David O'Hara

Went looking for sources on the life of Pontius Pilate and the internet kept pointing me towards exercise regimens that happen to be spelled like the Roman cognomen. Argh.

With each new book I read, I am reminded how little I know.

This week our college library is having a used book sale. It’s one of the best events of the year on campus. I always run into lots of friends, colleagues, students. We’re all in the same mode, looking for those physical copies of great texts worth owning. Someone picks up a copy of a Shakespeare play. Someone else notices a commentary and says out loud, “Oh, I know who would LOVE this!” It’s fifty cents for paperbacks, a dollar for hardcovers, so it’s easy to buy gifts for everyone.

Black Hills history, and some USGS reports on local hydrology. An English professor shows me some large scale block prints, signed by the artist. Free. She’s thrilled, and I’m thrilled for her.

Students peruse the LPs discarded by an older generation, scoring classic sounds on vinyl.

An elementary school teacher browses the children’s books, shopping for her classroom. Others shop alongside her, and people point out books to each other.

I run into a favorite student (can I say “favorite student”? I like them all, really) and we compare the books we are struggling to hold as we peruse the tables. We have some of the same authors in hand, and we congratulate each other as a new bond forms between teacher and student; now we are both fellow readers, and we share a secret: this author is worth our time.

A colleague who first introduces me to Graham Greene greets me and I tell him where I saw a bunch of Greene. I bought only the one I thought he already had. He grins and shows me the rest of the volumes already under his arm. He found them not long after I found them, and snatched them up. We take a moment to chat about our favorite Greene titles. Both of us really like “Our Man in Havana” and “The Quiet American.” I think I’ve quoted both of them in some of my published essays, and I have Will to thank for that.

But we don’t chat long, because there are more books to find. It’s not a competition, but it is also a little competitive. It’s convivial, and we all know it: we are in this together, the race to find and preserve and enjoy and share texts that have made us who we are, and that are continuing to make us something new.

I always look for texts in classical and ancestral languages, but this time I only find one, an edition of Catullus. I snag it, of course, but I wish I had found some good texts in Sanskrit. I’d love to find some Classical Chinese texts, too, and some more Greek texts to complement the shelves in my office. Old Norse, Old Icelandic, Old English? Yes, please. But none come to light. Maybe at the next table.

Slowly, texts like those seem to be vanishing. When I first started teaching in Greece I brough a small bag full of Greek texts to share with my students while we were abroad. When the Kindle appeared I thought I’d save some weight, but no, the texts I wanted were not available in digital form. They just don’t sell enough copies. Now of course I can find those texts online, and my cell plan covers me in Europe now. But I wonder how long the digital archives will last. The Cloud, after all, is just hard drives that belong to other people. Which means other people are deciding whether to keep maintaining them. Libraries might someday vanish not in an Alexandrian fire or in a Fahrenheit 451 raid, but simply because the books aren’t being read enough to pay for the digital storage. Libraries are often forced to cull their collections, and I sometimes go into the library and remove books from the shelves and place them in the reshelving area so that they are logged as books that people still care about.

The ladies at the door have a metal box with cash in it, and that feels quaint and old fashioned. I hand them a twenty for my eleven dollars' worth of books, a stack so large I can hardly hold it. In addition to the Greene and Catullus, a few volumes of Hannah Arendt, an edited volume of early Christian literature, a volume of poems by Ted Kooser, a few books about philosophy, religion, and science. Some field guides, and yeah, I bought those USGS hydrology books because mni wiconi, water is life.

One of the ladies hands me my change and tells me I haven’t bought as many books as last year. It’s true. My shelves are running over both at home and in my office. I remember that this sale benefits the library, and helps to maintain the collection, so I hand over a few more dollars and buy a reusable book bag with the library logo branded on the side. I slip the books in the bag and head for my car. I might come back tomorrow. There’s still a little room on the shelves, I think.

Image: a small section of the bookstore at my alma mater, St John’s College in Santa Fe, NM. It’s one of the only college bookstores I know that sells such a fine selection of texts in Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek.

It’s easy to point out others' sins, much harder to confront my own.

I have very little sympathy for the belief that the biggest problems in the world are all in other people.

“A crime is something someone else commits.”

John Steinbeck, _The Winter of Our Discontent. _ (1961) 258 (New York: Penguin, 1996)

We live lives of incredible wonder.

The universe is constantly revealing new things to us.

One gift we can give ourselves is to slow down to look, to listen.

One gift we can give to others is to help them to do the same.

One of the joys of teaching is continuing to learn. I’ve been teaching about hymenoptera (bees, wasps, hornets, ants) for several years. I am a beekeeper with bees on campus; I maintain habitat for native bees; and I teach about leafcutter ants. And I’ve been teaching field ecology with my Mayan partners in Guatemala for almost two decades. But I only recently learned that the Mayans kept indigenous bees for honey. We get so focused on ants in Guatemala we forget to pay attention to the bees! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meli…

Democracy requires:

• liberal education
• unfettered journalism
• public defenders

Happy to report that I got a rejection letter from a writing fellowship I applied for.

Not happy about the rejection; but I’m happy that I applied.

I’m not aiming for perfection; I’m aiming for improvement.

Make art.

It’s good for your soul, your mind, your body.

Don’t worry about whether it looks like other people’s art.

Two weeks ago an artist I met for the first time told me he uses Rapidograph pens. “Triple zero points!” he said. I do like fine pens.

In my hard drives I have half a million photos.

The camera opens and closes a little window and grabs all the light it can in that moment. Small points on a sensor each play their role and grab their little bit, registering intensity and wavelength. Processors tag each bit of measured light with coordinates on a two-dimensional plane, framed by straight lines and right angles.

And this all seems normal to us because we have done it so often.

We do not think about the lines and angles and coordinates even though our own biology does not perceive the world like that.

We have two eyes, resulting in binocular vision with depth perception, 3D images; the camera has only one eye. We have eyes able to see motion in part of the eye and precision in another. And we have a visual cortex that makes some sense of all of this, and sends that sense on to connect with what we hear, feel, smell, taste. All our body’s senses come together in a “common sense.”

Here I hold this mussel shell in my hand. It is semi-fossil, meaning there is no living tissue left in it, at least none of the tissue we thought of as mussel. It has many other lives on it, bacteria and algae and other microscopic organisms. What I see is nacre, lustrous and pearlescent. I also see that it is covered by black-and-brown flaking skin, and I wonder if I should peel it off to show the true nature of the mussel shell. This is what we have done with buttons, after all.

And with gemstones: we cut off the outside to make the inside shine for eyes like our own. We approach the rough natural world with lapidary tools, murdering to dissect, dissecting to find gems. We cast aside the organic and the soft tissue in hopes of finding the hard and enduring treasure inside, the diamond in the rough, the pearl in the shell, the treasure inside the tomb. Never mind the body; we want only the things that glisten.

Nate has jars of soft tissue on his shelves. I am here for a class on unionidae, and I am overwhelmed by how little I have noticed before, by how much there is to see in such a small space. Few who come to his museum ever look at that soft tissue; most of Nate’s students are there to learn the shells to make money by digging holes for bridge footings, or by consulting with those who need to comply with the law.

What does it mean to contemplate this mussel shell in my hand? Let us begin to consider what it is that I hold. We ask questions like “What is it for? What good is it? What does it do? Can you eat it?” We think with our guts, with our appetitive soul.

But we can also allow ourselves to be silent, and to consider what the shell says about itself.

The question “What is it for?” begins to feel foolish and rude.

This is hard work, asking questions of a mute shell! How can I hear its replies? Where to begin? I sometimes begin by sketching it. To photograph it is to let the camera “See” and to register the coordinates of pixels smacked by photons. To sketch it is dissatisfying because it never looks like the thing we see unless we are very good artists.

But if I sketch I slow down, and I let my hand holding the pen tell my eye whether it is seeing well or only seeing what it thinks it sees. I am no longer trying to move at the speed of light, as I hope my camera will do.

We often think we see what we do not see; we see some light, and then we fill in the gaps. We all have blind spots, and we no longer see them. And then we think we are not blind. We are all above average by our own estimation.

Gaylord Schanilec engraved “Unionidae Upstream” and “Unionidae Downstream.” Two engravings, framed together as one. As I look at this on the wall of the gallery I see: here is a threehorn wartyback; here are two semi fossil shells of different sexes. Maybe giant floaters. I am aware that most people don’t know the word “unionidae.” Most will not see that these three semifossil shells are two species, two sexes. They look like gray lumps. Until you see the lines.

I am starting to see. I look for the growth lines, and I know: they are not like tree rings, showing seasons of weather; they show seasons of growth, following the nutrients of the stream rather than the hours of sunlight. Similar, but different. Shanilec’s Rapidograph pen has traced the lines very finely indeed.

But this is not about making art; it is about making my mind start to see its own unseeing. It is about reminding myself that I see bits of light, fill in the gaps, and believe that what I have synthesized unthinkingly is now something known. I glance at the world and think I now own a fact. My ocular vision is my truth, or so I am tempted to think.

But the shell in my hand as I stand by the river has only begun to speak. It is not just speaking itself, showing its layers, showing its death. It is also asking me questions about itself: why am I here, in your hand? Why am I open, my muscles and connective tissue gone? Why am I only bones, in this riverbed? And then: how long ago did I die? Are there more like me? Am I a fossil? Am I extinct?

And now the harder questions: Why am I holding this shell? What drew me to it? Why do I think part of it is lovely? What does that tell me about myself? What role did I play in its death? How are our lives connected?

And the slowness of contemplating these questions begins to reveal me to myself.

Made a few sketches in my journal this weekend. One sketch was after a paragraph about migration to my city and its growing population.

The other sketch was about government corruption.

I didn’t intend the images to line up like this; both were just images of birds I saw while hiking this weekend. But the migration paragraph was followed by the image of migrating waterfowl, and the corruption paragraph was followed by an image of a woodpecker looking for insects in the branch it was perched on.

At lunch with an artist friend the other day we started talking about watercolors and he told me he had something to show me: his new Escoda brushes from Pablo Rubén. The brushes are beautiful by themselves, but he tells me they’ve changed the way he paints. He showed me some of his recent work and I can see the difference already.

This came up because we were talking about the inflection point at which it makes sense to buy better tools. I have often resisted buying better guitars until I feel I have played the ones I have to some kind of limit. But it’s hard to know: is this a limit of the instrument, or do I need to pay a different kind of attention to how I play?

Pretty sure I’ll be buying better watercolor paints soon, but for now I’m going to stick with my cheap brushes. (I mostly use brushes that have plastic reservoirs so I can quickly paint while hiking.)

Still, I’m making a note that it might not be long before I need to get some better brushes, too.

Last year I led a private, online discussion of Thucydides. Amazing experience. Thinking of starting up again.

Prairie.

This is a lovely book, written by my friend and co-author, Matthew Dickerson, and illustrated by Matthew Clark with simple but enticing woodcuts and sketches.

Dickerson is a computer science professor, but also a poet, musician, novelist, and wonder-walker in this wonderful world we share. And he is attentive to nature and to his own spiritual journey in a way that invites readers to attend to our own inner lives and the world around us.

A study of one of the oxbows on the Big Sioux River. I sketched this yesterday from a photo I took this past weekend.

Two recent pages from my pocket sketchbook. One is from last week’s trip to the Paha Sapa (Black Hills); the other is from this morning’s walk along the Big Sioux River.

Aside, I am impressed by the way micro.blog generates the alt text. Makes me feel like a better artist! Thanks, @manton !

Sketching is a good practice for me. When I take a photo, I am instructing the light sensor to take in light. But when I sketch, I am forced to ask myself: what do I actually see? This is very different from asking what I think I see. And the sketch shows me whether what I see comes close to what I think I see.

A little more about Bio-Itzá, by my favorite photographer. Click the video link to hear my late mentor, Reginaldo Chayax Huex, speak Itzá. He was one of the last people to hear his ancestral language spoken by monolingual Itzá speakers, his parents.

A great place to visit in Guatemala: www.bioitza.org/en

I just returned from a weeklong visit there, a place I’ve been to many times over the last two decades. I highly recommend it!​

They can arrange local homestays, language lessons in Spanish and the endangered Itzá language, rainforest tours (with or without overnight stays), visits with local artisans making sustainable use of rainforest products, wildlife viewings, and visits to local sacred sites like Tikal and Yaxhá.

While you’re there, you can also take in Arcas animal rescue center (your visit will help to fund their efforts to save the scarlet macaw and other animals endangered by trafficking) and the beautiful island city of Flores​. If you’re feeling even more adventurous, reach out to Fundaeco’s Francisco Asturias and let him bring you deep into the forest to see jaguars and to get to know the work Fundaeco is doing to conserve one of the last remaining extended rainforests in Central America.

​Here is Asturias’ instagram, which is a good way to reach out to him:

And here is more about Arcas. They welcome volunteers! You can also learn about through the PBS film, “Jungle Animal Hospital”

All of these photos were taken by me during this visit. It’s a beautiful place with wonderful people.