Hello and welcome to Five Minutes in Nature with me Liz Scott,
Where every day in February I take you outside as I go on a walk and enjoy nature's wisdom.
Well today you find me walking down a track,
A lane,
Near my house.
It's in the evening and it's a grey day and I'm walking down with my old dog who really loves a good old.
.
.
You can probably just hear him there having a shake.
He loves a good old sniff as he walks around the lanes.
He'll walk from one side to the other and then he'll walk backwards and he just loves to take his time and enjoy all the smells that a dog loves to smell.
And as I'm walking down this lane I'm reminded of a walk I went on recently and it was a walk beside a river and there was a green meadow beside this river,
Very green,
We'd had a lot of rain and this meadow was a flat meadow that becomes the flood plain for the river so if the river breaks its bank the meadow will get flooded.
As it was the river was high but not flooding its banks and I could see in this field ahead of me a white clump of what looked like litter and I was looking at this litter thinking I don't believe it,
Somebody has come all this way,
Gone for a walk and then left litter behind them.
How ungrateful are people and I began to imagine who it might have been.
I wondered if it was children and I got a bit annoyed at young people and I thought well that wasn't children because I'm in the middle of the countryside,
No youngster would come here willingly on their own so well it must be the parents of children who brought children here to the countryside and maybe they had a picnic and they left litter because they didn't clear up after them and I had all these stories running through my head and then I got closer to this white clump and I realised that it wasn't paper and it wasn't litter,
It was actually a white clump of snow drops.
Now you know I love snow drops,
I adore snow drops,
They are the most beautiful delicate flowers of this time of year and I felt a little bit silly because I'd been making up a story about the people that drop litter and seeing the snow drops had jolted me back into the presence of just appreciating the beauty of nature around me and it was such a good thing for me to realise because what I began to realise from this lovely clump of snow drops which I had thought was a pile of litter is the ease it is to fall into stories.
Now bear with me here because this for me has been so enlightening is I've begun to realise over the last few years that I make up story after story after story about how life should be and when life doesn't turn out in the way that I think it should be I make up stories about who's to blame and how much other people should suffer and how much I should suffer because people aren't living in the way that I think they ought to live.
Does that ring a bell for you?
Do you have stories about how people should be and how things should be?
The clump of snow drops really helped me because it helped to remind me that when I get lost in stories what happens is I lose the present moment,
I lose sight of the present moment.
I get angry,
I get embroiled,
I get frustrated in thinking the world should be a different way and there's nothing wrong in stories and I want you to be really clear I'm not saying that it's bad or wrong we live our lives through stories and it's really helpful to have stories in our life.
It's just that when we forget that we're seeing the world through stories and we're making up stories and believing that things should be different than they are we are the ones that suffer.
If I hadn't had a story about the litter I would have just noticed a clump of white in the field and then come across a clump of snow drops.
If I had not had a story and I had seen this white clump in the middle of the field and then I had just come across some litter then I would have just come across some litter and in that moment I might have picked it up and taken it to a bin and disposed of it.
Or not.
But as it was I felt an extraordinary amount of stress and strain because I believed life should be different than it was.
So today the snow drop is a reminder of the way that we make up stories and we can really give ourselves a hard time when we believe these stories and we believe that life should be any other way than it actually is.
So what stories are you telling yourself in life that are causing you pain?
