How a Danish Concept Helped Us Frame Our Intentions for 2025
At the start of 2025, we set intentions to guide our work and foster our connections with communities across the Credit River Watershed.
Taking inspiration from the Danish, we embraced the concept of hygge (pronounced hoo-gah) which promotes a cozy and warm lifestyle. We incorporated three of its components into our intentions: togetherness, simple pleasures, and mindfulness and well-being. Now, that 2025 has ended, we reflect and look back on these intentions.
Togetherness
Working together and deepening our connections – to ourselves, communities and the land – is an intention we all share.
Your participation in community events focused on invasive species management and sustainable agricultural practices in the watershed demonstrates this commitment.
We’re also grateful for the many opportunities we had to meet and engage with you at farmers’ markets, fall fairs and other community gatherings. And thank you to the dozens of landowners who partnered with us to complete projects that improve the management of land, water and groundwater through our partnership with ALUS Peel and our Landowner Action Fund and Rural Water Quality Programs. We invite you to share your successes with your community to continue bringing us together to improve our watershed.
Simple Pleasures
The hard work of good stewardship makes the bliss of a rural lifestyle possible. For landowners, simple pleasures were experienced when a balance between the dualities of rural living was struck.
For some, the balance is found in observing the wildlife visiting their property, the bountiful berry harvests and marvelling at the trees, plants and flowers thriving across the land. For others, like Tara Weerasuriya, that balance is in the installation of beetle berms as a new and unique way to control pests on her organic fruit and nut farm. This form of integrated pest management contributes to biodiversity in our watershed and helps Tara achieve her goal of low-impact farming.
Mindfulness and Well-being
These experiences and simple pleasures continue to guide our new and ongoing projects with landowners, such as planting trees to strengthen the buffer between wetlands and creeks and converting marginalized land into a forested plantation to better support wildlife.
Each project is approached with the mindfulness and well-being necessary to nurture nature and our connections with it—and to benefit all life in our watershed. By approaching our projects in this way, we ensure joyful moments continue to be experienced long after a project is completed. For Deborah Antoniuk and Doug Ilton, this joy may have come as a renewed sense of peace of mind. After their old well dried up one summer, they replaced it with a new well for cleaner, safer water, that also protects community watershed health.
And while this work can be challenging, nature and community are there as an antidote, as highlighted by our work with landowners and the efforts made by all. We’re excited to continue this work with you in 2026. Connect with us to get started.