Hello and welcome to five minutes in nature with me Liz Scott.
Sitting on a rock in the sunshine on Dartmoor overlooking the town of Ivy Bridge.
I can see just below me amongst the gorse bushes different coloured bobble hats walking along or bobbing along I should say.
It looks like they're surfing on the waves at the top of the gorse bushes but it's obviously a group,
Maybe a group of young people out for a walk on Dartmoor.
It is glorious and I'm out a bit earlier than I have been recently.
As you know probably in the last few days I've been chasing the last hours of daylight and today I thought no I'm gonna get out early.
So I am enjoying the warmth of the morning sun on my face.
And I've just passed a stone row.
It's not a particularly big stone row and it's one that probably in the summer you wouldn't see at all because as the grasses grow it would be covered.
So most of the stones are probably about one foot two three foot high.
And as I was walking along the track I hadn't noticed it particularly before but for some reason I noticed it.
And it occurred to me because I've recently been up on Dartmoor at another very substantial stone row and on that stone row I took a compass reading.
It just occurred to me to have a go at seeing whether this particularly aligned with anything.
Maybe a sunrise or a sunset.
So my intention was to take a compass reading and then go home and start to investigate.
But as it was this stone row aligns pretty much exactly with the stone row that I saw on Dartmoor.
And I've already looked that up.
So this stone row aligns with either the sunrise for the summer solstice or the sunset for the winter solstice.
And because of the way that the stones are positioned running down the hill my hunch is that this stone row particularly is marking the sunset of the winter solstice.
I don't know why these stones were put here and I don't even know whether I'm correct in my assertions.
But it really does something when I allow myself to sink into and reflect on how or why a community of people,
And it would have needed to have been a community to move these stones into place,
How or why a community of people went to such great lengths to place these stones in the landscape.
And it comes back to something I was reflecting on yesterday.
If you remember yesterday we were looking at the past and the future and in the absence of thought does it exist?
That was the question.
And yesterday when I reflected on that question there was something that arose for me which was a deep knowing,
A deep sense of an energy.
I think I called it an emptiness of potential.
And I'm going to add another word to that today which is a sense of knowing.
In the past I've called it in a compass or intuition but it's this deep sense of knowing.
That for me is an extraordinary place to put my attention.
This sense of knowing.
It's almost before thought.
It is before thought.
The sense of knowing is an experience and then I describe it using language and words which of course then is covered or coated in thought and language.
But before that there is a sense of knowing.
And on the bird feeder,
When I feed the birds,
Particularly on these cold days,
And I watch them go on the bird feeders and I watch them dart between the bushes and then they go to the birdbath with water in it and they take some water because I've defrosted it so they've got a bit of water they can drink from.
And I just watch them dart around and some of them start looking through the leaf litter and finding bugs and insects.
And when the ground is less hard and it's a bit softer often the blackbirds will bounce across the lawn and suddenly dunk their heads into the grass and pull up,
Stretch up a worm which they eat.
And I'm just drawn to this sense of knowing,
Of something beyond thought.
And I go back to this stone row which is a construction that my intuition is that there was a sense of knowing that it was put in the landscape,
Placed in the landscape.
There was a sense of knowing that this was the right thing to do.
There was a sense of knowing to mark the winter sunset.
That for me feels as though people in the past were attuned with that sense of knowing.
So today is a reflection on knowing.
What does that mean for you?
Your awareness,
Your knowing,
That deeper sense of knowing,
That intuition before thought.
What does that mean for you?
