David O'Hara

Three sketches, one from a wedding rehearsal.

One of my simple ideas for improving my sketches is this: keep sketching.

In practice, this means that some of my sketches are hasty and simple. I am not in the least bit ashamed of them, because each one is another moment in which I was actually sketching.

As with almost everything else, practice teaches better than waiting for time to do things perfectly. Doing a little now beats dreaming of a time when you can do a lot.

When I teach others to make nature journals, I often begin by having them make random marks on a sheet of paper. There, I tell them. That sheet is now a mess, which means you’re free to do whatever you want with it, and you’re also free from the silly hope that this, your first sketch, will look like a photograph.

Here are three pages in my sketchbook from the last few days. One is of quick line gestures while waiting for a friend to meet me for lunch at Bread and Circus in Sioux Falls. Another has a few quick sketches of a dog named Fred who was waiting for his man to finish his coffee at M.B. Haskett. The third is one that I made yesterday in Yankton, South Dakota, while at a wedding rehearsal. I am not part of the wedding party, but my wife is the officiant, so I was free for an hour or so to capture the interior of Christ Church, one of the oldest Episcopal churches in the Dakotas.

They vary in detail, and you can see one of them has watercolor paint on it as well. They took me between a few seconds and an hour to make. And they all belong in the same sketchbook, because the aim was not to make great art, but to make me a better observer. In that regard, they are all equal successes.

Now get out there and make some marks on a page. And don’t worry about what they add up to. They add up to you getting just a little better at making marks on a page, and at observing the world as you do so.

Coffee in the garden this morning, listening to the wrens scold the dog as he makes his rounds. I’ve built my garden in part so the dog has lots of places to explore. It’s a small garden but he finds lots of ways to amuse himself. One of those ways, evidently, involves annoying the wrens.

New books in today’s mail. Good times ahead. Especially excited about the new mussel ecology book!

Damselfly in the Prairie Restoration Garden at work today.

Five years ago this month I was teaching my students how to survive in the wilderness during a three week nature writing course in backcountry Alaska. Such good memories!

Two weeks after returning from my NOLS sea kayaking course in Alaska I am still reflecting on this one kelp with its holdfast attached to a small rock.

The holdfast reminded me of one of my favorite environmental philosophers, Kathleen Dean Moore—and especially of her essay “Holdfast” in her book by the same name.

It is an essay about connectedness and our relationships to the natural world.

Even more, it is about being a parent of a human child who does not have a holdfast, and who is free to move away from home.

Such a wonderful thing, and also such a hard thing.

We humans don’t have physical roots or holdfasts. But we can have attention, love, care. We can notice. We can ask good questions.

We can embrace one another literally, and we can hold fast to one another in prayer without ceasing, in memory, in holding one another in the light and in our hearts.

This one moment at low tide on an island in Prince William Sound is on my mind and in my heart this morning, and so I took time to remember the place, and the people I was with, holding them in my heart as my pen and brush called the memory back to the center of my attention.

Two hummingbirds on one of my garden trellises.

I made the trellises from 16’ cattle panels, and use them to grow beans, pumpkins, and grapes. And of course some clematis and morning glories.

Since pulling all those ticks off the dog yesterday I’ve been looking at some of them more closely under the microscope.

Before this week, I’ve never looked at the details of their mouthparts, or of their claws.

You might not find this appealing, but I often find that the more closely I look at the things that initially disgust me the more interesting (and even delightful) they can become.

Not always, but often enough to make me keep looking with interest.

The first image is an update of an image I posted yesterday. As I learn more, I often go back to old nature journal entries and add to them.

The second image is a response to a question that formed in my mind as I made the first image: what are their feet like?

The third image came about when I flipped one tick over and began to look at its underside, and then started looking up answers as the tick’s anatomy raised more questions for me!

This might be an argument against allowing me to have my own microscopes. But I am having fun learning, and I am marveling at the details of these tiny creatures.

Holding a pine cone with one hand while sketching it with the other. Nature is full of delights.

When life gives you ticks, that means you have a new species to sketch!

Pocket notebooks.

“Have you pen and ink, Master Doctor?”

“A scholar is never without them, your Majesty,” answered Doctor Cornelius.

– C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian, ch. 13

Yesterday I visited the Wheaton College Field Station (formerly the Wheaton College Science Station; they’re introducing a broader range of environmental classes that include the humanities) near Rapid City, South Dakota.

I first heard about this place from my friend Joel, who studied there as an undergraduate. We met in grad school in Pennsylvania, and he spoke highly of the immersive educational experience he had. Far from the distractions of campus life, he could step outside his cabin and onto hiking trails, or walk down to Rapid Creek, or go to the small labs and library on the field station campus.

So for a quarter of a century since Joel and I met, I’ve been wanting to check this place out. I often teach in the Black Hills, but usually when I do the trunk of my car is my portable lab and library (as it is right now, with a milk crate full of field guides and an assortment of tools for teaching ecology at our church camp.) I have often urged my own institution to let me found a field station for our own school, but budgets are always tight, etc. More recently I’ve considered buying or making a long-term lease on some other property out here to start my own lab and school that could operate as an extension of the teaching I do on campus. I’m not sure that will ever happen, but a guy likes to dream.

In the attached photo you will see some of the reasons this week became the occasion for my visit. First, @dswanson. We met through this platform, and he reached out to me as he was traveling to the Wheaton campus as part of his sabbatical. I’m so glad he did! We met in Sioux Falls for a meal, and yesterday we met for several more. He also brought along Ben Lowe, the Executive Director of A Rocha USA whom I’ve also known only digitally. I love it when online platforms make IRL connections happen. The other two folks in the photo are the Director and Assistant Director of the Field Station. The Assistant Director is formerly the Director, who has recently taken a back seat to help onboard the new Director. And he knows my friend Joel!

Yesterday was a day of fun conversation about faith and creation care, about our hopes for our planet and all who share it with us. And it was a good day for sharing a few meals with new friends. And for dreaming of the good things we might be able to foster in our lifetimes, Deo volente.

Morning sketch: yellow-bellied marmot in the Paha Sapa (Black Hills) of South Dakota.

Spending the week at Thunderhead Episcopal Camp in the Paha Sapa (Black Hills). Part of my role as Canon of Creation Care for the Diocese involves teaching ecology and faith. And part of my teaching involves paying close attention and inviting others to join me. Here’s a little of what I’ve been paying attention to this week.

Morning breakfast at M. B. Haskett in Sioux Falls with @dswanson. Hopefully the first of many more conversations and shared meals.

Turkeys on the Concordia College campus this week.

I was there for the Summer Institute in American Philosophy. I gave a short workshop on nature journaling and the philosophy of Henry Bugbee and Charles Sanders Peirce.

When I arrived on campus I was surprised to see a number of groups of turkeys wandering the grounds. So naturally, I took out My sketchbook and made a few quick sketches before heading to my session.

(The Concordia mascot is Kernel Cobb, and Concordia fans are called Cobbers, hence the tItle of this post.)

A snapping turtle. An acquaintance pointed this one out to me. It appeared to have died and it was floating in just a few inches of water. Even in death it was beautiful, and I wanted to honor its beauty with a sketch.

Long Lake, MN near the Concordia College Biology Field Station this week.

(Update: a biologist i spoke to said he would contact anOther biologist who would work our the cause of death.)

Moonrise Cafe, Fargo, ND. Handmade blueberry coconut poptart. Is this health food? Maybe not the kind a medical professional would prescribe but it sure feels good to eat it.

• Libraries, when you’re searching for one book but browse the books on adjacent shelves
• Watching people, with wonder and curiosity and love, as you sit on a bench in a park or an airport
• Gravel bars at the mouths of rivers
• The OED, not just for the definitions of words, but also for the stories of words
• Floating over a patch reef, mask down, barely moving, as the juvenile damselfish guard their little farms, as a reef squid’s chromatophores pulse nearby
• Secondhand bookstores, especially when they are only loosely organized
• Flea markets in small towns
• Gently flipping logs in the Appalachian mountains
• Newspaper stands in Madrid in the late 1980s, with news in so many languages, and I only have a few coins so I have to choose one paper
• Printed encyclopedias on my childhood home’s shelves
• Flânerie, at home or abroad
• Scripture
• Museums, curated by those who know they don’t yet know how wonderful it all is
• Coffee shops and local eateries frequented by people who might not otherwise gather together
• Anyone with a sketchbook in hand
• Footnotes written by someone who knows so much more, and who wants to at least gesture towards more sources you might like
• Wiktionary, with animated brush strokes for the Chinese characters
• Epic poems that have survived many generations
• Tide pools
• My father’s workshop (with oscilloscope), and my grandfather’s workbench (with tools that slowly reveal their workings as I turn them over in my hands)
• The underside of a leaf, where the insects hide their eggs, where the frog’s feet adhere, where the butterfly sleeps
• Family Bibles with bookmarks and mementos and notes from centuries ago
• Van Nostrand’s Scientific Encyclopedia
• Novels that will never be called “important” by modern reviewers
• Following the gaze of an infant who is unashamed to admit that this whole world is new and wild and fascinating.

While flying in a holding pattern over Minnesota this evening, waiting for the weather to let us land, I decided to do a quick sketch from a photo I took yesterday. I did not realize it but the couple sitting next to me were watching as I sketched. Before we landed we started to chat about our short connections to make it home, and about their trip to Alaska. By this point my sketchbook was put away. One of them casually remarked, “So I guess you’re a professional artist.” The other added “I would do what you do if I could but I don’t have an artistic bone in my body!”

For the record, I started sketching seriously about two years ago. I’ve taken two very short classes since then, totaling eight days of instruction.

You have artistic bones in your bodies, my friends. You can do it just as I do. All it takes is a willingness to keep trying. You have an inner critic — we all do, I think — that tells you you’re no good. It’s trying to help you by saving you from shame. It doesn’t realize that it is motivated by the wrong type of fear. You have nothing to fear. You have a short life. Make some art. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t have to please other eyes. Let it simply be your modest and imperfect little love letter to this amazing world we inhabit for a little while.

You don’t need special art tools. Just pick up a pencil or a marker or a crayon and make some marks. They’re good enough for today. Maybe tomorrow they’ll be better. Who cares? They don’t have to be. Tomorrow can worry about itself. Just make some marks, and let yourself fall in love again, like you did when this world was all still new to you.

You can do this.