Hello and welcome to Five Minutes in Nature with me Liz Scott and you join me on day 40 of my pilgrimage as I go across England following the Michael and Mary energy currents and here I am sitting on a bench in Bartlow in the churchyard in the sunshine and it's such a beautiful day.
The church tower here is quite unusual.
The church is covered in flint stones and I'm used to seeing flint on a church but the tower is cylindrical and I've not seen that so far with any churches so I don't know if Bartlow church is unusual or whether this is going to become a trend I start to see in this part of the world but unusually although the church is aligned with the Michael energy current the dedication in the church is to Saint Mary which I find fascinating and just below the church is the pub and I've just been in the pub had a quick drink and that pub is also aligned on the Michael energy current and it was really lovely going inside the once again there were some old frescoes on the wall do you remember Ickleton yesterday they'd uncovered these 12 13th century paintings and again on the walls here there are some paintings one of them in particular was of a dragon that was caught it had its tail coiled up in his head pointing upwards with his mouth open now above the dragon most likely would have been Saint George killing it because that's the image that we often see depicted Saint George on his horse with a sword in hand killing the dragon but the image of Saint George was was no longer there so all that was left is the dragon and I rather like that this idea that the dragon actually survived survived the slaughter and it's really lovely just sitting here in the sunshine this morning was very cold it was misty I've had my coat on for a lot of the day and I found myself walking once again through arable land plowed fields fields with crops in zigzagging around the edges of the fields and this morning I've got to say I felt a little bit flat probably as flat as the landscape I was walking in and as flat as the day with the low clouds that were hanging in the sky and my feeling was that here I was on day 40 of my pilgrimage and it felt as though I was looking back to earlier days when there had been some real gem moments of connection at Glastonbury,
At Avebury,
At Crediton Church,
At Los Witheal Church,
At the Stone Circle,
At Boskownen in Cornwall.
I mean there are so many images that flickered in my mind of times where I'd felt this extraordinary sense of contentment and connection and yet here I was walking through this landscape which is dry it's dusty it's just acres and acres of the same thing field after field after field in varying states of either being plowed or having a crop growing in it and I kind of wondered what this part of the pilgrimage was all about and I guess my sense is this and I'm sitting in the sunshine now so things have shifted I've just had some food I'm feeling rested I'm just enjoying the feeling of being outside and and enjoying nature so right at the minute I'm in a different state of mind but earlier I came to the conclusion as I was walking that it's just about embracing all of it this pilgrimage is not a tick list or a checklist of different spiritual moments that inspire me greatly this whole pilgrimage is for me at some level something for me to experience and it's really helpful for me to realize that so the times of the flat gray cold landscape cold day the monotony of what I'm looking at at some level I know that that is as important for me to experience as this pretty churchyard in the sunshine with daffodils growing all around nettles growing and bees buzzing and just looking at some of the very well-loved graves in front of me all of it all of it is for me to experience and that for me is what I'm taking away from today a pilgrimage isn't meant to be a certain way all of it at some level has value
