David O'Hara

In Boise tonight, and I have two new recommendations for places to eat and drink and find books.

Visiting two alums and their newborn in Montana. Last night we babysat so the young parents could go out on a date. Feels like academic grandparenting. Which I am enjoying quite a lot.

Mato Tipila / Bear Lodge

My sabbatical is coming to an end soon, but not before I take one more class. I’ll be joining a Wild Wonder workshop in California next month, learning the art of nature journaling with Robin Lee Carlson and John Muir Laws.

This sabbatical has been an immense gift. I’ve studied freshwater mussels at Ohio State University; I took an environmental writing class through Orion Magazine in upstate New York; and my wife and I dipped into our savings to take in some mutually beneficial conferences, and to visit family in New York, Chicago, and Sweden.

I am grateful for the opportunities, and I look forward to sharing what I have learned with my students.

It also has me considering: what next? Do I continue to teach as I have, or do I look for new ways to expand that teaching?

I’m not sure. For this coming year, at least, I will go back to doing what I’ve done before (see my note to my students for more about that)

But I do so with an eye on the horizon. Higher education has been a wonderful journey and a great place to work, and I don’t plan to leave altogether, but I’m wondering how else to make use of this work that I have for the benefit of my community. This is a joyful thing to ponder!

One of my practices during my sabbatical has been such pondering, in the consistent form of journaling. I’ve just about 450 handwritten pages of journal at this point, plus a bunch of sketchbooks I’ve filled, in addition to the writing I do with a keyboard. I review that writing often and find themes emerge that help me think about what lies ahead.

One thing for sure: I don’t ever want to stop learning.

Another: I don’t ever want to stop sharing what I learn with those who might benefit from it.

Bumblebee on purple prairie clover.

So often critiques of higher education complain about overpaid teachers who corrupt the youth.

I’d like to suggest walking a mile in the shoes of a public school teacher—or of a SLAC professor—before offering such critiques.

Met with some other faculty yesterday for a “shut up and write” session at a local pub. The deal: we order our drinks, then spend an hour writing in silence. Then someone calls time, we close laptops, and we talk about whatever comes to mind.

It’s productive, and it builds community. So good.

This morning I’m feeling thankful for the adults who bought me books when I was a child.

At the time I did not understand how expensive that was for some of them. And I didn’t always appreciate their choices.

But I still own many of those books fifty years later.

It is good to be home again after traveling for over a month. My wife and I are both on sabbatical, and we have been visiting people and places in order to deepen friendships and deepen our curiosity, wonder, and knowledge. (You can see a bit of that in my previous posts and in some I’ll write soon.)

Back at home among my books, one of my reads this morning is a chapter from Creative Acts for Curious People.

The book is by Sarah Stein Greenberg, the Executive Director of “the d.school” at Stanford.

This is one of my go-to books for creative thinking. Every chapter is a gem. And you don’t have to read it front-to-back. Dive in anywhere. It will likely be worthwhile.

Today I read a chapter on how to “see things in a new way.” The basic idea: immerse yourself in the system you intend to change. This is a key lesson for leaders: find the friction points in your system by exposing yourself to them.

One obvious takeaway for higher education is that every administrator should experience student life on a regular basis.

**Try to find your way through the systems you’ve made, and you’ll find it easier to tell where change is needed. **

You’ll probably also see good things you didn’t know existed.

Either way, that’s a win.

And with this I come to the last pages of my current sketchbook. Here are two photos showing the last pages. I’ll do a little coloring of one of the images but I think I will leave the city scenes black and white.

My aim in visiting Tain, Scotland, was to learn about a joint effort between researchers at a university in Scotland, a conservation organization, and a distillery to restore the oyster beds in the Firth of Dornoch.

We were fortunate to spend a day doing “citizen science” in surveying some of the coastline and mapping our finds, and a few more days getting to know the community and some of the people working on conservation in the area.

And of course we also toured the distillery, a local museum, a church, and a few other places where we could talk to locals and hear what matters to them. Time well spent. 🎨

Spending a few days in Tain, Scotland this week to learn about the Dornoch Environmental Enhancement Project (DEEP) being carried out by the Marine Conservation Society, researchers at Heriot-Watt University, and the Glenmorangie Distillery.

The distillery is funding a long-term project to restore oyster beds that were destroyed by overharvesting.

We spent part of our day doing “citizen science” in surveying for both native oysters and invasive species, and in learning about the partnership between the university, the MCS, and the distillery.

Most of the time when I tell people I have been studying malacology and mussel/clam/oyster ecology, people ask me “can you eat them?” (FWIW, no, I don’t eat them.)

When we only think of bivalves as food we forget that they are important in their ecosystem as water filters (up to 200L per day per oyster) and as creators of habitat for many species. Established oyster beds become nurseries for fish and their oceanic neighbors.

Reestablishing a bed we have destroyed is a very long and slow process.

Thankfully, this project has a distillery as a partner. Distilleries are among a handful of businesses that understand that sometimes good things take years to create, and they’re worth long-term investments.

This has me wondering what it would take to get my own community to commit to long-term restoration of the environment, with the understanding that what we are restoring is something that will pay for itself in the long term.

We tend to think in very short terms for these things, seeking a quick ROI. Or we ask for repeated philanthropic or governmental investment without any expected return. These are losing strategies. My ideal investments in environmental sustainability pay for themselves.

This presents a hurdle for the imagination. If you’re accustomed to thinking of environmental action as a sacrifice, it might seem foreign to think of it as an investment with a slow but steady long-term yield.

My students understand this. Perhaps their youth allows them to take the long view.

I’ll keep working on persuading the older people in my community that it’s worth investing in the future.

And I’ll keep inviting the young people to learn about bivalves that do more than provide us with an expensive snack. 🦪🦪🦪

A last page of sketches and notes from Sweden. 🎨

Finished another page in my watercolor sketchbook. Here ya go, with images and some reflections about sacred places, and how I am trying to sketch details. 🎨

Visited some of my wife’s family in Västerås, Sweden, this week, which gave us a chance to visit the largest burial mound in the country with her cousins. Stones stand in circles, a rune stone stands by the highway, and a number of tumuli — including one especially large one — dot the landscape.

The travel sketchbook grows. We have moved on to Sweden, so I’m sketching a few photos from Trondheim and around Trøndelag while the memories are still strong. 🎨

Here are a few more sketches from our trip to Oslo. I was especially interested in the buildings with living rooftops. There are many varieties of these but this one jærhus especially caught my eye for its design. It sits low on a hillside, with one side protected by the hill it is set into. The side facing me had windows that looked out over the sea. Each end has a stone wall that protects a storage area for peat that can be burned for heat. This probably took a lot of work to build by hand, but it is mostly built of local material and it responds to the landscape. We can’t say that about many modern buildings.

I also sketched the Nobel Peace Center because it’s an important part of the waterfront landscape and obviously the Nobel prizes have been important historically. But I was not particularly impressed by the center itself, and I admit that I often wonder about the value of the prize it is associated with. I always hope for peace, and there are laureates whose work has impressed me, but I look elsewhere for my hope.

🕊️🎨🇳🇴

My travel sketching kit.

Details are in my previous post, but sometimes a picture is worth more than words. 🙂🎨🖌️✏️

More sketches from Oslo.

I added a page from a day we spent walking around Vigeland Park and the Folk Museum on Bygdøy.

Oslo is a city that delights the eye continually. It’s hard to capture how visually rich that city is.

All of Vigeland’s sculptures are deep, but I was especially drawn to his old people. A sign of my age? Perhaps.

The Folk Museum should be a required stop for architects, engineers, and landscape designers looking to learn from history.

I’m using a Hahnemühle zigzag sketchbook so that my journey can all be on a single page that unfolds. Most of my sketches begin with pencils (Pentel Graphgear in varying sizes and hardness) and then I switch to watercolors (sometimes watercolor pencils that I then paint through with brush pens, other times my Windsor and Newton pocket watercolor set) and Pigma markers in thicknesses ranging from 003 to 08 and BR.

It’s all an experiment. Playing around with light and color as I travel.

🎨🏛️😱

Two days in Oslo.

I take a lot of photos while traveling, but the images I remember best are often the ones I sketch.

Here are some of my sketches from two days in Oslo last week.

A few sketches from the Orion Environmental Writers’ Workshop last week.

The workshop was held at the Omega Institute in upstate NY. I grew up only a few miles away and had heard of the place but knew nothing about it.

It was a good place for a conference, in part because I had very weak cell signal and spotty wifi. The landscape kept my attention. The pergola is at the entrance to a garden, and the sign outside it asks people not to be on their phones while in the garden.

One day my writing instructor sent us out to look for certain shapes in nature: a heart, a spiral, roots, a star, a feather. Given a little license, I could find most of that in a stump left after a tree was felled. 🎨