Where do you "live?"

I don't spend a lot of time on social media, but when I do dabble in online exploration, one of the things I find most striking is what an extraordinary diversity of input there is available to me, or to anyone. Depending how curious I am, inside of five minutes I can check out who wore what to the Met Gala, find recommendations for a kibble-free diet for my beloved senior pooch (Happy 12th birthday, Whitley!), read about an ecovillage near Cairo, Egypt, watch a high school teacher dance in his classroom, learn why a duck flaps its wings standing alone by a pond, and a kajillion other things. The five I mentioned above are just examples of what I would search; the other 8.3 billion humans on earth are putting their focus on endless other things at any given moment.

What kinds of things capture your attention? Family, friends, pets, I imagine. What else? News headlines? Food, health, fitness? Music, clothing, vehicles? What about Gaia? On the average day, I wonder how many people focus on the natural world around them. For me, it depends. My usuals include my dog Whitley, the hummingbirds zooming to and from the feeder outside my window, the palm and eucalytpus trees that are abundant in my yard and throughout the area where I live, and whatever is in bloom at the moment. I am always captivated by flowers and color; right now it's bougainvillea, geraniums, lantana, and the scarlet of bottle brush trees that seem to be everywhere. At our nearby park, I count the turtles (lots of springtime youngsters!), admire the fiery orange pomegranate tree blossoms, and try to figure out why that one wacky duck keeps flapping when all the other ducks have flown the pond.

I have noticed that when I am consciously paying attention to nature around me, there is even more to see. When I really look, the purple flowers are covered in bees busy doing their pollinating thing; trails of ants traverse a giant eucalyptus trunk; and there is a hawk's nest high in its boughs. Wherever I set my eyes and other senses, the world is profoundly alive! Whether it's the natural world, the world of social media, the world of our work, or whatever other world, that's the world we are choosing, consciously or not, to inhabit.

I am curious to know, what does the world you "live in," aka spend your time focusing on, look like? Do you choose what you see/hear/smell/taste/feel, or do algorithms and the status quo do the choosing for you? If you could choose to set your attention anywhere you wanted, anywhere that made your heart sing, where would that be?

The natural world is calling for your attention.