Image credit: Beck Seamons
I call 2023 my year of chasing mountains.
In April, I traveled to Austria and Switzerland and stared in awe at the Swiss Alps around me—a view that my iPhone’s camera just couldn’t fully capture. In July, we took a family trip to Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada, where I could do a full 360-degree turn in any spot and see a gorgeous vista in all directions. And finally, a little bit later in the summer, some friends and I spent a weekend in Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park, squealing when the pointy peaks came into view on our drive to the park.
Oh, and I live in Utah. The mountains of the Wasatch Front loom majestically in east-facing windows every day as I drive to and from work. But I’ve lived in Utah for years, so that doesn’t count.
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A former roommate of mine spent a summer studying abroad in France. I asked her to send me pictures of her trip while she was gone. Much to my dismay, she replied with a photo of a single mallard duck. Being the stuck-up bird-watcher I am, I immediately thought, “This girl is on a different continent experiencing a brand new culture, and the first picture she sends home is of a mallard duck? I could walk outside my apartment and see that same duck here in Utah.”
Bird-watcher or not, most everyone living in the Northern Hemisphere can identify a mallard duck. And even if you don’t know its name, I can almost guarantee you’ve seen one before. National Geographic even claims that the mallard is “the most abundant and wide-ranging duck on Earth.”
However, the beauty of mallard ducks is quite underrated. The male ducks have metallic green heads that shine when the light hits them just right, and the geometric black, brown and cream colors on their bodies contrast beautifully with the band of blue feathers visible only when the birds take flight.
Yet birders rarely give mallard ducks a second glance upon seeing them out in the wild. You need only go as far as your neighborhood irrigation ditch or playground to see flocks of them, so they don’t count.
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Over the past few years, I’ve tried to write a short journal entry every night about what I am grateful for that day. As a result of this routine, I have started to experience a deep gratitude for the smallest hints of beauty, hints that I may not have otherwise noticed. I see the glimmer of a mallard duck’s green feathers in my coworker who brought bagels to work on the morning I’d forgotten to eat breakfast. I see the striking outline of a mountain range in the friend who invited me on an afternoon walk when I’d spent all day sitting at home alone. I see the subtle beauties of life on the nights I lie down in bed feeling grateful to have my own room and a clean house.
Why fly to the Canadian Rockies when you live right next to a range within the same mountain system? My friend who flew to France to take pictures of common ducks knew better—there is beauty in the ordinary. Maybe it isn’t that mallard ducks or the Wasatch Front are boring, but that we get bored once their beauty becomes commonplace. As the Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro once noted, “The world is beautiful, the art is in the seeing.”
All this is not to say that we shouldn’t find beauty in the spectacular. Living among Utah mountains doesn’t mean you should never visit the Swiss Alps. In fact, I loved Austria so much that I’m going back in a few months. It does mean, however, that your outlook on life can create the beauty that wouldn’t otherwise exist in your world. Beauty is beauty, whether it’s ordinary or exceptional.
Ironically, my year of chasing mountains was what taught me to see the beauty here at home. While I highly recommend traveling to Canada and Austria, I also recommend taking in the Wasatch Front outside your door. Seek out exotic birds, but appreciate the mallard ducks you see along the way.
It all counts.
I love this! Such a good reminder!