What You Are You Tending?

Create Harmony invites you to step away from the noise for a few minutes and ask a deceptively simple spring question: what are you growing this season, and are you growing what you actually want to harvest later? When life is packed and your nervous system is tired, clarity matters more than hustle. This gentle reset is about intentional living, not perfect productivity.

We explore how life is shaped by small daily habits and repeated rhythms, the quiet practices that form us long before results show up. Using the garden as a metaphor, we look at what’s happening under the soil: your thoughts, your focus, your attention, and the environment you’re living in. Hot days, dry days, floods, sickness, upsetting news, and overload all affect what you can realistically tend. Instead of pushing harder, we work with honesty and grace.

Then we get practical. I’ll guide you to name one to three things you want to grow and to write them down so you have a simple cue to return when distraction hits. We talk about why growth often stalls, how to decide whether something should wait for another season, and how tiny steps still count. I close with a beloved Apache blessing, then share a few ways to go deeper with our seasonal meditations.

If this brought you a little peace, subscribe, share the episode with a friend who needs a gentler pace, and leave a review so more listeners can find Create Harmony. What are you choosing to tend this week?

To learn more, go to mycreateharmony.com 

Transcript

What Are You Growing This Spring

Soil Conditions And Life Stressors

Name One To Three Priorities

Return To What You Want To Grow

Grace Small Steps And Apache Blessing

Subscribe And Explore Meditation Gifts

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome back to the Create Harmony podcast. Are you looking for a place to step away from the noise and chaos of the world and rediscover your peace? And do you need a gentler approach to the world around you? Well, I have got some great news. You have found the right place. Here at Create Harmony, we talk about how to be very intentional about our daily habits and rhythms. And those intentions shift us towards noticing goodness and being grounded in gratitude, giving thanks and slowing down to savor the small moments of joy in our day. And let me also add that you might have a life that's cool and it's hectic, and you might feel a little bit of a tension. When I say embracing a slower pace, maybe that causes you to feel like, oh, I'm not gonna be able to do that and get everything done, and that is okay. In other words, you might need a gentler approach to your life, but this is not necessarily the season that you have the opportunity for that. But it's all good because even if the whole rest of your day is bananas, we are going to practice those rhythms here together. So this might be the only chance you have to lean in that direction, and that'll be fine. We will all do it together, and these moments of peace together are better than no moments of peace at all. So this is episode 165, and I am your host, Sally Burlington, and today we're going to consider the question of what are you growing this season? So we're in spring here, we like to talk about plants in springtime. We're very seasonal with our rhythms around here. So what are you growing this season? And the follow-up to that question is, are you growing what you actually want to harvest later? So think about that. I'm gonna say it one more time. Are you growing what you actually want to harvest later? So one of our key tenets here is that our life is shaped by rhythms. It's not defined by the very big moments of life, but the small ones that we repeat over and over and over again. And spring, we're in the season of spring right now. I live in the state of North Carolina, and we're in spring, and spring has a way of revealing those rhythms. What you water, what you tend to, what you give your attention to. That's what grows. So today we pause and gently ask that, what are you growing this season? So now let's take that a step deeper, literally. You see what I did there? Deeper, we're gonna talk about what happens under the soil. Let's think about under the soil in in early spring where your seeds are. The reality is, even in stillness, something is forming underneath. Before you can even see evidence on the top of the soil of any kind of growth, there is growth and change happening underneath. So for us, from a figurative standpoint, that's like our habits, our thoughts, what we focus on. Those are our soil conditions, if you will. And if we want to work towards wet whatever is our most ideal sour soil conditions, we want to remember our habits and our rhythms. But also we need to keep in mind that all soil conditions are subject to their environment. So some days are really, really hot, some days are dry, other days are cold, some days you have a flood and it's really wet. And the soil changes with those conditions. So for us, just like us, some days things are just too much, or something really upsetting happens, or we're physically sick, and that affects our ability to focus on the things that we want to. But for today, I want to invite you to work towards growth for the things that you hold most dear to think through and define in this season of life in this spring, what is it that you really want to cherish and keep your focus on that. So the first thing we want to do is name what you want to grow. Because remember, this the question we're considering is what do you want to grow right now? What do you want to grow that will be harvested later? So let's name that. I want to invite you to choose one or one to three maybe things that you really want to grow right now. You don't want a list of 45 things because that's not doable, that's not sustainable. Just think about one, one or two, maybe three areas that you think are are important. Maybe those areas are connection or rest or faith or peace or creativity, or maybe it might be an actual project you want to work on, something you feel ready to tackle. What feels ready to grow in your life right now? Think about that for a second. I'm gonna pause for just a second and let you think about it. What feels ready to grow? And once you've chosen that area of growth or maybe a couple of areas of growth, it would probably be a good idea to write them down in your journal to make a note. You can make a note on your calendar if that's easier, but give your brain a cue so that you can come back to this. Remind yourself that this is important. Here's where I want to hold my focus. I don't know if your brain is like mine, but my brain has a tendency to be influenced by all of the noise and the chaos that's going on in the world around us. And so having those prompts in my journal or notes in my calendar or whatever, I have to cue my brain to come back to this to remind myself this is what I named that I wanted to grow, and I'm gonna focus on it. So from uh some examples from my life. I mean, literally, I'm growing a lot of plants and a garden. I do, I do that in the spring. But more figuratively, right now we're growing our create harmony infrastructure. We we've added Megan, who is our brand coordinator. We talked about that last week or one of the last few weeks. We've talked about how we're changing some of the way we do things. We've gotten some new project management systems, and we're just trying to grow that infrastructure. At the same time in my life, I'm trying to I'm at the age where my parents are aging, and I want to really make sure we have structures and systems in place for them so that as that process is happening, we we give them the support that they need. So aging parents and their legacy, that's something that I want to grow right now. And the third thing I'll I'll list for you is, and I've shared this before, I want to grow some of my peace practices. I'm trying to focus a little bit more on taking time to be reflective, to journal, to pray more in in deeper ways, to to do expand on some of my meditation times. I shared that our church is doing a read the Bible in a year, and I am way behind. So, you know, I need to focus on that. I want to tend to that, and those are the things that are important to me. I want to work on them and get them to grow, but here's the thing the growth is gonna come from returning to that thing, from returning to the things that I named. Not just naming them, naming them is the first step, but growth comes from returning to it, from repeated actions tending the garden. So this is the rhythm of tending. What you tend to tend to grow. So I'm gonna say that again. What you tend to tends to grow. So if you listed an area that you wanted to grow or a place that you needed to focus in order to be pleased with a harvest that you're gonna have later, but you're not really tending that area, you might want to consider it again. Like for example, for me, I said I wanted to grow my peace practices, and one of those is that I'm trying to read the Bible in the in a year, but I'm I'm getting behind and I'm not really focusing on that. So I need to consider it again. And what you can do when you consider it again is to ask yourself a few key questions about why what do you think the reason is that it isn't getting tended? Is your life too full? Is there a reason that it doesn't make sense for you to tend that area right now? Is there something obvious that maybe this is not a season for you to name that you could you should tend that thing? Like, for example, last year when we were rebooting our raised bed garden, I was not able to grow all the things that I will this year because in that season it didn't make sense for me to think I was gonna have a robust garden with lots of produce. That that was not sensible. So maybe there's something like that that you just haven't realized. And if you took a moment, if you paused, maybe even took a day to journal on it, you would realize that's maybe not the best fit for me right now. Because you don't have to plant every idea. You don't have to say yes to everything. Some things will wait until another season. You get lots and lots of seasons in life. So not every seed is meant for right now. And giving yourself the grace to narrow your focus, that's the path to a more peaceful life. So maybe you think through the thing that's maybe not getting done and think, okay, do I need to shift some things or is that just not for me right now? And then decide your best path forward. And also just trust that even the smallest little moments of intention, even just taking time out to listen to this podcast, that is shaping something beautiful. And you can give yourself credit there. Even if you just focus on these things for a few minutes a day. Like if I just read one chapter of the Bible today, that would be progress. I could call that, I could give myself some credit. I could say I did it and I'm growing in that way and move on. So you get to count it if you've done that for even just a few minutes, and when you have a little bit more time, you can make bigger adjustments to your soil conditions. You can expand on what you want to tend. So just give yourself grace. It's not about pushing forward or being productive, it's about tending and returning and creating a rhythm and a habit that supports what you want to grow. So now for our closing today, I'm gonna share an Apache blessing with you. This is something that I really love. I love this blessing, and I think it's a gentle, it has a gentle spirit. So I thought it would be appropriate for today. And it goes like this. May the sun bring you new energy by day, may the moon softly restore you by night, may the rain wash away your worries, and may the breeze blow new strength into your being. May you walk gently through the world and know its beauty all the days of your life. May it be so. So check it out. You might want to subscribe. There's also two other ways that you can engage with this kind of content. If you're not ready for a subscription, you can get our mini meditation box, which has one meditation, and this spring's meditation is all about honey, making honey, and being a bee part of a big community where everybody does their part. And in the box, you also get honey and a dipper and a little bee charm and a thing of tea. So you might want to check that out. And or if you just want a meditation, if you just want to try there. This spring we've started a new thing where we have a little card that you can buy that has the link to one of the individual meditations that are in the box. So you can just try one of those. Maybe give it as a gift. All of these things are really good teacher gift ideas, or even the subscription box might be a good Mother's Day idea, so just keep that in mind. And if you want more information, you can go to mycreateharmony.com. You can find out everything you want to know about that. And we'll be back next week with another spring season episode, and hope you'll join us then too. And until next time, peace.