Seeing With New Eyes - June 26

Have you ever experienced a moment when your perspective completely changed? As Liz wanders through a wildflower-filled graveyard in the heart of the city, she reflects on how different her reaction would have been just a few years ago. What once might have seemed messy or unkempt now fills her with joy — a vibrant expression of life and beauty growing among the tall grasses. She notices a similar shift in how she relates to uncomfortable emotions. Rather than resisting them, she now sees them as gentle invitations — signals to turn inward and reconnect with the deeper thread that binds us to all things.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to five minutes in nature with me Liz Scott and you find me in a churchyard. I am enjoying a little walk through the edges of the city and I've come to a little churchyard on my walk and I paused here because it's completely overgrown so there are gravestones in this churchyard but there are tall grasses, Feathery grasses, There's sorrel growing high, I can see a hogweed with its sort of white plate like flowers and plantain and speckled amongst all of this are yellow buttercups and white clover. I mean I've got to say to my eye if I came here 10 years ago I would have thought oh this is dreadful this is unloved for and uncared for this graveyard they've just let it go but actually now I think it looks beautiful I think it looks absolutely stunning. You see the tall grasses with their flower heads on, Seed heads on, They're almost like if you bend down they're almost like a mist, A mist of sort of beigey greenness and the little flowers that come through the little yellow bright yellow flowers I can see some pink campion over here they're absolutely set off against the the green and the the beigey lightness of the grass so it's everything just has this sense for me of being alive that's what it feels like and isn't it interesting how our understanding changes and I just wonder if there's anything in your life where you have significantly changed the way that you see something in life so something has moved in your experience like this what I will call now absolutely beautiful wilded area which I know is a haven for bees and insects and birds and small mammals they'll be all in this area they'll love it so I see it like that now and yet 10 years ago I would have thought this is a mess somebody needs to do something about it you see as our understanding changes about something we see it differently in the past I would have seen that this meant it was unkept it was unloved and now I see that it is it is a haven for nature and my heart sings with the wildness of it this little tiny pocket of wildness on the edge of a city center so as my understanding has changed my experience of the thing has changed so nobody's intellectually told me to think differently or tried to make me think differently but as I've educated myself and understood more fully what's going on I've changed my response to it so I just wonder if there's anything in your life that you can think of I mean this is a real practical thing this sense of wildness and and whether something's untidy or tidy but is there something in your life where you've changed your your experience I'll give you another example which is which is more about a psychological feeling for me so for example now when I feel unsettled I'll give you an example I was out yesterday and I felt I just felt a bit agitated I was out a bit longer than I thought I wanted to get back to my dog I was just a bit twitchy with the person that I was with to kind of move on get get on a bit quicker they were moving quite slowly in the past I would have seen this sort of level of agitation as blaming the other person like they were they weren't moving fast enough they weren't being thoughtful enough about me and my predicament and I would have felt all those agitated feelings and then had stories attached to why I was feeling them but actually yesterday I just realized that I was in agitated thinking and when I realized that it took the angst out of that agitated feeling and I just realized that I was unsettled and when I noticed that I'm unsettled I know that there's only one place and one place to go and that's to bring my attention back within to that settled place within so nothing changes a bit like this wonderful graveyard that's full of wild grasses nothing changes and yet my experience changed yesterday my experience changed so rather than blaming the person I was with for my agitation I just realized I was in agitated thinking and to come back to center use that as a reminder as a sign to come back to my center and take action from there so today is just about asking yourself is there something in my life that has changed for me is there something in my life that I feel very differently about now

Reviews

Thankyou Liz 🙏🏼
This is true of change and I can relate to having changed my perspective on things over time, with educating myself.
Sounds like the wildflowers, birds, critters and insects have a lovely Nature home.
🌿🐝🌼🦜🍄🏡🪺🌸🐿️🕷️🌿

I recently discovered that I have a neurodivergence that had never been previously diagnosed! As I'm in my late 50s this was a bit of a surprise but it has had me re-evaluating everything thus far in my life and, as a consequence, I absolutely do think about things in a different way now - a way that is far more suited to the way my brain works and allows me achieve things in my own way rather than feeling I don't fit in and that I'm inherently different.