The Place You Live
June 19, 2009 | By
I am constantly amazed at how beautiful seemingly innocuous or mundane things are to me. On my drive home from my day job in the evenings I take the same stretch of freeway back to my house, it goes right back the Las Vegas Strip. Usually it’s not dark yet so you don’t get the overwhelming collaboration of bright lights and flashing neon that most people associate with the Las Vegas skyline. Despite the fact that I usually miss the lights and splendor, the Vegas skyline is still incredibly beautiful to me. I think it’s beautiful in the same way that I found the sky lines of Seattle, Denver and even my hometown of Anchorage, Alaska to be beautiful. It is a collection of architecture that makes up the very soul of the city you live in. Every skyline is different, and every sky that it is set against is both different and the same all at once.
I used to get really frustrated sitting in the traffic on the freeway on my way home, until I started noticing how gorgeous my surroundings really were. A lot of people describe Las Vegas as a dust bowl, dirty and oddly uniform in its building designs. All of these things are true if you give it only a cursory glance. In actuality if you really look at the buildings, people and landscape that make up the Las Vegas Valley, it’s very easy to see how the land has shaped the people who live here, how the culture has influenced every aspect of development and how the residents of the sparse Nevadan desert are persistent, clever and passionate people. If recognizing that fact about a place so many people mock and make fun of isn’t inspiring I don’t know what is. 
The real lesson here is to take the spare moments you have; in traffic, in line at the post office, waiting in a doctor’s office, to really look around you. Look at the other people who make up the population with you, take in the scenery and landscape around you. Coming from very lush and green states like Washington and Alaska it took me years to realize that the stuff on the ground around my house in Vegas was even plant life, but now that I see that it’s there. I see that it’s a wonderful fragrant Rosemary shrub. I love the towering palm trees that line the streets here and, even though I’m terribly allergic when the Mulberry trees bloom in Las Vegas, it really is a beautiful sight.
Every place on the planet has its own unique beauty, history and demographic that makes it special. When all else fails you there are immense amounts of inspiration to be had by simply looking out the window, people watching at the grocery store or staring at the sky line while stuck in traffic.
(First image courtesey of Forgotten Beauty, second image courtesy of Sara Norris)
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