Hello and welcome to five minutes in nature with me Liz Scott.
I'm back in Exeter I'm helping out with my mum again,
And it's a really hot day Yesterday we thought the weather was going to significantly shift there were very wild storms and some places had very heavy downpours and it for a moment it just felt like the weather had broken and it has to a certain extent it's not as baking hot as it has been but it is still very very warm so I've come out into her garden in the evening it's a little bit too warm for me to go for a walk and I'm standing in the shade of the trees at the bottom of the garden and I'm on the the lawn area it's quite a large lawn and I don't know if you remember last week I was sitting on the steps looking over the lawn and the grass hadn't been cut for a while and this meant there were some very tall dandelion-like flowers on the grass,
They were clover coming up,
The daisies were tall and bright and there were buttercups and it was alive with bees when I came here last week.
And I kind of predicted,
I knew my brother was coming to help with mum,
And I thought,
I know he's going to look at this lawn and not say,
Oh,
What a beautiful place with butterflies and bees and flowers.
He's going to say the grass needs a good cut.
And sure enough,
The lawn has been mown.
But what is really lovely,
For me anyway,
Is that I can see that once again the daisies are pushing up.
The little white daisy heads with the yellow centre are starting to push up again in the lawn.
The white clover is starting to come up through again.
I can see the purple of the self-heal,
Which is a low-lying flower.
It too is starting to re-emerge.
And it really struck me as I looked at these flowers starting again on their journey in life,
Of the resilience of nature.
The resilience and its ability to continue living and producing life,
Producing flowers.
It's not beaten back down if something happens,
It just seems to pick itself up and start again.
And this very resilience that I'm seeing in the lawn as the flowers start to cheekily re-emerge in amongst the green of the grass.
What I see is that in the same way the flowers come through here on the lawn,
I also see that we have resilience within us.
It's made with the same stuff.
I'm not saying it's made of daisies and flowers.
It's the energy behind life that pushes up the daisies,
That pushes up the clover,
That has the self-heal come to life.
That energy is the same energy that flows through me and through you.
We are all made of that energy.
Which is why I see so clearly that the human spirit is made of resilience.
If you're listening to this,
If you've had a tough time in life or you're going through a tough time in life,
You are listening to this and that by its very definition that you're listening to this shows me that you've got resilience.
It shows me that you are able,
Regardless of what life throws at you,
Is that you pick yourself up and you keep going.
And that is what resilience is.
It's the spirit within us.
It's our core and essence.
It's not something we have to try and make happen.
It's not something we have to work on with techniques.
Resilience is what naturally unfolds whether or not we give it attention.
But what I've found is that as I've seen resilience in myself,
I can't help but see it in others.
And resilience doesn't show up necessarily in the way that we've been culturally taught to look for it.
For me,
Resilience turns up when someone who's had a tough tough experience children or for your parents.
Resilience turns up in many forms and like this lawn that's been completely cut down I can see the resilience coming through here in the flowers.
You can't stop resilience.
You can't stop the resilience in your own life and that's the bit to look out for and that's the hopeful part of being human.
Let me know your reflections on resilience and I look forward to connecting with you again tomorrow for another Five Minutes in Nature.
