Hello and welcome to Five Minutes in Nature with me Liz Scott and I'm sheltering under a road bridge beside the River Axe.
You might be able to hear the dribble of water,
A stream,
A little stream of water that's dribbling off the bridge into the river itself.
I'm not the only one sheltering under this bridge,
There are lots of doves and you might hear them cooing in the background.
All of us just trying to have a little bit of respite from a very fine drizzly rain and today,
If you remember yesterday,
I was walking beside the river.
I couldn't walk beside the river because it was so high and today I was delighted to see that the river has fallen back and other than having to climb on a bank for the first part of the journey I've been able to walk along the path that leads beside the river and the river is pretty much at the top of the path.
It is very,
Very high and as I was walking down it was interesting for me to notice that there was a large tree trunk that had been washed down in last year's floods and it had come to rest in the river when the flood waters receded and that large tree trunk has been quite a landmark on my walks along the River Axe.
I've seen it as the water gushes around it.
Well that tree trunk has been lifted up once again and taken somewhere downstream,
Maybe as far as the sea now,
Maybe it's gone out to sea,
I don't know,
But that now has gone and this flooded river has got such power as it drives things down towards the ocean and today's reflection is about the changes that we have in our life and how sometimes these floods of emotions,
These floods of challenges,
This sense of life being super difficult is often a gateway to something new,
Fresh happening in our world and it's a little bit like that tree trunk,
You know,
If we didn't have the flood waters the tree trunk would stay stuck and sometimes we need an onslaught of unwelcome challenge to shift things that we'd kind of got used to in our lives and we were finding our way around and it has me consider this with so many things.
I've got a friend who's recently had a cancer diagnosis and I know that that information is going to be a bit like a river flooding through her life as she navigates and manages her life to become cancer free and I remember another friend who had chemotherapy for leukemia and I asked her a question that she'd once asked me and I did it in a very respectful way because it's not a trite question to ask people going through difficult times but she had once asked me when I had been going through a difficult time what what is the gift in this experience and that's not a question I'm going to ask of my friend who's recently had a cancer diagnosis,
Not yet and there might be a time when it feels appropriate because there will be a gift in the experience,
There will be a clearing out,
A reckoning,
A changing of what you feel is important and what your priorities are and a sense of wanting to put your attention on that which is really necessary so there will be gifts wrapped up in the challenge and the experience and then I look further afield and I look at the politics and the disquiet and the sadness and I look at the wars and the fears that are prevalent in the world and I'm on a path so you might hear people go past if you hear voices and I realize that maybe this too is the flood that we need the flood in our world to shift that which is no longer welcome to shift that which is unhealthy to find a new way maybe we have to experience such disquiet before we can find a way that we feel is healthy so I guess if you use the analogy of the tree trunk in the river it's for some time the river was running around the tree trunk and the tree trunk didn't move and we have that in our worlds where there are things in our lives that we go okay well we'll work around that it's not ideal but we'll work around it and then it's only when our worlds change significantly when a challenge of incredible proportions strikes us that's when we realize what we're up for giving energy to and what we're not up for giving energy to so that's my reflection today it's in the in the flood of adversity the question is what is the gift and that is something I'm going to reflect on today
