Hello and welcome to Five Minutes in Nature with me Liz Scott and you join me on a slightly overcast but occasionally sunny day,
Walking up my favourite lane onto Dartmoor which has got thick green ferns on either side.
There's a stream running down beside us,
You'll probably hear it get a bit louder as I get closer to it as it crosses underneath the road.
There are different pink flowers on either side,
There's campions and I can see the white flowers here.
I mean they look like cowpast to me but I don't think they are,
I think they're pig nuts and you know that lovely white almost firework display flower of fluffiness on the top of the stem.
And yeah this is just me having a wonderful day and I was walking up here and there were two things,
First of all I smelt elderflower and the smell of elderflower is something I love and actually it's one of the few smells that I can smell,
I don't have a great sense of smell but there are a few smells that I can detect and elderflower is one of them so I feel very fortunate at this time of year to to be able to smell it.
And the other thing I've smelt on my walk is I go past a yard with a stable in it and they look after a couple of horses and there's a manure heap that I get a waft of and I can smell that too so there's a couple of smells that I can smell but a lot of smells I don't smell.
But the thing with the horse manure is it's a smell I love,
Sort of got that sweet sweetness to it and the reason I love it is that it takes me right back to my childhood.
When I was a teenager I had this absolute craze on horses,
I used to have horse posters on my wall and lots of photo books with horses in them,
I had the very very very occasional riding lesson,
We we couldn't afford it as a family that that was something I could do regularly so what I did is I used to go to a local riding stable and work there for free,
I would muck out and groom the horses and clean the tack and the saddles and the bridles and very occasionally I would then get a free ride,
An opportunity to go out hacking,
But to be honest most weeks I was just there for the love of being around horses.
So when I smell manure I go right back to that time as a teenager where I just absolutely felt that love of horses and of feeling completely fulfilled around them as animals and isn't it interesting how something you smell is almost like a time machine,
It can take you right back in time,
Right back to a moment in your life,
Sometimes it's a moment that's warm and friendly like me reminding myself of being a youngster loving horses and sometimes those memories can be a bit more troubling,
But the sense of smell is a powerful thing.
But I was just thinking as I was walking up this lovely beautiful green thick luscious lane up towards Dartmoor,
The moors where I love to go walking,
I was just thinking about childhood and how it's good just to remember that childhood has gone by,
I mean for me it's decades away,
I'm in my mid-50s late 50s heading on towards 60.
But actually there are things of childhood which I can remember warmly like the horses but they're no longer part of my life and it's good to remember that,
It's good to remember that there are things from childhood which were important at the time and had real importance at the time but they are no longer part of my life,
I am no longer that girl that loved horses.
And like I was saying the smells can be resonant of or remind you of memories which are troubling and it might be that there are images or memories of things that come up in your life,
Things that happened when you were younger that were troubling and the same message is true,
It's like it's not part of your life anymore,
You have moved on from that and I find that really hopeful,
There's a real sense of me realising of what I have shed and moved on from,
The shedding of the skin almost of growing up and moving on and the different experiences that I've had that I might be reminded of something from the past,
It is a memory of something,
It is not who I am or it does not impact my life in the way that it once did.
So the question here for you today is just to see if there's something in your life and it might be troubling and it might be something that's a fond memory where you can just make that distinction that that is something that has moved on in your life,
It was at one point part of your life but it is not part of your life anymore.
So that is the reflection today,
What are you being asked to move on from?
