David O'Hara

Morning practice. Little by little I’d like to sketch and paint all the wildlife on my university campus. Most of it goes unnoticed, even the large animals like deer and turkeys that sometimes wander through at night.

Watercolors are fairly new to me and I’m having fun exploring how to use them to express volume and gesture and shape with a minimum of color and of brushstrokes. Such a meditative practice.

This morning my wife pointed out a belted kingfisher down by the river. It was perched over one of the few places where the water is not covered with ice. I snapped a few photos, then inched closer, snapped a few more photos, and moved closer again. Now at home I’m studying the kingfisher in a way I have never been able to do when watching them in the wild. They tend to be elusive, and to move away fast when I approach. Here are three studies I’ve done today, in different media: ink, watercolor, and pencil.

The most vibrant one, done in colored pencil, is in the book I am handwriting for my infant grandson.

Kingfisher.

We saw this on our walk down by the river this morning. There is not a lot of open water, so it sat still for a long time over a place where the water was not frozen, giving me time to approach slowly for photos. Normally they’re not this willing to put up with company.

I read the morning news during breakfast, and I read some of what St John wrote on Patmos after that.

And then I spent time journaling, which feels very small but also very important.

And after writing five or six pages, I found myself thinking of the cardinal I saw in a small tree yesterday down by the river, puffed up against the cold, and placidly meeting my gaze as I stood on the trail ten feet away.

So I decided to end my journal entry with a sketch of that cardinal, with its calm gaze and its small part of the world. And now as I post this here I am thinking of Wendell Berry’s wise poem, The Peace of Wild Things.

Went for a walk down by the river this morning and saw this large bald eagle fly past me and then perch in the tree across the river from me.

At this time of year we get lots of eagles perched in the trees by the river since most of the lakes and ponds are covered with ice. The river is one of the few places where they can still catch fish.

Female wood duck. Still working on proportions. Fun practice!

New year, new bird. I’ve photographed many animals on my campus over the years.

Today’s sketch is part of a project to sketch and paint all the wildlife I’ve seen on my campus. Maybe I’ll make it into a poster, or a field guide.

This is also a project in getting a little better at my art every day, and getting a little better at ecology every day as well.

If I can make even tiny improvements in each of these on a daily basis, imagine what I can do in a year.

One of my faculty in grad school reminded us all: a dissertation seems daunting, but if you write just one page every day for a year, you’ll write it all.

Very often kind colleagues, friends, and family members will send me a text or an email with a link to something they found interesting.

A news article, a Substack, a YouTube video, a book they enjoyed.

I love it when they reach out to share something wonderful they’ve found.

One of them, a close friend from college, will often share a short passage from a book he is reading, or will send me a lecture on mathematics, architecture, classics, or some other topic we both enjoy learning about.

And he does it right : he always sends me a short passage from the book, or he will say something like “this lecture connects to the topic we discussed on the phone last week, especially starting about ten minutes in.”

He’s a busy man, so when he takes those extra few seconds to tell me why he was interested in this book or video, his text or email comes as a double gift: he is giving me something he found, and he is giving me a little of his precious time as well.

That is pure gold.

When someone just sends me a link, with nothing to explain it, I read the URL and then delete the email.

“Huh,” I say. “I guess Jane liked something at that link.”

And now I know a tiny bit more about Jane.

But I know nothing about the link, because I never clicked on it.

If Jane didn’t have time to tell me why she liked it, it must not have been worth much to her.

I take that as a sign that it’s not worth much to me, either. There are a lot of URLs out there, and I can’t click them all.

So I look at the link, and then I delete the email.

Sometimes that feels a little rude, but just as my busy friend’s time is precious, so is mine.

After all, I have to go through a LOT of cybersecurity training each year, and my own university sends me phishing emails on a regular basis. If I were to fail one of those test emails, I’d have to repeat the training, and that means an hour or several hours of my precious time. It’s not worth it. So I don’t click links in emails without VERY good reason. Even if I hover over the bright blue hyperlink and see that the link looks clean, I rarely click it. If it matters a lot, I might search for what the link purports to show me. Otherwise, it goes into the trash.

So if you find something cool and want to share it with me, great! I’m so grateful that you thought of me! Now take some time to tell me why you thought of me. If you summarize what you found, you might find that you understand what you read or saw even better by summarizing it, and I get the advantage of reading something you wrote rather than something written by a stranger. What a gift!

Better still, don’t just summarize it, but tell me more about us. Why did it remind you of me? Was it that conversation we had about a similar subject while we were hiking together? Was it the thing you told me about that your daughter learned in school and that made you so proud? I’d love to hear about that, and to share your pride!

If you just have time to send me a PDF, or a screenshot, or a hyperlink, thanks! _I’m honored that you thought of me. _

Just bear in mind that the next time you see me at the coffeeshop, if you ask me “What did you think about that link I sent you?” I will likely reply with something like “Remind me why it mattered to you.”

If you don’t recall what you sent, or why you sent it, and can’t tell me in your own words, I hope you’ll forgive me if I also don’t remember.

Meanwhile, keep reading and learning, and when you find good things, keep sharing them with people who will benefit from them.

If at all possible, take the time to write your own short essay about what you learned, and why it mattered to you.

That will be a far greater gift, and even if you don’t think you’re a good writer, I assure you that your personal essay will be more welcome than the words of a stranger. If there’s something I need clarified, we can meet for coffee and have a conversation about it.

Wouldn’t that be good?

A study in color and detail of two birds I can find not too far from where I live. One of them, the mountain bluebird, I usually find only in western South Dakota. The blue jay I usually only see in the eastern part of the state.

Both present good challenges for me as I work at improving my observation skills, my sketching, and my use of watercolors.

And both are beautiful to observe in the wild.

Do yourself a favor and memorize something beautiful in 2026.

Even better: make it something exceptionally beautiful, maybe even so beautiful that despite its apparent uselessness countless generations have received it as a heritage and shared it with those they love.

This one is a white-breasted nuthatch I photographed in the Good Earth State Park near Sioux Falls two years ago. I figured it would be interesting to paint two species in the same day so I could see their similarities and differences. Sketching and painting helps me remember species, and it helps me teach them to my students as well.

The other day a visiting alum asked me about my nature journaling practice. I told him about the Wild Wonder Foundation workshop I participated in last summer.

John Muir Laws is an amazing teacher, and all semester I have been teaching my students what I learned from him, including quick ways of sketching birds.

So I asked my alum to show me a picture of any bird and told him I could teach him to sketch it in under a minute. Then I did so.

A little while ago one of the same species made a rare appearance at the feeder outside my kitchen window so I made a quick sketch next to the one I made for my alum.

And then I decided to paint it, which took more like half an hour.

I’m pretty pleased with the whole process, but especially with the teaching and the birding!

(Update: see my next post for more nuthatch art!)

Even the furricane rests sometimes. He has had a busy morning being climbed on by my granddaughter. Both of them seemed happy with the play, and both are now sleeping.

South Dakota

This morning I had breakfast with an alum who is in grad school. He loves his studies but is also weary of political news. He is a gifted artist so I encouraged him to allow himself to see the local. Attend to the person in front of him, care for his neighbor, delight in what is nearby, and allow that delight to turn into gratitude and loving kindness. The small decisions can make a world of difference. In a way, the whole world is present in that one person, and love is not wasted on them, even if it might seem a squandering of effort to those who wish only to make big changes in the world. I came home and added a small scene to my sketchbook, choosing to attend to this small winter scene in my driveway. As I clear the snow from the sidewalk, I clear it for I know not who will walk there next. They are also worth loving.

The most popular undergraduate major in the country is Business.

Which means that if you’re a business major, you’re likely to be a small fish in a big pond.

Here are some ways you can stand out as a bigger fish:

• Get at least one good internship. Ideally, get several, in different fields.
• Play a sport, at least recreationally.

Those first two are fairly self-explanatory. Here are some that are easier to overlook:

• Learn to play an instrument. You’ll become more disciplined, and you’ll think better. Best of all, you’ll bring music with you wherever you go.
• Study art history, and learn to draw or paint. It will help you see the world differently, and it will change the way you travel. It will also help you with design problems. And it will help you think better.
• Learn a language. I don’t mean “take two semesters of Spanish,” but I do mean learn well enough that you can have a thoughtful conversation in another language.
• Then learn another language, one which probably doesn’t seem important to you right now. Learn Latin or Greek or Classical Chinese. Learn a modern language you think you will never use.
• Study some other discipline throughout your college years. History, philosophy, religion, anthropology, literature. Something that seems pointless. These are things that simply make the world a more interesting place, and will continue to do so beyond your working years. Also, they’ll make you a better thinker, a better writer, etc.
• Take classes in math (ideally, at least through linear algebra) and science. This will help you to understand the world better.
• Study abroad. Note that I didn’t say “travel” or “become a tourist.” Actually study the places you go, and get to know people there.

There’s a lot more I could say, but I think if you do even some of this you’ll see how good it is.

Today I took a little time to thank people for good work they’re doing. They were all doing “little big things” — things that probably seem little and ordinary to them, but that can add up to a big difference for others, like keeping things clean in their workplace. Each one was grateful that I had stopped to thank them. Most of them told me stories about how much they like the place they work and the people they work with.

The cost to me was a tiny bit of time and attention. The reward was hearing people talk gladly about their work and their colleagues.

“How much better it is to have many brothers than it is to have a lot of money. For money stirs up plots among one’s neighbors, whereas brothers protect against the plotters.”

— Musonius Rufus, Fragment 15

(Cora Lutz, Musonius Rufus: “The Roman Socrates,” Yale Classical Studies 10 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1947), pp. 3-147.) Taken from The Stoics Reader, Hackett, 2008. Brad Inwood and Lloyd P. Gerson, trans. P. 184

Despite having just completed a sabbatical year, I find myself wishing I had more time to learn new things.

One of the peculiarities of our time is we don’t agree on the purpose of school.

So we often aim for something non-controversial, like job preparation.

Once we do that, we find it easy to stop talking about how schools can provide a place to learn the tools of reasoning, and to practice them.

We stop talking about schools as places of experimentation with ideas, in conversation with others, guided by guardrails of common care and mutual enrichment.

We forget about the delight of playing with tools of discovery like dictionaries and novels and guided time in laboratories.

We turn our attention away from the way writing and reading are like weightlifting for our inner lives.

We think of math and science as tools for professions and forget that they are about helping our minds and our communities reach out and get in touch with the way things are in the cosmos.

So many wonders of language and culture and math and thinking together become boxes to be ticked, grades to be tallied, rungs on a career ladder.

And then it surprises us when we one day find that the play is gone, the wonder and curiosity have been shoved aside as distractions from work, and learning has become a task rather than a privilege to pursue in joyful leisure.

(Our word “school” comes from the Ancient Greek word scholê which means leisure.)

So what is school for?

This is something we ought to spend more joyful leisure discussing in our communities, ideally while breaking bread together, with good music in the background, music and food that make us glad to be thinking together about the children we love, and what will become of their too-short, beautiful lives.