Hello and welcome to five minutes in nature with me Liz Scott out and about on a frosty February morning.
I'm walking through a field and crunching on white coated grass.
It's a pasture field with sheep in it and as I look around I can see there are lambs.
These are the first lambs that I've seen of the year and the farmer has obviously brought them into his field to keep them safe.
I'm glad it's quite frosty underfoot because I can see that this is a very muddy field and the frost is at least hardening the ground.
And as I'm walking through this field and just looking at these beautiful lambs I always feel a little bit of a flutter of excitement because this is it isn't it?
Spring.
Lambs.
They go together and I wonder what it's like to be a lamb,
To be newly born,
Coming out of your mother's womb and coming into a world like this which is cold and bright and confusing.
It must be so confusing at first.
And then I watch as the lambs instinctively follow their mothers and the mother is warily looking at me and most of them are now gently guiding their lambs away from me because I suppose they see me as a threat.
And I'm just watching a line of one,
Two,
Three ewes taking their lambs through a hedgerow into a different field.
And there's so much in what I see that really inspires me.
One is the freshness of life.
Seeing newborn lambs is an immediate reminder of the renewal of life.
There is life and there is death.
There is life and there is death.
And when something is newly born I wonder at the freshness of seeing this world with new eyes.
For me in recent years coming across something called the Inside Out Understanding or the Three Principles has helped me really be reborn into this world seeing it with fresh eyes.
Realizing that the tyranny of thought that had really bogged me down with anxiety and stress and me believing all the things that my thinking was telling me.
I've seen through that.
I've seen that thinking and thought is part of being human but there is something more profound and real at the heart of who I truly am.
And so when I am in that place when I bring my awareness and attention to that place of settled peace within me it feels as though I am quite literally seeing the world through new eyes.
And from a settled mind as my thoughts settle I don't feed my thoughts anymore.
They rise,
They agitate and I allow them just to settle down.
And as they settle I see the freshness and the beauty in the world around me.
I can get struck as I am just standing in this field now looking at this white haze coating on the top of the grass the frost and I can see a pool of sunlight at the top of the field.
I'm actually in a bit of a valley here but at the top of the field and the sheep are moving towards that warmer sunny patch I can see the sunshine and everything feels fresh and clean and clear and right.
So today my invitation to you is to imagine what it's like to see the world through fresh eyes.
What's it like to arrive in this world as though you had never seen it before?
And with those fresh eyes notice those things which are utterly beautiful and notice the things that no longer fit in your life anymore.
The things like the sheep and the lambs here they moved away from me.
Maybe the things that you need to move away from in your life.
So today the invitation is just to see life through fresh eyes.
