The Delight & Insight of 1000 Rubber Ducks

Rivers are my favorite kind of water. I love the ocean and lakes, sure, but I’ll take a rocky, rolling river (extra bonus for a waterfall) every day of the week.

Funny, then, that for a weekend getaway with my sister, we landed in Sperryville, Virginia. My sister found the spot: a small, vibrant town in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains with the Thornton River burbling through it. As an extra bonus, this weekend was the annual Sperryfest which includes The Great Rubber Duck Race down the mighty Thornton.

Ducks warming up for the race.

One thousand rubber ducks are tossed off a bridge at one end of town and whichever one crosses under the bridge at the other end of town first wins. It was without question one of the most adorable and delightful things I’ve seen in years.

The dumping of the ducks. (Photo: Ireland Hayes for Foothills Forum)

As Sebastian the pro river racing duck explains in his interview with the Rappahannock News, the town “started these races as a way to draw attention to the need to clean our rivers and protect our environment, to pick up litter and fight invasive species and protect water quality.”

And, even for me – someone who loves rivers and is committed to protecting the environment – it worked. The Great Rubber Duck Race literally threw in something both familiar and unexpected which helped me look at the Thornton River differently.

Watching a waddling of ducks cruise down the river helped me notice how clean the water looked (and cold! when I saw kiddos wading in) and that there was no Japanese Knotweed or other invasives (that I recognized). I noticed the trees that were down (those ducks were so skilled, they didn’t get caught up…mostly) and a series of small waterfalls. I’d seen the river in passing but a thousand rubber ducks made me look at the river more tenderly and with more curiosity.

Consider how introducing something different or familiar but out of context (like bathtub duckies in a river) can shift attention, awareness and appreciation in other arenas.

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For more photos of The Great Rubber Duck Race, go here. And for a few short videos, go here.

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Next week we’ll look at how my perspective on racism was shifted in just this way.

Drawing Again...

Note: I’m taking a break from the Gentle Rewilding series first to go to the ocean and then, as it turns out to draw. If you’d like to catch up on the Gentle Rewilding series – an exploration of ways to reconnect to our human design – you can find them below. I’ll resume with Gentle Rewilding of Hips on Oct 5...unless I don’t.

* Find Part 1 – Gentle Rewilding & Feet here.

* Find Part 2 – Gentle Rewilding: Hands here.

* Find Part 3 – Gentle Rewilding: Spine here.

* Find Part 4 – Gentle Rewilding: Shoulders here.

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Last week, we went to the ocean. We packed our little camper, drove to South Carolina and for a week hung out on the edge of the Eastern Seaboard.

I’ve been thinking a lot about space and time – specifically MY space and MY time. What do I want to be doing? How do I want to be spending my days? Am I being carried by habit or passion or both? What does it mean to use my time well? What does it mean to live my life well?

In such a swirl of questions, having a week to watch the waves and the shore birds and *eek* the alligators, was deeply welcome.

Liza Donnelly (thanks for the reminder, Kate Bennis) is a beloved and long-time New Yorker cartoonist and I’ve been following her for the past couple of months. Watching her draw and talk about the art and craft of cartooning reawakened my love of doodling and drawing. Since I was a kid reading Peanuts and then a ‘tween scouring the New Yorker for the cartoons (even when I only got about 40% of them), I’ve wanted to make art that delights.

A few years ago, I dove into this dream by making two books – Buddha Cat and Octobusy – and other art that blends images, color and words. But since the pandemic and becoming a solopreneur, my art-making has taken a back seat. The way back seat. I get ideas and start something but then the busyness of days pushes it back into the drawer.

On our first day on our trip to the ocean, driving through North Carolina, we passed a flea market and Frank offhandedly mused, “Why do they call it a flea market?” (Note: There is a general agreement that the term 'Flea Market' is a literal translation of the French marché aux puces, an outdoor bazaar in Paris, France, named after those pesky little parasites of the order Siphonaptera (or "wingless bloodsucker") that infested the upholstery of old furniture brought out for sale. Source: Wikipedia)

When we got to the campground, I found a scrap of paper and a kinda shitty pen and drew this:

It was silly. And yet it had me looking at everything differently. I was looking for funny and delightful things to draw.

Plovers. Plovers are funny. Plovers are little shore birds that oddly seem averse to getting their feet wet. They run to the edge of the waves, niggle some sort of food item out of the sand and then scurry their little feet away from the waves again. It’s hilarious and I could watch them all day.

Also hilarious: little dogs at the beach. They too seem disinclined to get their feet wet and also whir their little legs to outmaneuver the water. So I drew this:

Pelicans delight me no end. What with their gangly bodies, unruly beak-sacks and spectacular dives for their dinner, I’m constantly pointing and ridiculously saying, “Oooh! Pelicans!” As a kid someone told me that after a lifetime of plunging into the sea head first, Brown Pelicans will eventually go blind. Turns out that’s a myth. Which, yay for that, but even so, this is what I drew:

Until this week, I’d never seen an alligator in its natural environment. At Huntington Beach State Park, it’s a regular occurrence. I’m a total scaredy pants when it comes to most reptiles (not turtles, I love turtles) and big, fast-moving ones with 80 teeth are no exception. I squealed and squeaked every time one came into view. So when I saw the big sign at the entrance to the park that read “FEEDING ALLIGATORS PROHIBITED BY LAW,” it completely cracked me up. So I drew this:

Now that we’re home, I’m playing with giving myself time to draw what delights and amuses me. We went for a hike and Frank (who was walking ahead of me) got tangled in about eleventy billion spider webs. I discovered that there are spiders every-freaking-where in the fall because it’s dating time:

Now that we’re home, we’re back to doing chores like scooping the cat box and vacuuming. Frank loves the Roomba to supplement his excellent housekeeping skills but Phoenix (the aforementioned Buddha Cat) thinks we have adopted the dumbest pet ever.

Phoenix is absolutely not afraid of the Roomba but I got delighted by the idea of having a cat on my head, so…

All this to say (or to draw): turn toward delight. If the one thing I keep not doing is something that lends effervescence to my days, it’s worth rethinking the whole thing. Turn toward delight, friends. It’s what connects us to ourselves, each other and being human.

Delight

It is joy by which the labor that will make the life that I want, possible. It is not at all puzzling to me that joy is possible in the midst of difficulty. ~ Ross Gay

When I first heard Ross Gay’s interview with Krista Tippett on the On Being podcast, it was the summer of 2019 and the world was a mess. Ross Gay had just published his book of essays, The Book of Delights, and the notion of delight, especially as interpreted by a poet of color, intrigued me. My question was exactly the one with which Krista Tippett introduced the interview:

There’s a question floating around the world right now — how can we be joyful in a moment like this? To which Ross Gay responds in word and deed, how can we not be joyful, especially in a moment like this? 

In 2020, after reading Ross Gay’s book (and working with coach Tiffany Han), I began intentionally noticing delight on the daily. I’ve written recently about my feelings of being stuck and slipping and through it all, at the end of every sometimes odd, sometimes confusing, sometimes craptastic day, I connect with at least one thing that delighted me.

I was curious to go back to the interview and see how Ross Gay defines “delight,” and I was (yes) delighted to find this:

Tippett: And then you also point out that the word “delight” suggests both “of light” and “without light,” which kind of points back at what you were just talking about.

Gay: Exactly, exactly. The delightful things that I’m talking about in this book, so often, when they’re there, they also imply their absence.

Tippett: Have you thought much about what is the distinction between delight, pleasure — I don’t know. Something people talk about a lot now is gratitude, a practice of gratitude. And it strikes me that this practice of daily delight has a kinship with that, but it’s slightly different. I don’t know. Did you think about what really focusing on the word “delight” meant, for you?

Gay: It just came in my ear. Something delighted me, and I was like, oh, it’d be a neat thing to write essays every day for a year about something that delighted me. It came in my ear. It wasn’t until literally the last day of writing that someone sent me a card for my birthday and told me what the etymology of delight was. And I was like, “Oh, I didn’t even look up the word yet.”

The intuitive looseness with which he holds not just the practice of noticing delight but the writing of daily essays and an actual book, totally delights me. As a recovering English major, I’m always running to the dictionary so I’m precisely sure what I’m actually talking about but instead, he let the word and the feeling “come in his ear.”

He reminds me that I can trust myself, my feeling about something rather than making sure I’ve got it right. Delight feels a certain way in my body. I felt it yesterday when a fat bluebird landed in a window feeder. If I trust myself, that feeling is all I need to know.

Last night I was considering why I continue to do a delight practice every day. Why do I spend the whole day looking for what delight I’ll add to my journal? My reason is that I want to strengthen my delight muscle. I want to find more delight around me.

Tippett: What surprised you, in the process of moving through that year and moving through that year looking for delight and writing about delight every day?

Gay: Many things surprised me, I suppose. But one of the things that surprised me was how quickly the study of delight made delight more evident. That was really quick. [laughs] And I wasn’t sure; I was a little bit like, “This is gonna be hard, to just have something delightful happen every day.”

Tippett: You said somewhere that you developed a delight radar or a delight muscle. Well, it seems to me it’s kind of the inverse, or the opposite experience from going to the therapist every week, where you’re saving up things [laughs] that illustrate your neurosis. And you were doing the opposite.

[laughter]

Gay: Exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it’s fun. It was fun.

It is fun.

A crowd of brown leaves chasing each other across a windy winding road. The smell of grapefruit. My cat curling herself into the curve of my waist. That fat bluebird.

Twentieth Century American Trappist monk, poet, social activist and scholar, Thomas Merton wrote:

No despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there...We are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance.

For me, to choose to find delight in all my days is a way to “join in the general dance.”

Our days are both “of light” and “without light.” No matter what else is going on, delight is still all around. I only have to remember to look.