The ugly duckling
Mysterious beauty, ugly ducklings, and the importance of remembering our humanness.
The ugly duckling
26 Aug, 2023
We begin this letter with recordings of two birds that make their home by my favorite lake. The first bird is a male, always somehow mysteriously at the far end of the lake. Can you hear his call in the distance? The black-throated loon. The second bird will be a more familiar tune. Enjoy.
😂❤️
So I took these two observations, and with them, I let my mind play. Out of it grew the following letter to you.
We all know the inspiring story of the ugly duckling who grew up to be a beautiful swan. But who of us knows the story about the ugly duckling... who grew up to be an ugly duck?
She spent her entire life nibbling for insects and her call rang with a sound reminiscent of her distant frog cousins. She was a modest brown or gray and often seen in big groups of birds who all looked and sounded exactly like her. A loud, unmoderated quacking.
In our wishful psyches, we tend to long to be a swan. Or a loon. We rather have our voice echo far into the silent forest, than be laughed at for our ugly and cheeky display. Perhaps it is a loving laugh, but still... condescendingly, no?
Nature does seem to display some examples of lone metaphors of beauty. But look again and be struck by nature's display of humble multitude, void of that individualized focus and obsession that we take for granted.
The Buddha famously raised a lotus plant into the air. It grows out of the gooey multitude of the pond's dark mud. Mostly blind to the natural browns and grays that cover the entire surface of our planet, we cut the flower by its head and bring it into our homes. Naturally, it withers and dies.
The other week I found myself fortunate to be visited by a butterfly. A fairly big one. Most of it a dark, almost black, brown. But there were some spots of blue and a white lining along the entirety of its wings. It came and landed many times on my porch, even on my hand, and I felt blessed by its presence. The next day I took a drive along the forest road leading into town. Along the road swarmed countless individuals of exactly that butterfly. Hundreds and hundreds. My heart squashed as I involuntarily squashed many of them with my heavy car.
When you mix all colors of light, you get pristine white. But when we mix all colors of this material world that we inhabit, we come back to our brown. The home of the multitude. The humble ground of our lives.
Surely, a few clear colors can and should be carefully distilled. And are we not all unique in certain ways that glean out of the brown mud of our humanness. But the one who forgets his brownness, forgets almost all of who he is. The one who disowns his ground.. Won't he inevitably come to wither?
With love,
Alexander
PS. I wrote this text almost two years ago. I want to share with you how I came to post it now. I was eating raw tofu. As I was chewing one of the tofu pieces, somehow its gummy texture squeaked against my tooth. In my brain - perfectly reconstructed - I heard a short moment of a cheeky quack: The female mallard (wild duck) in this post. Naturally, I broke down laughing. And also naturally, this text held a beautiful timely message for me. Maybe it did also for you ❤️