, in myriad ways…from burnout do to overwork to … Continue reading Healing through Hiking
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
“In the winter I am writing about, there was much darkness. Darkness of nature, darkness of event, darkness of the spirit. The sprawling darkness of not knowing. We speak of the light of reason. I would speak here of the darkness of the world, and the light of___. But I don’t know what to call … Continue reading Faith and Hope
The cold, though not unexpected, is startling. It feels good to walk through fields that have provided nourishment of all sorts to beings of all kinds. Ice clings to stalks of bowing grass. Every step crunches in the stillness of freeze. Muted colors announce themselves in burnt umber, dark brown, and burgundy, reminding us that … Continue reading In the Shadow of an Old Barn
This post originates at Red Sofa Literary. The agent I’m working with for a new book project posed this question for her agency’s annual NaNoWriMo series: Did you choose writing or did writing choose you? I had to think awhile on this. Why do I write, day after day, word after word? Did I actually choose it, or … Continue reading Fuel for Writing
Evening is falling into the day like a silk scarf slips off a woman’s shoulders when she relaxes into a lover’s embrace. The lake is dead calm, and the fully clothed trees admire their reflection, flaunting their leafy abundance a second time over. As the sun sinks lower in the sky, the shoreline across the … Continue reading That Wild Family of Things
Someone shared this poem, by Patricia Monaghan, in a group I facilitate, and I keep reading it over and over again.
The Old Song of the Tribes
The sky draws its curtain
across the season. Any day
now it will snow, curtainingthe footprints in the soft earth
we made today, but any day in this life
or another, if I meet you, the earth’spull will be upon us, the mark of the forest
will be on us, indelible handprints, birthmarks.
We will know each other in city or forest,despite continents and oceans, we will know
each other as much, as little as
we know ourselves, as much as we knowwhat the mind is, what the body
can be. Amidst
all the changing, our souls will remain
true to each other. The rest can be mist.
Heidi Barr | Author 