Hello and welcome to five minutes in nature with me Liz Scott and I am so delighted to be out and about because today has been a horrendous day absolutely heaving with rain.
I had to run from my sister's house to my car and in doing so I got soaked through so rather than walking during the day I've pretty much hunkered down but I've got out because the rain has eased off and it's dark I'm up on Dartmoor in the dark but as I was coming out of my house everybody seemed to be emerging particularly dog walkers grateful to get out without getting wet so here I am in the dark I can see the hillside ahead of me west where the Sun is still got a tiny bit of light illuminating as a backdrop the hillside but other than that with my torch on I can't really see very much and today is a reflection on the year of the snake and I'm reflecting on this because tomorrow I'm giving a talk on the pilgrimage I walked last year when I walked it last year I knew that I was walking during the year of the snake and it seemed quite important because the pilgrimage I walked on following energy currents these energy currents are often depicted like snakes and much of the imagery in churches when it showed snakes or dragons the idea is that this imagery referred to the ancient pagan religion so the iconography I was coming across images I came across with dragons and snakes that I was seeing in churches felt really pertinent to it just felt as though the snake was a perfect image to have on my walk and here I was walking during the year of the snake and then more recently my friend explained that the snake also sheds its skin and she was explaining this to me and it just made a whole load of sense because it felt as though during my pilgrimage I was effectively shedding a skin looking back on it that really feels like a great way to describe it so the year of the snake had another layer of meaning for me and this is what I plan to talk about in my talk tomorrow just to explain how it feels and you know a snake when it sheds its skin it doesn't shed its skin and wait for a new skin to grow what happens is that the new skin grows beneath the the one that's about to be shared and then at some point that new skin takes over and the old one becomes redundant and splits and falls away and it's quite useful to make that distinction because you see often in life I think we feel like a change is coming or we feel inspired to do something different and it feels like a vulnerable moment it feels like we need to take an old skin off before a new one has formed but my sense is that when you feel that or when I feel that when I feel like something new is coming in my world something new is growing it doesn't mean I need to get rid of anything first it means that I just trust that this new thing will grow and when the time is right the old skin will shed for me with a pilgrimage that seems so much what happened I it was an intense period of personal reflection and as I walked through this pilgrimage it felt like I was bridging one side of my life with another particularly as you know I'm very inspired in the area of older women and it felt that during my pilgrimage as well as reflecting on the grief of losing my dad as well as contemplating my religion which was Christianity and and how that was going to take unfold in the rest of my life and I was reflecting on intuition and wisdom and rituals and walking and settled mind and thinking and the real upset in the world that I see at the moment when I reflected on all of those things I didn't realize that actually I was growing a new skin and at the end of the pilgrimage it feels as though the old skin has now fallen away and I am waiting now in this new skin to see what is unfolding and I wonder if the year of the snake holds any resonance for you the year of the snake lasts up until February the 17th I think and then it's the year of the horse but does the year of the snake hold any resonance for you and if so what resonance does it hold what does the year of the snake mean for you
