Hello and welcome to Five Minutes in Nature with me Liz Scott.
Every day in February I'm out and about enjoying nature and enjoying her wisdom and I like to take you outside with me.
Today I'm up on Dartmoor which is the National Park on the southwest of England.
It's actually right above my home so it's somewhere I often come to for a walk.
It's a wide open space and as I'm looking around me I can see it's an undulating space with hills and tors and around me there are a couple of beacons which are hills that rise up from behind my home and there's an expanse of both green and brown.
The green of the grass,
Very short clipped grass because there are sheep here and then the brown of the bracken which is on the hillsides and has died back over winter.
If I was a painter I would be putting big splodges of colour to represent the green of the grass and then the brown of the bracken as it sweeps up the hillsides.
And then spotted around are small splodges of green so again if I was an artist I'd get my paintbrush and just put these tiny splotches of green across the canvas and that's the gorse bushes,
The thorn bushes that are peppered around and very distinctive on the hillside.
This landscape is home to livestock.
It's farmed but the animals live semi-wild and I can see sheep,
White sheep dotted around the place and also the ponies,
The Dartmoor ponies which are grazing higher up on the hillside.
The other day as I came walking there was a foal,
A youngster,
Well a couple of youngsters actually and as I was walking closer towards the pony herd these youngsters were dancing around and playing around,
Lots of energy,
Made me smile to see them.
And as I got closer I just slowed down because they started to look at me cautiously which was fair enough and I was really not wanting to spook them so I slowed down and stopped and just watched them,
Watched these beautiful animals as they were grazing and watched these two lovely foals who were curious about who I was and what I was doing.
I could see one of them in particular seemed particularly curious and started to tentatively take a step closer towards me and I had a look at the older ponies that were grazing and they seemed very comfortable with this and I knew that my best bet if I wanted this foal to come closer towards me was to turn my back on it so I did.
I turned my back on it and just pretended that I wasn't interested and sure enough eventually after a few minutes I could hear the huff and the breathing of this foal and I gently got my phone out and put it on the selfie so that I could see over my shoulder this beautiful animal very curious to see who I was and what I was.
Cautious but curious,
Gentle and playful.
And eventually I could see the parent ponies or the older ponies looking a little bit suspicious of what was going on and suddenly the whole herd was away galloping,
Cantering away.
But just in that moment I felt I'd had this extraordinary connection with another animal and it was so beautiful.
And I loved the curiosity of this pony and that's really what I feel I learnt from connecting from that absolutely special moment of connection.
This little pony was curious,
Playfully curious and it just reminds me of how delicious it is to be playfully curious in life.
You know there are different ways that we can engage with things and there can be the very heavy frowning intellectual way of trying to work something out,
Researching something,
Analysing something,
Trying to get to the bottom of something.
Another way of engaging with something is actually disengagement,
Is something comes along that you might be interested in and yet you just can't be bothered to even give it any attention.
So you've got the scrunched up face of trying to work something out and then at the other end of the spectrum just letting something go,
Not being interested in the slightest.
And I think there are some things in life which deserve the playful curiosity of the pony.
Where you gently hold something,
You're gently curious and you allow it to be in your world and to reflect on it without trying to work it out and trying to overanalyse it.
So I'm going to ask you today is there something in your life that you are being called on to be playfully curious about,
To reflect on gently and to see what arises within you.
Thank you.
