Hello and welcome to Five Minutes in Nature with me Liz Scott.
I'm in Exeter.
I'm helping to look after my mum and every morning I go out for a walk when I'm in Exeter.
I get up quite early.
I love it this time of year because of course it's light and you join me on a footpath which I tend not to come on when the mornings are dark but at this time of year it's delightful.
Can you hear all the birds?
I mean it's extraordinary to think I'm here right in the heart of the city and yet below me there's this little valley.
It's towards Exeter University and this is a lovely little footpath that will take me to the edge of the city centre and I go down to the river and then walk along the river just to have a nice long walk before I treat myself to a cup of coffee.
It's a bit of a ritual really but I was just really reflecting on three stages of my reflection on nature.
I mean my mum loved nature and would often get route marched on to walks as children which I thought were very boring.
Walks to the woods,
Walks here and there but actually those walks I think really laid the foundation of my real love of nature as an adult and it's grown and grown the older I've got so much so that now I feel almost like a steward of nature,
A guardian of nature and it feels to me as though there have been sort of three stages of my exploration of nature.
The first one was when I was that maybe reluctant youngster,
That child,
And we were taken out on a walk so I was going out onto nature.
It was a bit like going on a bridge,
You sort of went on a bridge to get somewhere else,
It wasn't really about the bridge and it wasn't really about the walk,
It was it was about you know I did this because my mum wanted to do it and then after that I'd be able to play or I'd be able to see my friends.
So there was something about being on nature or getting out onto nature and then as I became a young adult I really began to love walking.
So this would be I guess the second stage of how I relate to nature and in this stage I would say I wanted to get out into nature.
So nature when I was a child was something to get through,
I was on nature and now as a young adult and as an adult I was in nature and I enjoyed it,
I enjoyed walking through nature,
I enjoyed going on walks and I think in recent years as I've got older I've really noticed a difference in my evolution of my relationship with nature and now I feel I am of nature.
It's a very different experience.
As a child and as a young adult there was a separation between me and nature but now I look around and I see trees,
I see wild,
I see nettles,
I see garlic mustard growing on the edges of the path,
I see lanky celandines and sorrel and tall grasses growing up through.
Now as I look at this greenery that's surrounding me with just the odd speckle of pink of campions and yellow of celandines,
I have this feeling that it is me and I am it.
I suppose to put it more accurately I feel this sense of that the energy of nature is the same energy that comes through me.
We are of the same energy.
I feel it is me and I am it.
It is the universal energy being represented in a creative form and for me that feels like a truth.
It feels right.
It feels like I'm at home here.
So I don't know if that resonates for you at all.
Do you get that sense of being of nature where the separation between you and nature,
There isn't one because ultimately you are all of the same source.
That's my reflection today.
