Sowing the Seeds of Mindfulness: A thoughtful dig into the importance of intention setting & embracing the roots of our work
by Lauren Boritzke Smith
January and February in Minnesota are my least favorite months of the year. It’s not that I dislike winter; it’s the anticipation of spring while experiencing the last days of negative temperatures and slush. Warmth is just around the corner, and I can almost feel the soil beneath the layers of snow getting ready to come to life again.
Outside of working in marketing and communications, I am a gardener. A vegetable grower, a perennial admirer, a tree gazer, a seed gatherer. My love of stewarding the land has been nourished by my family since childhood, but also by literary friends I’ve met along the way: voices like Robin Wall Kimmerer, Mary Oliver, the writers at Atmos, Wendell Berry, and many others.
In our collective winter hibernation this year––another pandemic winter, where gathering with friends sparks COVID anxiety and virtual work makes getting out of the house a rare occurrence––I’ve found resolve in returning to a small note written on scrap paper, taped to my desk. Let me tell you about it.
Each Monday morning, the staff team at my organization gathers via Zoom with our mugs of coffee to connect over an introspective or silly prompt and share our week’s workload. (I highly recommend this become part of your team schedule, if it isn’t already.) We did this before the pandemic, but since adapting it to a virtual format it’s been some of the only times I see coworkers that I don’t work with regularly.
At the time of the particular meeting of note, it was the beginning of our organization’s fiscal year last September. To reflect together as a team, one of my colleagues posed the prompt: What are you embracing this year? And/or what are you letting go of?
I love questions like these. It’s a chance to ground ourselves and remember our roots –– what do we need to be our best selves in this challenging yet rewarding work as nonprofiteers? What do we need to feel nurtured as we show up each day? (Or rather, as we log on with a nice shirt over pajama bottoms, pour that cup of coffee, and swivel up to our desks at home.)
During this meeting, I wrote five bullet points on a scrap piece of paper listing what I would like to embrace in the year ahead:
Creativity and leadership
Challenging scenarios
Rest and communicating boundaries
Moving slow
Intentional reflection
These five items became my symbolic seeds to nurture in the months ahead, and they continue to be. When the work gets challenging and messy, or I feel disconnected from my team, or I’m a bit overworked, it helps to take a breath and look at this list of intentions set by my past self. Now that I’m about halfway through our fiscal year, I can reflect on what this actually has looked like for me, and try to give myself grace in the moments when I’ve forgotten.
It has meant becoming more aware of the gaps in my work and the strengths I possess as I navigate my first year as a supervising manager with a growing team. It has looked like reading articles that inspire me both professionally and personally, like Vu Lee’s Nonprofit AF (so good, right?) and most things from Big Duck, as well as the really incredible Bakers Creek Seed Catalog. (I mean look at these snake beans?!)
I’ve encouraged myself to take that mid-day break to walk in the snow or make a warm chai tea with milk and extra sugar. It has looked like leaning into tough and intentional conversations with my coworkers around race and white supremacy, and navigating changing workflows and internal growth –– work that is so much easier said than done.
The most recent change I’ve made is removing social media apps from my phone, only engaging with social media on my laptop’s internet browser. As a communications professional, I feel like there’s pressure to be logged on all the time, engaging, liking, sharing, networking, and connecting. I was having a hard time separating home from work, and my own digital self from my job. I’m currently into the second week of this experiment and I’m feeling refreshed. In a way, it feels like I’ve got parts of my brain back –– if you haven’t seen Aziz Ansari’s latest comedy special on Netflix, he talks about this exact thing.
At the end of the day, it’s plain fact that there will always be a nonprofit doing similar work, and doing it quicker, at a bigger scale, with more funders, with a better website, with that extra staff person that we wish we had. But what’s critical to sustain ourselves, I think, is to plant these seeds of intention and abundance throughout our work style –– to embrace what is drawing us to this work and continuously root ourselves in why we are still here.
As a gardener, I see this parallel so clearly with this time of year. It’s a time for planning garden plots, ordering seeds, and powering up the basement grow lights in a few weeks to get the onions, tomatoes, and other vegetables started.
The time of abundance is coming for the garden. I encourage all of us to pause and consider our own abundance. What seeds are we planting for ourselves to flourish a few months from now? How are we rooting ourselves in those values in the dormant or slower months? In the nonprofit world it often feels like there is “not enough”. Not enough time, not enough funding, not enough capacity. It is so critical to address these scarcities in our sector, for equitable work spaces and personal health, and furthering the missions we’re working toward in a sustainable way.
And yet, it’s a “yes, and” in this regard: simultaneously, what are our gifts and how do we show up in the abundance that is around us?
In this challenging time of collective trauma and disconnection, my thoughts are with everyone in our nonprofit community. We’re not alone, and sometimes embracing one thing can look a lot like letting go of another. If others are looking to connect about what seeds we’re planting for ourselves this year––metaphorically or literally in the garden––I would love to approach it together, in community.
