Hello and welcome to five minutes in nature with me Liz Scott up on Dartmoor beside my favourite Hawthorn tree.
In fact it's a little bit damp today so I put on my waterproof coat and in the pocket I found a tiny stone that I had picked up from Ireland my recent trip to Ireland and I'd picked up this stone knowing that I would like to place it somewhere in the landscape and as I walked up here today and felt the stone in my pocket I thought hmm I'm gonna take this up to my favourite hawthorn tree and just leave it with my hawthorn tree.
And that's exactly what I'm going to do.
And today's reflection comes about from a conversation that I was having and we were in a group of people talking,
Talking about my favourite kinds of subjects,
Which in this particular instance was about following the breadcrumb trail.
That's how my friend put it.
And he was describing how he realises in his life,
He's trusting,
He's trusting and following a breadcrumb crumb trail to see where it leads.
And it coincided with me reading a book,
Which I'm reading at the moment and enjoying very much,
Where I'm taken through what a tracker does.
This is a lion tracker,
Someone who tracks lions for safari parks.
So he takes people on safari,
And in order to try and show them where the big game is,
He goes out tracking the lions to see if he can lead the party there later in the day.
And I realised that this man,
The way he described his tracking,
Is very much how I see my life at the moment.
And it was so beautiful in the description of how he follows the lion's track.
And he talks about trackers being very much at one with the landscape,
Seeing and feeling a wider sense of the living creatures,
The terrain,
The view,
The experience,
Everything is in attunement with the tracker.
And when you follow a track,
You don't actually have a very clear track often to follow.
You have the odd indentation here or there,
And sometimes you'll lose the track.
But what he was saying in this book,
And he was referring to the way we live life,
Is he was talking about us tracking our way to finding what it is in our life that we want to follow.
And as you pick up the track you can follow that track and the track isn't necessarily always clear sometimes the track will disappear completely sometimes you can't even see the footprints but you can see maybe little twigs or bits of branch that have been cracked or snapped because of the lion passing through so sometimes it's not about footprints you're looking for other things in the landscape but you you can find your way.
And if for whatever reason you lose the track,
It might be you go back to where you last saw it,
Or it might be that you pick up another track and you go in a different direction.
But what I really got from this metaphor of tracking,
And it was the same as my friend said about leaving a breadcrumb trail,
Is that this isn't an exact science.
It's not like following your sat-nav or having a map that you've drawn out the route and you know exactly where you're going.
Tracking is more interactive with life.
It's more interactive with wisdom.
It's more interactive with that other intelligence which is not the intellectual intelligence that we live with.
And that's what I'm really interested in,
In my life,
Is following the tracks,
Following the breadcrumbs,
Following the energy where I am drawn,
Rather than plotting out the route.
And today's reflection is around this,
Because my sense is that as I track my life,
I will track and engage with things that feel fulfilling and alive.
Aligned with what I am about in the world.
It's like it's coming from a different energy.
It's coming from a universal space of energy,
That essence of love.
That's what I'm tracking,
Is a trail through love.
And as I engage with that tracked trail or those breadcrumbs or the energy or whatever you want to call it,
I find myself being drawn in a direction in life that is way more expansive than anything I could have dreamt up myself.
So my reflection today is to see how you feel about that in your life,
Reflecting on that sense of tracking,
Of following an energy trail,
Of following something that isn't your intellect,
Those breadcrumbs.
Are you doing that in your life?
How does it turn out?
I'd love to know.
Let me know your reflections.
And of course,
Don't forget to join me again tomorrow for another five minutes in nature.
