Hello and welcome to Five Minutes in Nature with me Liz Scott up on Dartmoor on a glorious evening just enjoying the cool warmth of the evening sun.
It's certainly quite autumnal up here,
The orange of the hillside where the bracken has turned from green to orange and I'm just sort of enjoying the warmth of the sun and the coolness of the breeze.
I'm not the only one out and about,
I can just see two runners hurtling down the hillside,
You might be able to hear them talking to each other as they make their way down off the beacon and around me sheep are grazing and just in front of me here which I love to see is the hawthorn tree,
I say the hawthorn tree,
There are lots of hawthorn trees dotted around Dartmoor,
They're quite lonely often on their own in the landscape and this one is one of my favourites,
It's one I come up to and spend time with and talk to and touch and hug and this hawthorn tree is festooned with red berries,
It's beautiful actually and I'm loving the thought that these berries are going to be food for the birds as the nights draw in and food becomes more and more scarce.
And today I was walking up on Dartmoor a bit further into the moorland,
I had to drive to get there,
I met a friend and we went for a walk and one of the things I loved about this walk is as we were talking and walking and going up footpaths,
We were actually high above the River Dart and the River Dart rises on Dartmoor and rushes its way down from Dartmoor all the way to Dartmouth,
That's where it comes out the mouth of the River Dart and here we were up on Dartmoor where the river was quite tumbling and high but we were high up so we could only see this silvery ribbon below us as it tumbled through this steep-sided valley and one of the things I really loved was realising that I was seeing the River Dart from a different angle.
I'd actually walked along the banks of the River Dart some months earlier and I had walked along the banks of the River Dart and then climbed very steeply up out of the river up the valley and to a place called Dartmeet and here I was at a different spot but looking at the same river,
The river from the same spot that I had walked all those months before but in that instant I was much closer to the river itself and here I was now with a bird's eye view looking down on the river and I get a real thrill from seeing things from a different angle,
Seeing a landscape from a different angle,
Connecting up different parts of the landscape,
Seeing that the place that I had walked a few months earlier I could see it from a different angle and see how it connected up with different parts of the landscape and I just love that when I'm walking and it really got me reflecting on what it is like to see things from a different angle.
There's the sense that you're seeing the same thing but you're seeing it differently and this for me is really important particularly with the work that I engage with and share with you because there are two things I know absolutely deeply to be true.
One is that I am at the level of soul and spirit unbroken,
I'm okay,
I'm deeply deeply okay,
I cannot be broken and also I know that I have the capacity through the power and gift of thought to create stories that take me away from that recognition of who I truly am,
That space of peace love and wisdom.
My imagination and my thoughts and the stories that I create can distract me from the very thing that I am,
The very thing that I'm looking for in fact and my philosophy is simple,
It's based on something called the three principles or the inside out understanding and there's a course on the three principles you can listen to on Insight Timer,
An introduction to the three principles if you want to learn more.
But one of the things I love about the three principles is the simplicity of the message and the message is pretty much as I've said to you now which is firstly you're deeply okay and secondly you can believe that you're not okay,
That you can get lost in thought.
And in the same way that today I saw the river Dart from a different angle,
The same river but from a different perspective,
So I keep seeing those two truths from different angles and different perspectives and that's why I share this so much on Insight Timer and the two things I really want to share and continue sharing is the power of you looking within,
Look within towards that space of peace,
Love and wisdom within you and just realise that you might get lost in your thoughts and thinking but you are not your thoughts and thinking,
You are that space,
That awareness,
That is who you truly are.
