Hello and welcome to Five Minutes in Nature with me Liz Scott and I'm still in the cemetery.
This is part two of a talk I started yesterday.
This is the cemetery that we allow to grow wild and we have long grasses here in the summer and there's birds and butterflies and little beetles and bugs.
It's such a beautiful area.
It's a tiny little patch of land but it almost shows what happens when the land is allowed to breathe again.
That's what I see with this little patch of land in our village.
Now it's time for the local nursery where the young children are now being collected so you might hear them excitedly running around behind me.
It's just part of village life.
It's all very beautiful.
Yesterday I talked about the pilgrimage I went on and I gave a talk earlier in the week and there were three areas I looked at.
Yesterday I shared the areas around intuition and wisdom and then the second area I spoke about was connection with nature,
With the landscape.
And the third area which is what I want to spend a bit of time on today is what I'm seeing around older women.
As far as I'm aware the wisdom of older women is pretty much overlooked.
In the world that we live in,
Which is a very fast knowledge-based world where technology and speed and all of those things are really important in order to get by,
Older women and the knowledge that they hold and used to hold on behalf of the community has over the years been overlooked.
When I worked in community for a little while and I became super conscious that when I looked at a computer screen full of little videos of people all working in community that 90% of the faces I saw were older women.
There were some men,
There were some younger people there,
But it was older women that by far took up the mantle of looking out for community.
And I began to see that there seems to be something with older women that they they step up,
They become a safety net in a community,
They see what needs to be done and they fill the gap.
And they don't do it,
They don't trumpet about what they do,
They don't share it,
They just do it.
And I began to realize how unacknowledged older women are with what they do and what they contribute to the world.
And that really resonated when I looked at the land as I was walking my pilgrimage.
It seemed to me as though the land was unacknowledged,
That there was no real relationship with the land.
The land was just viewed as something that you took from and somehow magically it just kept on giving.
When I was walking across some of the arable landscape,
Vast vast acres of field put down to a monoculture of I think it was a wheat crop,
My heart quite literally felt leaden and low at this landscape that felt semi-dead.
It was without life other than the crop that was growing in the field.
And for me seeing that reminded me of what happens when we as humans in our community we become lopsided.
We see or value one aspect of strengths or skills or abilities and we value that over others.
So for example if you value competitiveness and if you value exploitation of the land and if you value resources,
Getting resources and owning them,
And if I've got resources you can't have them,
Well if you put your emphasis on that then you miss out on collaboration and support and compassion.
And I see that women,
Older women,
Have such a lot to contribute,
Huge potential.
They're in a stage of their life where transition is taking place physically with the menopause,
With life as mothers or grandmothers or looking after parents and work life.
It's like they're going through a cauldron,
A crucible of change.
And for me as older women take a stand in the world,
Feel themselves rooted in the world,
Take up space in the world,
Their space in the world.
When they look within to see what is their unique gift to give to the world,
What is their unique voice,
What is it that they are being asked to speak and express or share in the world,
When we see that it's what the world really needs.
It's a little bit like this wild flower meadow,
It will flourish,
It flourishes when we give it time and space to grow and that's what I really see about the power and wisdom of older women.
I'm going to be continuing the theme of older women in the coming weeks and months and I do hope you enjoy as I develop my ideas and you do enjoy what I have to share and but I'd love to hear your perspective as well.
