Hello and welcome to five minutes in nature with me Liz Scott.
I'm pausing on a very quiet morning in the cathedral green here at Exeter.
In front of me is a huge chestnut tree,
Full leaf and little chestnuts starting to grow.
I wonder if they're,
It's like a concret tree I think,
As they're very small and tiny and green at the moment.
But it's got a very wide girth that tree.
I reckon you'd probably need two people to,
If you wanted to put your arms around the girth of the trunk to actually enclose it.
And that tree is standing in front of the cathedral itself,
Which is a sort of a pale,
Almost like yellowy,
Whitey,
Creamy stone of the cathedral,
Which over time there are parts of it which have been cleaned and there are parts of it which have gone a bit grey and dark.
And you'll probably hear people go by and there are cafes setting up tables.
This is an early time of the day.
There's litter on the ground from last night's revelries and there'll be street cleaners going out in full force,
Cleaning up.
After people have been out in the city,
Lots of wrappers of fast food.
And amongst all of this I sit and I kind of reflect on humans and our achievements,
Like this huge,
Big,
Massive cathedral which was built hundreds and hundreds of years ago.
And then I look and my eye goes to the beer cans and the cigarette packets and the fast food wrappers that are all over the place.
And I find it hard to compute that the same people that built something so extraordinary to the magnificence of God can be so careless in the way they treat the world.
And I'm actually sitting here because there's a quote by William Blake that's been carved into the paving stones.
And the quote is this,
He who kisses the joy as it flies,
Lives in eternity's sunrise.
And I just love that.
Let me repeat it.
He who kisses the joy as it flies,
Lives in eternity's sunrise.
And I guess what I love about lines like that,
They'll mean different things to different people.
But for me,
It's an invitation to look within,
Look within to my inner joy,
My inner contentment.
I'm looking at this crow as it stalks along the grass,
Obviously looking for worms,
I think.
And there are pigeons flying here and there.
And just looking at the magnificence of this beautiful tree,
This chestnut tree,
The concha tree that I was describing earlier,
Just almost like feeling it,
Just feeling its magnificence and being with that.
When my mind wanders into the territory of,
Oh,
How bad we are as a human race and what happened,
And I feel a little bit despondent about the attitude of mankind,
I kind of get a bit flat.
So this quote is such a,
It's a great reminder.
I'm probably going to take a photograph of it so I can remember it actually.
He who kisses the joy as it flies,
Lives in eternity's sunrise.
And that for me is a reminder of eternity,
Of the presence of now,
The presence of being.
As we bring our attention to that which is within us,
As we bring our attention to the connection of that creative energy,
Which is the connection that has us all,
Which is the energy that is connected to all things,
As I bring my attention to that awareness,
To that presence,
To that sense of eternity,
That's when I can kiss the joy as it flies.
That's where joy exists.
It doesn't exist in my mind trying to work out the world.
It exists by looking within.
So let me repeat that quote again,
And I'd love to know what it means for you.
It was by William Blake.
He who kisses the joy as it flies,
Lives in eternity's sunrise.
