Hello and welcome to Five Minutes in Nature with me Liz Scott.
This is a daily reflection out in nature and I'm sitting on some rocks,
Some grey granite rocks,
Up on Dartmoor,
Just above my house.
I live just beside the moorland of Dartmoor and this is my daily walk.
I come up onto the moors and just breathe in the scene and I'm sitting with my back towards quite a blustery southwesterly wind and the sun,
It's in the morning and the sun is in the east and it's trying desperately to send out some warmth through the cloud cover but there are grey and white clouds scudding across the sky.
It's a real sense that there could be a rain shower at any time.
It's very cool for June but I think this is probably the weather I'm very used to in England.
Sometimes we have very hot days and often it's grey and cloudy and a bit rainy and it's interesting because I was reminded as I sat here of something that happened just a few days ago,
A really magical moment.
I was walking down off the moor,
Off the hillside,
Just where I'm sitting now and as I came off the hillside I was surprised to see a sheep.
I say I was surprised to see a sheep,
There were lots of sheep all over the moors but this sheep looked just,
There was something a bit odd about it and I could see it was licking something and I was very cautious,
I didn't want to startle it and I suddenly realised that this sheep had just given birth and it was it was licking a lamb.
I kept a really good distance,
I didn't want to alarm the mother or the lamb but I just watched,
Watched this tiny little creature wobble and struggle to its feet and as it was getting to its feet and the mother was continuing to lick it,
It was trying to find,
Obviously trying to find the milk,
Kept nuzzling her her coat to try and find milk and in her exuberance of licking,
She licked it so hard it fell over and for what felt like an age the lamb lay motionless on the ground and I was thinking oh my goodness do I need to go and intervene,
Do I need to help this lamb up,
What should I do?
I was so glad I didn't,
There was something in me,
I call it my inner compass,
There was something in me that reminded me just to take a step back and to allow what needed to happen to happen and the mother kept licking the lamb even though the lamb was motionless on the ground and then eventually the lamb,
The leg started to twitch again and it started to try and find its feet and this time it was successful and it managed to stand up and stay standing.
I felt as though I'd been given this extraordinary gift seeing this happen in front of my eyes and I realized so deeply the importance of allowing things to be.
I don't know about you but sometimes I feel the urge to rush in and rescue and save things or I tamper with things.
When I was walking my pilgrimage one of the things I began to trust deeply was my body's ability to heal itself from the blisters and the aches and the pains that I got from walking day after day after day for seven weeks on a pilgrimage.
All I needed to do was to give it rest and to give it space to heal and to respect it and I had this similar feeling when I saw that little lamb trying to get up,
My feeling was give it space,
Allow it to do its thing.
There is something in the process of struggle,
There is something in the process of having to find your own way that is an important part of being alive,
Of being a living creature and sometimes in my desire to intervene and make things better I might interrupt a really important process that is going on and that doesn't mean I don't intervene and it also means that I would have stepped in if I had really felt that the little lamb was in distress but I think there was something for me about learning the importance of standing back and seeing if things are going to work out without my intervention and that's maybe just a question for you today.
It's just to reflect on maybe if sometimes you step in too early,
Might come from the right place but ask yourself the question,
Do I sometimes step in too early and try and rescue a situation?
