Heidi Barr's Blog

I’ve taken to skating the lake.  It’s been a winter with minimal snow, so here in Minnesota the ground is brown instead of white. Normally I’d be celebrating the season with nordic skiing or snowshoeing, but that hasn’t been an option so far this winter season. This winter, it has been tempting to bemoan the lack of snow and stay inside, longing for spring. And that’s no way to spend one’s time. So this winter, I skate.

A childhood of annual treks across frozen cattle pastures to the rive...

Today we woke to pouring rain, that’s supposed to turn into 2-4 inches of heavy snow by midday. Autumn is starting to at least think about giving way to winter. Of course, this happens semi-regularly in Minnesota: Halloween and snow fall sharing the date.  Anyone my age who grew up in Minnesota remembers the great Halloween blizzard of 1991.  I don’t, because my family was living in Indiana at the time, but even further east, that year we had a pretty stellar ice storm that knocked out power for...

Road trips. Cookouts. Camps. Clubs. Far away vacations. Visiting family. Hosting dinner parties. Attending events. Keeping the yard in tip top shape. Remodeling the house. Paving the driveway. Redoing the landscaping. Looking for a new job. Leveling up in business. Starting a new business. Maintaining a huge garden. Residing the garage. Updating the resume. Going boating, hiking, camping, biking at least X number of times. Generating a great work of art or finishing a book draft. Canning 86 pint...

Here we are at the close of another year…often a time of reflection and goal setting for the next twelve months. Despite my long tenure as a health and wellness coach, I’ve never been one to set New Years Resolutions—deep winter (as much as I enjoy winter..) just doesn’t seem like the best time to overhaul life.

But I do like reflecting on what sort of energy from which I’d like the next twelve months to grow. Fi...

Light and dark come into balance once again tomorrow as we mark the autumnal equinox here in the northern hemisphere. Each year the Earth offers us a ‘celestial reminder’ to pay attention and honor what’s coming, to make ready for the march toward the gathering dark.

Winds from the north have increased and newly yellowed leaves are swirling to the ground in surrender to the seasonal shift. I always appreciate this time of cooling, even while darkness falls earlier and earlier each day. The la...

The following is the afterword of a collaborative project that came into being in partnership with Connor L. Wolfe [L.M. Browning] and a host of brilliant writers who are committed to intentional living, sustainability, and moving slower through life.

Do you ever find yourself walking slowly, meandering, sauntering with no lofty goal?  There are so many reasons a person might take to the forest or prairie, or perhaps the beach or desert. Even a suburban park or urban alleyway will do. When we...

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 on your actual lived life, but you can’t quite stop looking for the one that just might matter, somehow? I mean, I have plenty to do between coaching work and a boo...

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 of being that help us live as fully as we can within the life experience we’re dealt. She writes about dealing with illness: “But I know I can’t hold off on living my ...

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 than here, so I’d love to have you follow me over there if you’ve enjoyed my posts here. (Not that I’ll never again post a blog here…but they’ll likely be fewer and further between..)

So, I invite you...

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 burnout do to lack of work to war to ongoing pandemic fatigue to the everyday but never easy usual suspects of company downsizes, layoffs, illnesses, family demands, etc….it’s been a lot, and a great many fo...