Hello and welcome to five minutes in nature with me Liz Scott and we've still got this easterly wind on Dartmoor.
It's not as strong and it's not as cold and I'm out early morning.
I've come out for a morning walk.
I do this most mornings,
Come out and walk and whatever the weather really and I just enjoy being outdoors and now that the mornings are lighter I'm able to come up onto Dartmoor.
When it's very dark in the mornings it's too difficult to find my way across Dartmoor with a torch so I tend to walk on the lanes.
It's just a bit easier to find my way but now I can get out early in the morning.
It's a joy to hear the birds,
Just to breathe deeply in the air,
To see the lambs,
See the ponies.
This is a beautiful time of year and I feel so blessed at being able to have this on my doorstep and to come out and experience and be in nature and today's reflection came about from a conversation I had with a friend and it just got me thinking about what power there is in chipping away at something,
Doing something slowly,
Particularly when your enthusiasm or motivation is maybe flat and she told me the story of an artist that she knew who had been going through a bit of a dry patch with creativity for her artwork and she's used to doing these canvases and watercolours of the natural landscape and so the artist just had this idea that rather than get out a fresh canvas and be slightly daunted by starting a big piece of artwork,
Instead what she was going to do is she was going to get these small little bits of cardboard,
Tiny bits of cardboard,
Smaller than a postcard and she was going just to commit to daily doing a little bit of artwork on these tiny bits of cardboard and that's what she did.
She woke up,
She would get up,
She would see what was inspiring her and then she would get out a tiny piece of cardboard and do a painting on it and this happened for several weeks until she had a mass of painted pieces of cardboard and then from that she saw that there was the possibility of creating a bigger piece of artwork from what she had done.
It hadn't been her intention,
That wasn't what she'd set out to do but she saw what was possible and then created a piece of artwork from these tiny bits of painted cardboard that she'd created and it reminded me of something I do daily.
I've got a diary and this diary is a five-year diary and each page represents a day of the year for five years so for example on January the 1st I write on January the 1st and I started writing the diary four years ago and each year I could see what I was doing on January the 1st on the same page and I'm only writing two or three sentences at most.
Sometimes I notice I write about the things that happened during the day and it's wonderful to bring back memories of things often that I've forgotten I actually did.
Sometimes I'm writing about my state of mind and it's really helpful to see how that state of mind just moves and shifts so much from day to day and year to year and sometimes I don't write much and sometimes I have tiny writing and I squeeze a lot in but one thing I do is I write it every day.
It's not a chore,
It's not a huge piece of writing that I've got to do and I've been doing quite a bit of writing recently on my book and changing my website and I just find it quite I find it quite tiring doing longer pieces of writing but this I can do a little snapshot every day and I find it lovely just to see how my years have progressed.
So today is just a little reminder really if something that is coming up for you in life and it feels quite big and onerous just remember you can do it in small steps do things a little piece a day just know that the whole big picture of what you need to do might feel overwhelming but actually there is probably something a small thing that you can do today right now towards it is something that you can achieve with a light heart so let me know if that makes sense for you and of course I'll be back again tomorrow with another five minutes in nature so please do join me again then.
