David O'Hara

Peace Candle.

A meditation with ballpoint pen and pocket notebook before church began on Sunday, the second Sunday in Advent.

In class yesterday I told my students that I’ll pay the postage to mail a copy of their final reflections on “how to live well” to them in a year. I think they’ll enjoy re-reading what they wrote, and it will give them a chance to reflect on what progress they’ve made in a year.

I brought envelopes to class and asked students to write their mailing address on the envelopes.

It was a funny moment when we realized that their generation doesn’t really send mail.

A few of them sheepishly asked me to remind them how exactly to format their address on an envelope. They all learned it at some point, but generally enter their address into online forms that take care of the details.

We all laughed, and I heard some of them saying to friends “I can also write in cursive!” They’re “digital natives,” as they say.

Each year fewer students carry paper and pen with them. A few years ago my university replaced its bookstore with a swag store. That still feels like a loss to me, but my students are accustomed to carrying all their books on a digital reader.

I’ve really enjoyed this group of students, and their reflections and conversation about great texts this semester have reminded me why I do this work. I’m going to miss them all.

But I’ll put my return address on the envelopes I send. Who knows? Maybe one or two will send a reply.

One of the family cats. A quick sketch in between grading philosophy papers.

A student in my How To Live Well (Intro to Philosophy) class commented on his final reflection that his beliefs did not change throughout the semester. He did examine them for the first time, he said, and he enjoyed that opportunity, especially since he did so alongside of several classic texts. But he was a little surprised that his beliefs did not change.

I replied to him:

“Great! Sometimes we find that we should change our beliefs, but in general I think our beliefs are like plants in our gardens: a few might be weeds; a few might have grown too big, and need to be pruned back; a few might need to be fertillized, watered, and given better growing conditions. And sometimes we find we want to sow some new seeds, or move plants around a bit to achieve a better arrangement.”

This is his first semester of university, and his first encounter with texts like Plato’s Republic and Augustine’s Confessions. My hunch is that those texts have done a little tilling and pruning, and maybe some new seeds have been planted. Or maybe he just got to see how some other people have gardened their beliefs, giving him some new ideas for how he will cultivate his own garden.

Tomorrow we will have our final class discussion, and I’ve already told the students that the topic is this: now that we have spent a semester considering how we might live well, what do others need from us as they seek to live well also?

And behind that question is another hunch of mine, one that is partly grounded in Plato, Augustine, and many others who had ideas and then wrote them down for others to consider: as Robin Wall Kimmerer and Kathleen Dean Moore have both written in several places: All flourishing is mutual.

Wrestling

Some quick sketches in my pocket notebook from yesterday’s wrestling meet at my university.

Some of these wrestlers study philosophy and environment with me, and they’re as agile of mind as they are on the wrestling mats. Such a delight to watch them use their gifts.

“For ourselves, we shall not trouble you with specious pretenses—either of how we have a right to our empire because we overthrew the Mede, or are now attacking you because of wrong you have done us—and make a long speech which would not be believed; and in return we hope that you, instead of thinking to influence us by saying that you did not join the Spartans, although their colonists, or that you have done us no wrong, will aim at what is feasible, holding in view the real sentiments of us both; since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

– The Athenians in the “Melian Dialogue” in Thucydides 5.89 (from Robert Strassler’s The Landmark Thucydides, an edition I highly recommend.)

Lots of ink has been spilled over this event and over this passage. That last line continues to hit hard:

“the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”

The same idea has been repeated again and again. Thucydides knew it was important to write it down 25 centuries ago, as he knew that the Pelopponesian War was a war full of lessons. So he wrote its history as a ktema es aei, a heritage unto the ages.

And when we read it today, we are struck by the fact that a war that took place so long ago and (for most of us) so far away still sounds like it was full of very human words, and very human acts.

These words are on my mind today as my nation makes sundry choices about where and whether and how to become involved in conflicts around the world. Too often we say things like “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” because it makes a kind of sense.

The question is: does it make the best kind of sense, or merely a convenient and lesser kind?

“Observe your laws, through which especially you have become great.”

– Euryptolemus, in Xenophon’s Hellenika, 1.7.29

“Kallikratidas, annoyed by the delay and angered by his unsuccessful visits to Cyrus, said that the Greeks were most wretched, since they flattered barbarians for the sake of money.”

– Xenophon, Hellenika, 1.6.7

Reading Andrew Ziminski’s words about the Celts of Cornwall, Wales, and Ireland, and their “thin places” where monastic culture thrived and was “known for a religious ideal based around a life of poverty and simplicity, scholarship and a love of nature.” This sounds like my own life and values, and it makes me wonder how much of that I have inherited, passed down in unspoken ways from my Celtic family.

This week I’m reading the final reflections for my intro to philosophy class. I asked students to reflect on their values, where they come from, and what values they hope to cultivate.

Most of my students are saying no one has ever asked them to consider their values before.

And most of them seem to appreciate the opportunity to do so.

Season

Today I resolve to be as ruthful, gruntled, and chalant as possible.

Possibly also kempt and shevelled, but don’t hold your breath on those. I’m rating those as highly unlikely.

Being plussed is an aspiration. Obviously the dual (and contradictory) meanings of “nonplussed” could work to my advantage here.

Eptitude is (at best) an aspiration, but likely beyond my reach. Probably depends on how defatigable I am today.

“The story, not information, is what we inhabit.”

Alison Hawthorne Deming, Writing the Sacred Into the Real

“Experts are trying to commodify your attention. Sketching is a revolutionary act [of owning your own attention].”

– John Muir Laws, at a nature journaling class I took with him this summer

Image: a page from my sketchbook this summer while I was in Oslo. IOW, an image of me owning my own attention.

I told a friend about a potentially career-boosting move I’ve recently made. Since it would change my work but still remain tightly within the structures of the academy, I added that it felt both exciting and tame.

To which he replied: “What doesn’t feel tame?”

Those of us who know him know this is not a rhetorical question for him, but an invitation to think bigger.

So I did. I wrote his question at the top of the page in my journal, uncapped my pen, and let it slide over the page.

Very quickly, a dozen big ideas flowed out.

These are all ideas I’ve been thinking about for a long time.

And they’re all big ones that would involve a bigger risk on my part.

And they’d all require commitment, time, and money.

As for commitment, my heart’s already in these things. My big ideas are about education, conservation, innovation, and serving my community in a way that could scale up and serve many other communities as well. That’s easy.

Finding time would mean leaving my current job (or scaling it back a lot) for most of these. I love teaching, and I love being part of a university, so this is scary. At the same time, higher education is going through the wringer right now, so everything is a bit scary, especially for those of us in the humanities. We believe our disciplines are important; people who have to balance budgets look at getting rid of our departments as easy cost savings.

The money part is perhaps the biggest risk. Despite the rumors that philosophy professors are overpaid, I’m here to assure you that is not the case, at least not for me.

But I’ve got to admit that the dreaming awakens the adventurous side of me.

About ten years ago my wife and I, with the help of a few anonymous colleagues, started an endowment at our university for Native American students. We already had a small endowment to help Native American nursing students.

I wanted one that would help those students who would become storytellers: historians, educators, artists, journalists, pastors, theologians, philosophers—and perhaps most importantly, lawyers.

Tribal elders have told me that one of the big challenges if you live on one of the reservations in South Dakota is that it’s easy to lose land and businesses, hard to pass them on to the next generation. Lawyers who know these things—and who graduate without debt so they don’t have to charge extreme fees—can make a huge difference.

Thanksgiving Day seems as good a day as any to invite you to join me in giving to my students. If you like, www.givecampus.com/campaigns… and then you’ll have to “Select a Designation,” then select “Other,” and then type in “Prairie Sage Endowment.”

I know, it’s clunky. I have no control over that website. But I have some control over my money, my time, and my knowledge, and I gladly give them to my students as I can.

I’m happy to report that each year one or two students (mostly from regional tribal nations) are getting half their tuition paid this way.

I’d love to do more, but big things often start small.

Join me if you can.

(Photo: one of the liatris species native to this part of the prairie. It’s not sage, but I like the way it rises up quietly and delicately, offering beautiful blossoms to the local pollinators, and then sending its seeds into the wind. It’s a perennial, and it will bloom again next year, surrounded by other grasses and forbs with which it shares the space. I took the photo last summer while on a run along the trails at Good Earth State Park, which is in a place where there used to be huge seasonal gatherings of the indigenous peoples of this region. It was like a seasonal city, with thousands of people gathering for a while before moving on. The parks on both sides of the Big Sioux River have some stones and some land art that still tell stories about the gatherings of people who came here perhaps for many centuries.)

Woke up to WhatsApp voicemail from the mother of one of my students. She lives in a small country on the other side of the planet. Wanted to thank me for caring for her daughter, who is my advisee. How to tell her I only wish I could do more to ensure her child’s future?

This semester I’ve had more students talking about how important their faith is to them than I recall hearing in several decades.

Last summer Travis Entenman and Lori Walsh interviewed me for their “Rivers and Rangelands” podcast.

They gave me a challenge: find a soundscape that matches the topic of our conversation.

So that’s what I did. Here’s a link to the podcast, or you can find it in all the usual places.

The location will remain a secret, but if you listen to the end of the podcast we sit without speaking for five minutes (really!) so you can hear where we are.

Academic philosophy can be drily heard in lecture halls and at conferences. But sometimes philosophy sounds like birdsong in a prairie riverbottom, with the wind brushing the tops of the cottonwoods.

Enjoy!

In an act of shameless self-promotion I’ll let you know that if you want to read my best nature writing (so far) my publisher has it on sale until November 30th. Half price and free shipping with the code CONFSHIP (they set that up for some recent academic conferences because we academics buy a lot of books and cannot resist a sale.)

Obviously this makes a great holiday gift for your friends and family. It also encourages the author to keep writing!

Here it is, my book on brook trout, fly-fishing, and conservation: It’s called Downstream, because we all live downstream.

Here, as a freebie, is a photo of a little brook trout I snapped underwater in Vermont two summers ago.

For all my life I have loved rivers and streams. I tromped in them as a boy, flipping over rocks, diving into deep pools, and searching for the delights that clean water carries downstream. For the last twenty years I’ve made research trips and taught classes alongside rivers and lakes and in the ocean, from my native Appalachians to North Africa, Arctic Alaska, and Central and South America. Everywhere I go I ask questions about the fish that live in the water, and all the multitude of lives that are intimately connected to them.

I’ve published several books but this one is probably my favorite. I’ve got another in the works right now that will appear in print next spring, on philosophy and camping. I’ve got some sketches and drafts of a half dozen other books as well. It’s fun to write them and even more fun to see them in print.

I hope you enjoy this book while I work on the next ones!