Meara (00:01.208)
Welcome back to the House of Noor. I'm Mira. Let me ask you something. What are you still waiting to start? Maybe it's growing food, cooking more from scratch, learning how to preserve something, spending more time outside, or simply slowing your life down enough to actually enjoy it.
A lot of us want those things, but they keep attaching them to something in the future. A house, land, more money, time, a bigger kitchen, a different season of life. And that sounds reasonable until years start passing. That is where I think we get stuck. We convince ourselves the life has to come after the setup, and I don't believe that anymore, because mine didn't.
Long before we owned our property, we rented. At one place we used a deck. My husband built simple raised beds. We had a tree sitting in the box in the front yard. And I started paying more attention to food and ingredients. I was learning bread, trying things, looking at what came into our home differently, and none of it was a part of some master plan. I was just really curious. And then we moved again.
Our family expanded.
And the next rental we had a little more space, so I kept experimenting. We ended up with green peppers, tomatoes, and buckets, apples and pots, apples and pots, no apple trees and pots, and one very questionable little shelter I made out of broken branches when the weather turned cold. It was three large sticks I created into a teepee and just took whatever rope I could find to wrap around to plant my.
Meara (01:51.292)
beans on and I planted my bean seeds when it was really cold outside realizing it probably wasn't gonna grow but they did it wasn't pretty and what I was learning worked and I think that matters the most because people often believe that their first attempt has to resemble the final vision. It does not. Most things worth learning begin very awkwardly. Your garden's gonna be extremely messy.
Your bread may be flop or a flop or half-flop sided when it comes out. You may buy something you thought you needed and never touch it again. And that's not a failure. That's just how you figure out what actually belongs in your life and what doesn't. So now we own land, we can plant our trees that we had in our pots, and we know that they are gonna stay there. So we can make plans that stretch beyond just that one season, right? And I love that.
But the land didn't create the interest. It just gave us more room to continue what we were already doing. And that matters. Because a homestead is not something that's magical. It's not some magical doorway into intentional living. You can own acres and still feel disconnected from your own life. You can still live in a small apartment and be deeply involved in how your home runs, what your family eats, what you make, what you buy, and
How you spend your time. The address does not decide it. Your choices do. And then there's the other thing people say all the time. This is my favorite. Well, I don't have time, but I think that actually deserves that closer look because sometimes we are really stretched too thin, and I understand that.
But we always say we don't have times for the things that we care about while we're just giving our hours to things that we don't even notice or that matter, like Facebook or TikTok or just scrolling, watching other people cook, garden, decorate, homestead, organize and live. And somewhere in the middle of all of that watching, we keep telling ourselves, we'll start eventually.
Meara (04:03.787)
And I had to look at that in my own life as well. I work 52 hours a week. I'm now homeschooling three of my five kids. I'm helping my husband get his business up and going. And I'm building the house of Noor on top of this podcast.
And then there's everything that comes with running a home and raising a family. So I'm not sitting around with giant empty stretches of time. I've had to build routines. I'm obsessed with routines. And that took a while. I didn't add everything all at once because that would have been impossible and absolutely ridiculous. But I started with something small, got used to it, and then worked something else in.
So eventually those things stopped feeling like extra projects and it just became a part of how we live. And that was the key. You know, you don't need five free hours of your time. You just need a starting point and to just start doing it. So maybe you spend 20 minutes cooking something instead of scrolling on your phone. Or maybe you learn one basic skill. Maybe you take one small thing you buy all the time and figure out how to make it yourself. The goal is not to fill your day with more.
work. It's just to notice where your time is already going and decide whether if it matches the life you keep saying that you want. That is completely different. And social media complicates this because it's turned slow living into a look. You know, you know exactly what I'm talking about. The farmhouse, the linen dress, the sourdough loaf, the garden without weeds, the matching jars, perfect kitchen. You know, the photographs are beautiful.
But that's not the same thing as real life. You can own every single thing in that picture and still be absolutely miserable, rust, rushed, distracted, and very disconnected. Aesthetics is not the point. The question is, what are you actually trying to change?
Meara (06:02.603)
Maybe your home feels chaotic. Maybe your family is living on convenience food because you're exhausted. We have lived on that for years. Three kids back to back, both of us working full-time, him just coming from another country, trying to figure out how we're living together, not being roommates anymore. So I get it. Maybe you buy things constantly and still feel like you have nothing useful. I've been there too. We've had to get rid of a lot of stuff. Maybe you want your kids to know how to do basic things.
And maybe you're tired of waking up, rushing through the day, scrolling at night, and doing it all again in the next morning. And this is where intentional living becomes useful. Not as an identity, but as a way to look at your life and ask what is no longer working. For me, one of the biggest changes was becoming more interested in how things work. Food is a great example. Once you grow something yourself, even once,
You see it differently. You notice the time it takes, you notice the weather, you notice the pests, how easy it is for a plant to fail, and suddenly that tomato is not just a tomato. The same thing happens when you bake or anything else that you use to buy without thinking. You know, you you just begin to understand the process behind the finished product the finished product.
That matters because modern life hides so much of the process from us. Things just disappear, food appears, furniture appears, clothes appear. Something breaks, we replace it. If we run out of something, we just reorder more. And convenience can be wonderful. I'm not against it. I love my washing machine and my electricity.
And I like to be able to order something last minute when I need it. You know, if my washer breaks, I'm calling someone who knows what they're doing. I'm not building a washboard. The point is not to reject modern life. The point is to keep convenience from making us incapable.
Meara (08:01.665)
There's things I want my kids to know. I want them to know how to cook. I want them to know how to be able to care for their home and how to grow something, and how to use just basic ingredients. How to try to fix something before deciding to throw it in the trash or getting upset about it. You know, how to figure things out when the answer is not immediate. It's so convenient these days where everything is just here, here, here. So if it's not right away, I'm noticing these kids are getting.
upset and just giving up on things. Those those things build confidence. And confidence changes the way we move through life. We stop feeling like everything has to come from somewhere else. That does not mean becoming completely self-sufficient.
Honestly, I don't even think it's realistic. We need other people. We need farmers, tradespeople, neighbors, teachers, you know, people who knew how to do more than we do. And so community is a part of intentional living.
The goal is not independence from everyone. It it it is participation, knowing enough to be involved in your own life instead of outsourcing every part of it. And sometimes participation looks messy as well. You burn something, you plant something in the wrong place, you spend money on a plant that dies anyway. We just planted our three trees, and I'm realizing these cannot be here. So I'm giving it a few more weeks so that I don't stress the trees out to move them into the other side.
Of the house. So I mean, you know, it's a lot. And this is useful information. I think people would feel less intimidated by this kind of lifestyle if we admitted this more often. And it's not all candlelight and decettles.
Meara (09:42.262)
You know, sometimes you're in in the backyard irritated because a plant refuses to cooperate. I'm guilty. Sometimes the kitchen is wrecked. That's daily. Sometimes you try to do something once and you say, absolutely never again. But you know what? That still counts because intentional living is not about choosing the hardest possible version of everything. It's deciding what deserves your energy.
That is why I don't believe in this big long checklist. You do not need to bake bread, garden, sew, can, have a compost, raise chickens, you know, make your own cleaner and preserve every vegetable that enters your house. I would love that for sure, but
You know, that sounds exhausting. So in that moment you need to pick what makes sense for you and just leave the rest. If bread matters to you, learn bread. If gardening makes you happy, garden. If clutter is driving you crazy, deal with that. If family dinners matter more than homemade soap, focus on dinner. This only works when it fits your actual lifestyle. Otherwise, slow living becomes another form of pressure. And that defeats the whole point of this.
You know, I also think there's something important about learning before the perfect setup arrives because the next stage of life doesn't automatically make you ready for it. More land also means more work, more things to maintain, more things to fix, more things that can go wrong.
So if you want a homestead someday, learn now. Not everything. Enough to build confidence and learn what you enjoy and what you hate. What's worth your time and what your family will actually use. That way when the opportunity comes, you're not starting from zero. And that's what our, you know, our rental years gave me. They weren't wasted years before the real life started. At the time, maybe I didn't fully see that. I didn't. But now I do. Because those years gave me skills, preferences, routines, and confidence. Even the trees came with us.
Meara (11:39.552)
And I love that because it reminds me that the life itself was already happening. The house just changed. So when you catch yourself saying, I'll do that when stop there and ask yourself whether the thing you're waiting on is really necessary. Now sometimes it is. I mean it's not like you can have cows in a
If you want to start with cows, which I wouldn't suggest it. It's not like you can start having cows in an apartment, you know, but sometimes it is. These there are things that money, space, and time genuinely limit. That is real.
But there's usually a smaller version that you can begin now. And that smaller version matters because starting changes you. Watching does not. Saving videos does not. Making Pinterest boards does not. And thinking about someday also does not. But doing something does. And that's the difference. Maybe today all you do is make one meal differently. Maybe you plant one herb.
Maybe you put the phone down for a half hour and use that time for something you keep claiming you do not have time for. That is enough. It's about intention.
Because the goal is not to transform your entire life by next week. It's to stop waiting for permission to begin. And that is the biggest lie around intentional living, that it belongs to a certain kind of person, someone with more land, more money, more time and knowledge, a prettier home, a slower schedule. It does not. It starts when you become more deliberate about the life you already have, and that is it. Our homestead did not begin this for me.
Meara (13:22.859)
It just became another chapter of something I already had started. And maybe that's what I want you to think about after this episode. What are you calling someday that could actually begin now? Not all at once, not perfectly, but enough to move. Because your current life is not waiting room. It's not a waiting room. It's your life and you're already living in it. I want to thank you for spending this time with me today on the House of Noor.
And if this episode made you think of someone who keeps saying someday, send it to them. And if you want more conversations around home, family, intentional living, natural wellness, and finding our way back to what actually matters, follow the show wherever you listen. I'll be back next Tuesday. Until then.