David O'Hara

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.

That good feeling of a Rite-in-the-Rain field notebook when it has been in your pocket through a week of drenching rain, splashes by salt water, folded over with each paddle stroke of your kayak, and filled with words and images and diagrams in camp each night and morning.

These notebooks have accompanied me on many trips to wild places, and they do a great job of holding up under the weather’s worst conditions. I have very few excuses not to take notes

For the last week I have been delightfully offline, participating in an Executive Leadership Sea Kayaking Expedition with NOLS or the National Outdoor Leadership School.

I had good company that included leaders from Google, Lockheed Martin, Salesforce, Black Diamond, and a handful of other organizations. The Dean of a business school and I were the only representatives from the ranks of academic leadership, and I think it was good for the two of us to be surrounded by such a diverse group of leaders from outside our guild.

Each day we kayaked in Prince William Sound, paddling to our next campsite, setting up camp, and cooking our meals from basic ingredients, plus water we sourced from waterfalls we found along the fjords or on islands. Our daily routes were about ten miles, sometimes under blue skies, but usually under clouds, and often with some wind and rain that varied from heavy mist to pelting downpours.

We were soaked, sore, cold, and dirty. And it felt amazingly good.

Several days I ended our paddling with a quick swim in water that was slightly warmer than the glaciers from which it had recently melted.

Whales and dolphins marked the beginning and end of our trip, and every day we were greeted by otters and seals.

On our last day of paddling, a pair of young male sea lions followed us for hours, and then watched us make camp for another three or four hours, diving for food and then rising above the gentle waves to snort and to watch us make our own meal on the rocky beach.

At each place we camped, and on each leg of our journey, we figured out how to make do with the simple things we brought, since kayaks don’t have space for much luggage. Tents and sleeping bags and food took up most of our cargo space, with a little room for dry bags with a change of dry socks and an extra puffy jacket to sleep in.

And each day we gathered on a beach, in our matching XtraTufs and our rain gear, to talk about leadership. We shared our stories of workplace successes and challenges. As we journeyed along the coast we told each other about our journeys through life and leadership.

There’s something wonderful that happens when we choose to share such a journey with one another. Adversity that is chosen, in the company of others who willingly embrace the challenge, can make an excellent space for conversation.

Whether we were speaking about the beauty of the glacier across from our campsite, navigating the icebergs it calved, or planning to support one another in case of an earthquake or a wave if the glacier’s face collapsed suddenly, the environment provided a classroom we could not have created in any online forum or any boardroom.

Nature was our campus, our laboratory, our seminar room.

This was my third NOLS course, and physically it was the most challenging. It was also the most challenging professionally. Of course it was excellent continuing education in outdoor leadership and education. But all of us on the course have spent a lot of time in wild places; camping without showers, pooping in the forest in bear country, and cooking on a Whisperlite stove are things we’re accustomed to.

The real challenge (for me, at any rate) came in the form of listening to others’ stories and then comparing them to my own life in academia.

The people I was with were and continue to be gifts, and I’m grateful for the time we spent together and for the generosity of their storytelling in that wonderful place that laid our hearts bare to one another.

Fresh stories can help us reimagine the stories we have already been living.

I’ll have more to say about that soon, but now it’s time for me to catch a plane home, and to return to my ongoing story with a fresh vision of what it could become.

Yesterday’s commute.

Somebody made a ruckus I guess.

In between meetings my sketchbook was at hand and so, one moment at a time, this page filled with studies in a black swallowtail butterfly that graced my garden with its presence today.

The sketchbook is not a camera, and I don’t feel a need to capture every detail. Rather, I aim to study a little bit at a time. The veins in the wings. The colors of the veins as the light shifts. Is it black, or is it purple, or blue? The segments of the abdomen, and how they bend. The difference between the velvet on the thorax and the satin on the abdomen.

Aristotle wrote a treatise “On the Parts of Animals.” It wound up creating entirely new fields of study in philosophy, history, and the sciences.

Today I am grateful for this butterfly, and I have paid my gratitude with attention. One part at a time.

The joy I feel when an alum texts me to say they’re visiting some far-off place of wonder and beauty and it reminded them of the classes we shared together? My heart swells with joy for them, and I find myself getting a little choked up. These moments give me hope.

I know it’s not fashionable to be a teacher these days, and I’m sure someone somewhere is concerned that I am corrupting the youth by sharing with them the things that fill me with wonder and awe. The pay? Not great. The hours? Long, especially at a small private school like mine. The rewards? They just keep coming in, year after year, in the form of alums who are flourishing.

(“Philokaloumen met’euteleias” is a romanization of a phrase used by Pericles in his funeral oration after the first year of the Peloponnesian War, recorded by Thucydides. It means something like “We love the beautiful with frugality.”)

Bug on plant.

Black swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes) on phlox in my garden today. Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

EV charging station at a small trailhead in Maine. Amazing the places you can find these. (Also amazing how many places you cannot find these.)

Buck’s Ledge Trail near Woodstock, Maine. Chargepoint.

Another of my two-color watercolor attempts from last summer when I was just getting started with the technique.

Sunrise with monarch caterpillar on Asclepias.

Experiment with two colors.

Adding to pages as I travel. We are back home, and with the tiring parts of travel behind us I’m looking back over the sketches I made in Vermont and Maine. So good to see old friends, our old home state, our alma mater, and the familiar landscapes of forests, lakes, and mountains.

Another small scene from this week’s trip to Vermont and Maine.

Sketching daily, capturing the small scenes before me.

Chicago’s storms delayed our return from college reunion / anniversary travel by about a day but when we got back we found new life waiting for us in the garden. Pictured: a monarch caterpillar on milkweed and a robin’s egg in a nest.

While canoeing with a friend today this loon popped up a few meters from our canoe. It looked at us for a moment and then vanished beneath the water again. I had time for a quick photo, from which I painted this in white gouache and black watercolor.

All the ponds around here (near Bethel, Maine) seem to have multiple loon nests. It’s wonderful to see them.

Journaling as I hike. The outline of the sketch took me a few seconds. A quick wash of green filled in the land, and some blue gouache gave color to water and sky (the waters above and the waters below). I added notes when we got home from the hike. It could have been a photograph but I forget photographs so quickly. This one sketch—combined with the willingness to keep adding notes—becomes both a record of a fine walk in the woods, and an opportunity to recall and deepen my memories.

A few more flowers. I stopped to sit alongside the trail to paint these. I tried first just with the brush, then I tried sketching before painting. Pretty happy with both results, especially since I was terrible at watercolors two years ago.

Azure bluet. Photographed along the banks of the Androscoggin River yesterday, a river that used to be one of the most polluted in the country and that now is a model of what caring for clean water can accomplish.