Hello and welcome to Five Minutes in Nature with me Liz Scott on a really lovely breezy Dartmoor after a scorching day.
It's the evening and the sun has dipped behind the hillside and although I am now out of the sun I can see on the fields below the sun is still shining and illuminating the greens and yellows of the square and rectangular fields that are laid out below me.
And it's been a scorching hot day.
I've been indoors all day apart from a very early morning walk and now getting out now that the sun has dipped and lost the intensity of its heat.
And there's a very welcome breeze up here.
I was going to say it's cool but it's not cool at all.
It's just refreshing after the stifling heat of the day.
And one of the lovely things I've done today is speaking to women who we gathered together and were on on a six month journey.
Where we met online and we also met in person as well and we called ourselves the wise woman group and I spoke to them today just getting some feedback on what they'd enjoyed and what had worked for them and one of the comments really made me smile and I want to share it with you today because this particular woman was describing what it's like to feel a real sense that she's got a contribution to make,
And these are older women.
So just to give a little bit of context,
Many older women often feel a bit sidelined or pushed into the shadows,
Or they lose a bit of confidence in their worth.
So this older woman was talking and she said one of the things that she found is that there were days when she felt really settled and almost like ready to take on the world and there were days when it was the complete opposite.
And she,
Like me,
Loves nature,
Loves coming into nature and finds it very restorative just being out and walking and soaking in the atmosphere.
And the way she described it is what made me smile.
She said,
There are days,
She said,
When I feel like I'm an eagle and I open my wings and I feel free and I can soar anywhere.
I feel this sense of excitement and a thrill at what I might get up to in my world and in my life.
And then she said,
And there are other days when I feel like a hedgehog.
And on those days,
She said,
I shrink back and I go under the leaves and I put up my prickles and I try and keep people away from me.
She said,
I go from being an eagle to a hedgehog.
But one of the things that I really loved about what she was saying is that she described how refreshing it was to be amongst a group of women.
Who didn't get caught up in the stories that she was telling us and telling herself about life.
We genuinely and authentically always saw her as an eagle,
Even though she couldn't see that in herself at times.
And one of the things she described is that Being seen like that,
Being seen for who she truly was,
Being seen through the masks that she put up,
Meant that she didn't have to pretend.
And there is great freedom in not having to pretend.
So whilst we might see her as the eagle,
She could turn up like the hedgehog.
And when she turned up like the hedgehog,
We didn't try and fix her.
We didn't try and tell her she should be anything different,
We allowed her to be.
And the reason we did this is because we knew that she herself,
We've got this self-correcting mechanism,
She herself would find that her psychological self-correcting mechanism would at some point kick in and the hedgehog in her would disappear and she would once again fly like an eagle.
I don't know if that resonates for you,
Whether you have different animal that you might like to describe yourself as,
But can you resonate with that?
Some days you feel like an eagle,
Some days you feel like a hedgehog.
If you were to find animals that best suit you when you feel free and full of confidence and self-worth,
What animal would you choose?
And what animal describes you when you maybe want to shrink back and hide and keep the world away from you?
Your reflections and of course join me again tomorrow for another five minutes in nature.
