About the Duckies Rule! Kingdom.
A few years back, we started decorating our garden in West Seattle, Washington, with duckies dressed and styled for the holidays. Over the years, the rubber ducky population has increased, and has gotten even more creative as each holiday has arrived. Our neighbors, friends, and even some very nice strangers have insisted that we create and publish calendars, cards, and other products that would allow them to remember and treasure the ducky sights they have seen. So, here it is. The Duckies Rule! Kingdom on the Internet has been established and we will be doing our very best to keep it creative, silly, quirky, funny, mildly intellectual, and all-around loving and fun. The loveable duckies of the Duckies Rule! Kingdom hope to keep you smiling throughout the year. Duckies Rule! is for the "kid" in all of us. As questions come to us that we think should be answered on this page as Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), we will post. Right now one of our most FAQs is "Where did the obsession with duckies come from?" I wish I knew the full answer to that. Some friends have suggested a Freudian interpretation related to yearning for younger years -- immortality so to speak. I suppose for "older adults" such as myself, this could be a "deeper" interpretation. However, to put it more simply, I think rubber duckies are symbolic of freshness, a sense of humor ("water off a duck's back"), resilience, endurance, and love of water. My most frequently used Internet screen name for posting messages and videos is "Duckitude." What is "duckitude," you ask? Believe it or not, Eckhart Tolle, the author of "A New Earth" and "The Power of Now," has the answer for us. In both books, Eckhart Tolle observes that when two ducks get into a tussle, they end it by flapping their wings and swimming off. As far as he can tell, they don’t stay mad – they don’t carry a grudge. They flap their wings and get on with life. The "duck lesson," according to Tolle is "Flap your wings, which translates as 'let go of the story.'" The human mind, in other words, often gets attached to the story and relives it over and over again, thus, living mostly in the past and not in the present.
I'm not so sure about my freshness or endurance, but I let the "rain" roll off my back (laugh a lot) and I love oceans and lakes. In that sense, I am at least one-half ducky. I count that as lucky. And, I feel like one lucky ducky living next to the Puget Sound in the wonderful, and often wet, Northwest.
-- Best wishes, Ron Sterling
Updated August 28, 2008
