Hello and welcome to five minutes in nature with me Liz Scott.
I'm leaning up against a burial cairn on Dartmoor.
It's a gorgeous beautiful sunny day and this is one of the stones that would have made up the burial cairn.
Most of it has been taken away probably over the centuries.
It's been put into building projects,
Houses,
Walls,
But these two big stones,
This one here is probably about six foot tall that I'm leaning up against and the one next to it,
These are too heavy I think probably to have taken out of the earth and they remain here like guardians on the hillside and I'm just enjoying this peaceful moment up on the moorland and reflecting actually on the very thing that I'm feeling which is peace.
The world at the moment feels as though it's at a boiling point.
I don't know if you sometimes feel that if you listen to the news or you hear people talking or politicians talking and hear about the wars and people dying,
People being hurt,
The anger,
The frustration,
The distress,
The grief,
The sadness that feels to me so close in the world at the moment.
It feels as though I might not be directly experiencing that myself but I know that that is taking place and I really feel it in my bones and we've talked about this before on Insight Timer and it feels so right to remind you again.
A friend I haven't spoken to for a couple of years,
Well we just lost contact.
We were in regular conversation and then something happened and we fell out of the habit of speaking to each other.
Well I got a message out of the blue from her and it was a short interview that she had done and the interview was about her looking out on the world,
Feeling this sense of helplessness and she asked herself that question,
You know,
What's mine to do?
What can I do?
It feels as though there is so much going on in the world and I don't know what to do.
And in this interview the interviewer asked her,
Well you've,
You have actually taken some steps or you are forming or formulating what is yours to do and she went on to explain that she's focusing on five minutes.
Every day she's committed to a year for a year to put aside five minutes and in those five minutes at eight o'clock she's going to reflect on peace.
It might be a meditation,
If she's out and about with other people she just might quietly reflect.
Say for example she's at a dinner or something she might just quietly reflect in on herself but she's just going to be reflecting on peace.
Her request was that if this was something that inspired others that others also took time at eight o'clock to reflect on peace.
I'm certainly going to do that tonight and whether I commit to it for a longer period of time I don't want,
I don't really know but what I love is that she was inspired to share that that's what she was going to do and for me these little messages of peace are so powerful.
When people make a stand,
Hold on to peace,
Present peace to the world,
That's exactly what the world needs right now.
And the bonus from her contacting me is that I realized how much I miss her and I also realized what an incredibly wise woman she is and I want to connect with her again and have her back in my life so we can have conversations.
She's a little bit older than me and she's always someone that I've viewed as an elder.
It's probably only in the last couple years that I feel that I'm taking up that role of being an elder myself.
She's always somebody that I've looked up to and so it feels really right to connect with her again and listen to her wisdom and to hear her efforts to reflect on peace,
To bring balance to the world.
So my request to you is keep bringing your awareness back to peace,
Keep being a beacon of peace in the world.
Every small kindness,
Everything that you engage with is exactly what the world needs right now.
Doesn't matter how small it is,
Please do what feels right for you to hold the line for love and to hold the line for peace.
Don't forget I'll be back again tomorrow with another five minutes in nature and if you want to comment and let me know what you're doing around bringing peace into the world,
However small,
I'd love to hear from you.
