Hello and welcome to five minutes in nature with me Liz Scott.
This is a daily reflection so join me.
I'm often up on Dartmoor which is exactly where I am at the moment and as I'm walking I reflect on things that feel important and want to be said and that's what I do daily.
I just share for five minutes and I'm perched on top of a granite rock quite high up on a hillside.
The hill below me has got this wonderful brown bracken which has died back from last year and it looks like someone has painted the hillside orange and I can see below me the green fields and pastures just above the village I live in and then I can look down right down on the slate roofs of the village houses.
This is the place I live and I feel like a bird actually.
I've got such a great elevated view and today is a reflection on two things around love and I'm going to tell you a little story and why it feels so relevant today but the two phrases that I want to reflect on are holding the line for love and also asking the question does this take me closer or further away from love and I'm saying this because my husband and I met a friend today and these two areas around love,
Holding the line for love and asking the question does this take me closer or further away from love,
These were central to our interaction with a mutual friend.
Now let me give you the context.
We'd met her a few weeks ago and we'd had a coffee with her and we'd both come away a little bit unsettled from the interaction.
Our friend who we've known for years and years is an incredibly loving person,
Compassionate,
Kind,
Always looking to support the underdog and to be kind to others and so we were quite taken aback when we had a cup of coffee with her the other week and she became very entrenched on a polarizing view,
Something that you see many people argue about on social media and she had a really strong adamant view and neither of us had seen her take a position like that before.
She was almost like bristling with righteousness and I felt a bit alarmed because to me it felt as though she'd almost been taken over by something.
It didn't feel like my friend was sitting in front of me.
It felt as though she had been taken over by something else and it wasn't my friend.
So today when my husband and I knew we were going to meet her again we had a conversation about how we might best support her.
Now we didn't want to engage in an argument or try and convince her that she was wrong in what she thought or we were right or somebody else was right or there was another way to see something.
It was like that wasn't what we were about and we talked about how we might best support her and support each other in the conversation and we realized that what would be important was holding the line for love.
That was what I really deeply saw for myself and for my husband he said yet I'll be asking myself does this take me closer or further away from love and so we met her and we were both present to love in our conversation with her.
Had that changed her view?
No.
Did she still have very strong opinions about the thing that she spoke to us about before?
Yes.
But what was different is both my husband and I engaged with her pointing to love within ourselves and pointing to love within her.
You see as I see it there are many different opinions and ideas on rights and wrongs and if there is a right and a wrong then for me that means it's just an opinion.
I have opinions too there's nothing wrong with opinions it's just that an opinion is that it's an opinion.
What I'm really deeply interested and where I feel as though I am connected to something deeper than myself is when I reflect on the nature and power of love.
So in this conversation my husband and I both actually talked about love we talked about holding the line for love I explained what it meant for me and my husband talked about whether it's important to move closer or further away from love in in the way you engage with people and we introduced this into the conversation with her and she talked about it too and as she did it felt like my old friend was back.
As she talked about love she connected with something universal something that touched her deeply and you see when we connect with people from that space then we're connecting beyond division we're connecting beyond that which separates we're recognizing the truth of who we truly are.
So I'd love to know your reflections on those two phrases I know I've used both of them before in previous insight timers but for me it feels really important holding the line for love is something that resonates deeply for me at the moment and and what do you make of the question does this take me closer or further away from love I'd love to know what lands for you in this conversation about love
