Hello and welcome to five minutes in nature with me Liz Scott and I'm off out every day in January listening to nature's wisdom and today I have come up onto Dartmoor the moorland above my home and I'm sitting in the evening sun and it's absolutely beautiful.
I'm sitting on a granite boulder which is quite dry and from my vantage point if I turn west I can see the sun and it's just before it's about to set behind the hillside and I'm closing my eyes and just raising my face to feel the warmth of the sun on my face and it's so bright I can see the orange of the sun through my lids my eyelids and I can just feel that warmth on my face.
This is one of the blessings of a January sunny day we don't get many sunny days here in the southwest of England but when we do my body just cries calls out to go and allow myself to raise my face to the sun and let the sun the goodness of the sun soak into my skin and if I look southwards I can look down below me I can see a dog walker and there's two dogs that she's walking with across the moorland and then beyond her I can look down further miles and miles over what we call the south hams it's a countryside and rural landscape with lots of fields very agricultural landscape but it's an English landscape so the fields are quite small and they are marked in little different patterns of squares and rectangles each outlined by a devon hedge and again it's quite unusual not just that it's a sunny day but it's a it's not windy and just again closing my eyes and allowing my body to soak up that sunshine it feels the same as if I'm very thirsty and I put some water to my lips my body is feeling the same kind of way that that sort of that giving me that real nudge that yes I'm doing exactly the right thing and it reminds me really that you know often we rush around oh well I do anyway I rush around doing things trying to get things done or tick things off my to-do list and then going out and doing exercise so that I'm getting fit or making sure that I prepare the right kind of food so that I'm putting the right things into my body a lot of what I do is doing whereas this is a really great example of actually just being the sun doesn't require me to do anything other than to allow it to seep into my body and it's such a great reminder that nourishment comes in many forms and one of the forms is actually by just allowing yourself to be to be present to be still and allow nourishment to take its course and this is such a great example of that it's easy to get lost in the busyness of life and there's nothing wrong in that either it's just that we can well I'll speak for myself when I get caught in the busyness of life and I've had a really productive day today with my to-do list and it's felt very satisfying ticking things off and sending emails and getting things done and contacting people all of that is great it's just that a life that is only pushing itself in that kind of direction is unbalanced and a life that is balanced is one that needs time for slowness for nourishment it needs time where you get outside in the sunshine and you allow the sun to soak into your skin you feel that warmth in the winter sunshine my request is that you consider what you might endeavor to do or not do where you might be where you might be present to something that in its own right is nourishing what are you being called to only you will know look within yourself look within your soul get outside into nature get outside into the fresh air get outside so that you can see the sky and the clouds and the sun or feel the wind and the rain on your face that is also part of the nourishment of being human so my request to you is to listen to that and if you're nudged to do that to get outside and to be present to the natural nourishment around us then please do get outside and enjoy that sense of freedom
