Yesterday I was reading a post on Instagram written by a fellow photographer and blogger that I follow. Like me, she loves wildlife and nature (especially birds) and she lives in a lovely area on a mountain in Queensland, Australia. Her post yesterday was about having a flock of eleven galahs that came to her feeding station earlier in the day.  If you aren’t familiar with the galah, it’s a pink and grey cockatoo that is absolutely gorgeous and probably my very favorite bird in the world.  Her photos were great, and I was happy for her to have had such a wonderful experience.  But a little bit of me was also kind of jealous.  I found myself thinking, “why can’t I live in a cool place like that, with awesome and interesting wildlife all around?”.

I think that we have all felt that way once in awhile.  I also think it’s easy to start feeling like whatever is around you is ordinary; especially when you have lived there for many years, like I have.  Later yesterday afternoon I began writing my own post for my own blog, and I realized, this is actually an incredible area to live in.  The post I was working on centered around a little trip I took out to a cattle egret rookery that’s about a fifteen minute drive from my house.  How many people are lucky enough to have something like that so near?  Not many, I’d venture.  That got me thinking about an older post I made about rounding a corner on my small dirt road and finding a white tail doe and her fawn on the edge of the woods by the road.  And I won’t soon forget seeing a swallowtail kite perched in the top of a snag, enjoying the sunrise on a different morning.  I have bobcats, foxes, gopher tortoises, opossums, armadillos, and raccoons living just behind my home in the Gothe State Forest.  I live on a property with numerous longleaf pines, an endangered species, and I can literally walk to the back of my property and hike trails in a State Forest.  Not many people can say that!  Manatees, river otters, wading birds, and beaches are only an  hours drive away, along with many other state and national parks.  Yes, I am truly blessed to live where I do!

And actually, I am doubly blessed.  I think that I’m extremely fortunate to live here among all this beauty and all these amazing wild creatures. Even if I got nothing else from it, I would be blessed.  But I am also lucky enough to be incredibly inspired by what surrounds me.  It fuels my creative juices, cures my ills, relaxes me, and keeps me sane.  It helps to keep me healthy and fit as I get older and keeps my mind functioning and engaged.  I hope that each and every one of you can feel the same way about where you live.  We all want different things out of life, but if you’re not happy about your surroundings, you can’t be happy about much of anything else.