David O'Hara

Just saw an ad saying that Halloween begins September 24th and I think it was written by Screwtape.

If you’re in Sioux Falls it’s not too late to get down to the river at Cherapa Place to take in the Riverfest. Lots of good food, good music, and great organizations and people to meet!

I was down there volunteering with Friends of the Big Sioux River earlier today, and took the time to do a quick sketch, as I often do. Our riverfront is nicer every year.

This week I gave a series of workshops for the Nebraska Rec and Parks Association (NeRPA). I asked attendees what it was that first helped them to connect with nature, what fostered their love of wild things and their curiosity?

Every one who answered pointed to someone older who brought them outdoors. Most spoke of a father or a grandfather who took them camping, boating, or hiking. Some mentioned Girl Scout leaders who did the same.

What they all had in common: it wasn’t a technology or a technique that brought them into nature; it was a person who shared their love for nature, passing it down from one generation to another.

Selah.

(On my use of the word “selah,” which is probably idiosyncratic.)

Buy physical books. Annotate them. Keep the best ones close at hand and return to them. Buy extra copies to give away.

In the last two weeks I’ve given leadership workshops to professional groups around the Midwest. One thing I keep emphasizing: write down what you don’t know.

Take notes about problems you are trying to solve, about things that cause you to wonder.

The act of writing them down is a helpful step in solving the problems and unraveling the mysteries.

More importantly, it is a shift in mindset from being a leader who knows a few things to being a leader who is still and constantly learning.

The example of leading by thoughtful and sustained curiosity will be more helpful to young colleagues than if they try to imitate your confidence.

This short reflection on some good experiences I have had in physical libraries at St John’s College and at Oxford has quickly and surprisingly become my most popular Substack post. I don’t write much on Substack or Medium, but every now and then something I write in one of those places seems to land with readers.

I should follow up with some more of my archival work at the Wade Center, and in the C.S. Peirce archives. But probably not today.

Yellow-legged mud-dauber wasp. Every day I stop by the garden my students created and have tended for the last seven years, to do some work and to see what’s in there. It’s a small garden but it is full of life. It’s slated to become a parking lot soon, so I continue to show up, to gather seeds, to move the shallow-rooted perennials to whatever refuge I can find for them, and to gather memories and records of the lives that live in and visit that garden. One of my frequent practices is nature journaling, combining images with words, and allowing my wonder to take specific form in words and numbers. Here is a new species, one I think I am seeing for the first time in the garden today.

There’s a good chance that someone out there would benefit from a word of gratitude. Take a moment to thank someone today. It costs so very little, and the ROI on gratitude is both large and long-tailed.

After lunch, a little more time to revisit some photos from my last class in Spain. Sketching and painting reminds me of the detailed work that went into creating some of the great stonework of the past. What do we build today that might compare to it? Each curve, each line, each dimple in stone was cut by human hands.

Spent a few hours yesterday writing a grant to help make my January 2027 class abroad more affordable for my students. All that time writing details about the course itinerary and what we will see and study has me even more eager to return to Morocco and Spain. This morning I woke up wanting to spend a few minutes painting so I took ten minutes to paint this scene from Sevilla. Just a postage-stamp sized sketch, but enough to help me immerse my memory in some beautiful details.

Spent a lot of time “working” in the garden today. Here I document some of my fellow gardeners as evidence that I was out there for a while and getting a lot of things done. Feeling quite good about what I accomplished today, and about the company that I kept while I was out there.

A festival of monarchs (Danaus plexippus) in the campus prairie restoration garden just now. Right now a big wave of monarch butterflies is migrating through our area, part of the annual migration that takes them from Mexico to Canada and back again. Gardens that have late-blooming flowers like sunflowers, Maximilian sunflowers, cup plants, asters, and other kinds of silphium are places where the monarchs can refuel. As we have converted prairie into ag production and then mowed and sprayed “weeds” along highways we have eliminated crucial food sources for the butterflies and for hundreds of other species. Your little garden is like an oasis, an auberge, a hostel, a parador. It is a “city of refuge.” It is an ark.

If you‘re curious about monarch butterfly migration, check out the Project Monarch app, which will let you sacn for Bluetooth tags on butterflies and help create a better map dataset of their movements.

Worship

For any of you who are interested in health care and spiritual care, and who happen to be in my region (Sioux Falls, SD). My colleague and I are the keynotes at Sanford Hospital on October 16th. Details on the attached flyer.

Here’s the cover of my new book. (See previous post.)

This book looks like it would be a great holiday gift for each of your friends.

We live in interesting times in higher education. Fascinating to see the split between techno-optimists and techno-pessimists in academia. Similarly fascinating: some see the current moment as an opportunity for disruption and renewal, while others are doubling down on old systems. I just spent several hours wading through syllabus checklists for a weeklong course abroad that we have taught for almost 40 years. For 21 of those years I have taught it. Most of the course is spent touring sites around Greece. I take the students to museums, to farms, to ancient ruins, to monasteries old and new, to wineries and vineyards, to modern cooking and dance lessons. I have no idea how to capture all the “learning outcomes” in the appropriate verbs. I don’t care whether students use AI on that course (or on my backcountry Alaska course). I don’t feel the need to list my office hours, or the location of the campus writing center, or a number of other things the syllabus checklist requires. The grading feels rather unimportant, provided the students show up and give their attention to the place and to its people.

I do very much care about the students, their growth, and their presence. And I care about Greece, its people, its history and languages, its culture and agriculture, its islands and ocean and fish, its flowers and its churches, the immigrants who arrive, the people who trace their family roots to this land for millennia.

The university provides me a foundation from which to teach these things. I teach not by proferring data but by bringing students along as I continue to learn.

Teaching should not be merely about what tools the students use, nor about what metrics we can contrive to justify our teaching. The proof of the education should be in the students themselves. And the teaching should come not from the techniques and devices of the teacher (very few of us learn how to teach, and fewer still can honestly say they know how to teach others how to teach) but from the teacher’s character. We should show up as the best students in the class. We should exemplify wonder and curiosity. We should ask good questions so that our students can ask even better ones. We should bring students along as we continue to learn, not studying for the exam, but delighting in this world that is our to explore.

…right after I finished that last sketch two hummingbirds flew up. I snapped a few photos and then painted this one. I like the way the colors of thid green and white bird changed against a gray sky.

Weekend sketches in my nature journal. I am once again requiring my students to keep nature journals, and so I am doing the same myself. In fact, I require much more of myself than I do of them, but so far their journals have been wonderful. Each one is drawn and written by hand. I let them use whatever research tools they wish, but they have to begin with observation and sketching. I don’t grade the quality of their art but rather the quantity, believing that practice is more important than worrying about perfection. If they keep sketching, they’ll become better observers of the world around them.

If you were still waiting for evidence that the Great Books can be an excellent education (if they’re done right), here you go:

St John’s College (my alma mater) undergrad alums will receive a triple major in philosophy, literature, and natural science.