Hello and welcome to Five Minutes in Nature with me Liz Scott.
Oh I love this part of the walk I do in Exeter.
I love it because there's just so many birds.
Can you hear them?
It's in the morning,
I walk quite early.
I look after my mum every now and again and I stay overnight and then I'll come out on a walk.
This part of Exeter has got a footpath that goes through a wooded valley and it's always full of birds.
I've seen robins and little hedge sparrows.
So beautiful,
Really beautiful.
And today I want to reflect on life is a journey and I know that's a little bit cliched to use that but I don't know of a better way of putting it other than life is a journey.
And the reflection is where are you on your journey?
Right at this minute,
Right at this minute.
And I was thinking about this because I walked with my sister yesterday.
We walked from a place called Dartmeat which is on Dartmoor to the middle of Dartmoor to a place called Postbridge.
It's probably about a five or six mile walk and this walk was such a mixture of different elements.
It was a beautiful path beside a river,
Easy to define.
There were times when we were finding our way slowly through bogs and marshes.
We'd had thunderstorms the day before so everything was very wet and marshy and some of the footpaths had turned into streams because the moorland was so wet and water was coming off the moors.
So there were times when we were making slow progress through marshy boggy areas and at one point we abandoned where we were walking because it just was taking too long so we climbed up a very steep hill through the undergrowth and found ourselves a footpath that we could walk on that was a more defined track.
We made our way through gorse and ferns which at this time of year the gorse is a very prickly thorny bush and the ferns are quite tall.
So we made our way through the gorse and ferns past old ruins of houses along plains,
Beautiful green sort of grassy plains beside the river Dart.
It was everything,
The walk was everything.
So in a way we had times where it was easy,
We had times where it was challenging,
We had times where it's so challenging we had to find a different route.
It was everything and just reminds me of life and the thing I mean one of the things I love about walking with my sister is she never complains like we both know that if it gets tough we just do the best we can and we slow down and we'll get there or we'll make a decision and do something different and for me it just reminds me of life is that life is by its nature life is designed to have its challenges it's not meant to be an easy ride there'll be times when you're walking and it's nice and easy you've got beautiful views and you feel at ease there'll be times where it's really slow going or hard going and you've just got to slow down when things get tough you've got to slow down and it might be at times where you're going through a patch where you need to give yourself some time and space so you might need to take yourself away from that tricky patch and take yourself up to an easier path or have an easier journey so the question today is quite simple if you were describing your life as a journey imagine you were taking a walk across Dartmoor and you had footpaths and tricky bits to to navigate and bogs and marshes and stones and undergrowth and brambles and beautiful flat clear areas where it's easy to walk if you if your life was a walk along Dartmoor right at the moment or maybe a walk that you were more familiar with where are you on that walk at the moment and just just know that wherever you are it's absolutely fine it's where you're meant to be and whatever it's like be assured that it will change because that is the nature of life it's designed to be challenging and it's designed to have moments of great ease and joy and for me the joy is engaging in life without any additional resistance to where i am at the moment so the question today is where are you on your journey of life?
