Hello and welcome to Five Minutes in Nature with me Liz Scott and you join me at the end of day 21 of my pilgrimage as I'm following the energy lines of the Michael and Mary current across England.
I started in Cornwall,
I'll be reaching Glastonbury tomorrow and today has been quite a challenging day which I'm surprised in a way because I've been crossing the Somerset Levels and the Somerset Levels are flat land.
It used to be marshland,
It's been drained and there are straight channels,
Almost like they've been drawn by a ruler,
That have got water in them that have drained the land and the land is just very flat.
It's green,
Lots and lots of green grass and then the occasional field that's been ploughed ready for a crop and just occasionally you'll see a mound or a hill but it's very rare but my highlight of the day was reaching one of those mounds.
It was called Burrow Mump and this mound is very distinctive in the landscape.
It's a squat hill,
It's a dollop of a hill and on the top is a ruin of a church,
It's a St Michael church.
The church is where there is a node point so this is where the Michael and Mary energy currents cross and the morning as I'd been walking towards Burrow Mump I had been really,
I'd been really quite,
Feeling quite bereft actually,
Quite sad that there weren't,
There wasn't much birdsong,
There weren't any hedgerows,
There was just a kind of a monotony of green and arable land.
It felt as though something was missing,
It's almost like you know you go somewhere and the laughter of children is missing.
It felt like that,
It felt like something was missing in the landscape and I,
I felt quite sad.
For me it represented a landscape that was crying out,
Was yearning to become marshland again,
That's what it naturally is and would be if,
If we left it alone.
And I got to Burrow Mump,
This,
This,
Like I say,
It was a dollop of a hill and had my lunch leaning up against the ruin and then went in and just spent a bit of time in the ruined church reflecting and,
And it,
It seemed to really energise me.
It was,
It was perfect,
It was a really wonderful plug in for me just to,
To kind of feel back in the zone again.
And I then continued walking and although I am heading towards Glastonbury and hopefully I'll reach Glastonbury tomorrow,
I had to cross one of these very major drains,
It's called the King Sedgmore Drain and it's,
It's wider than a river,
It's,
It's huge and the only way I could cross it without going on a major road,
Which would not be very pleasant on the pilgrimage,
Was to come off route.
So I had to go through communities,
Middle Zoi and Western Zoiland and then I've been walking along straight lines of these drains,
Crisscrossing and zigzagging across fields,
Finding the one footbridge that takes me over this massive big King Sedgmore Drain and I've just gone over it now.
And when I met a dog walker on,
On the route and he said,
Oh where are you going?
We,
We fell into a bit of a chat and I said,
Well I'm off to Glastonbury.
He said,
Well you're going the wrong way,
Glastonbury isn't this way and I explained to him,
Well look I need to cross over this drain and I don't want to go on a main road,
So that's why I'm heading north rather than heading east and he said,
Yep now I understand that.
And so I have spent probably the last three hours of my journey not going in the right direction,
But for good reason and that I think is what I'm really seeing from today,
Is that a couple of things really.
One is sometimes you might imagine that the train being flat is going to be easy,
But that doesn't mean it's going to be easy.
And the second thing which I've found quite useful and I've been reflecting on this for the last hour,
Is that we do sometimes need to go in a different direction than where we're heading,
Where we want to aspire to be,
Because we need to go in a direction,
Because there's a particular thing we need to do,
Action we need to take,
Person we need to meet,
We might not even know what it is.
So sometimes for me now,
I'm thinking if my route doesn't take me directly to where I think I want to be,
There's probably a good reason for it and it's just useful for me to remember that that is okay.
So sometimes I do have to go off route and that is okay.
