David O'Hara

Drawing cicadas for my granddaughter.

As part of today’s entry in the book I’m writing for my granddaughter, I wrote about cicadas. I wanted to sketch or paint one in the book so I was experimenting with different media.

Who knew I’d have this much fun playing with art? I’m still a novice but very much enjoying it.

90% of the 20,000 or so species of bees in the world are solitary.

Most of them are not interested in stinging you.

Many of them live underground. Many others live in small holes in fallen trees or plant stems.

We tend to think bees live in social (or eusocial) hives, and that they swarm, because those are the ones we make the most intentional use of.

Bees that are solitary are important pollinators everywhere, but because we don’t make money (or get honey) from them directly, we tend not to notice them.

Some native bees in the U.S. (we have about 4000 native species) are so small that if they landed on the eye of a large bumblebee they wouldn’t cover the whole eye.

Which means they might fly past me or even land on my skin without my noticing it.

Want to learn more about bees? Here are a few quick tips:

1. Go outside and watch different sizes of flowers. Be still for a while so you don’t scare them away. Also go outside early on a cool morning in late summer to see the little ones sleeping on flowers.

2. Buy a copy of The Bees In Your Backyard. Trust me. Worth it.

This morning I found a bunch of leaves covered with galls. Galls are interesting, and they often make me wonder who is growing inside them.

I took some quick photos, dropped the leaf, and came home to journal.

It has been a few weeks since I have written in the books I’m writing for my grandchildren, so I decided to turn today’s entry for Felix into a story about the Wild Wonder nature journaling workshop I recently attended in California, along with an illustration of what I learned.

It’s hard to know how old Felix will be when he reads this, so I’m just writing what comes to mind and hoping he will enjoy watching his grandfather continuing to learn.

What’s a brick-and-mortar bookstore you rarely visit without buying something?

If you know what you’re looking for, it’s easy to find books online.

Really good bookstores often show me books that I wasn’t looking for but that I’m glad to have found.

Here are some of my favorites:

• The Golden Notebook, (Woodstock, NY)

• Shakespeare & Co, (Missoula, MT)

• Zandbroz, (Sioux Falls, SD and Fargo, ND)

• Collected Works Bookstore and Coffeehouse, (Santa Fe, NM)

• Powell’s (Portland, OR and Chicago)

• St John’s College bookstore, (Santa Fe, NM) (this one is amazing. Best college bookstore ever? Maybe.)

• El Ateneo (Buenos Aires. Worth it for the location alone, but obvs also for the books)

• Librería Desnivel, (Madrid)

• Monroe Street Books, (Middlebury, VT)

• The Vermont Bookstore, (Middlebury, VT) 📚

Spent last night in Moab, so I spent this morning at Arches National Park. It wasn’t busy, so I could spend a leisurely morning walking and sketching. Even so, I felt I was moving much more slowly than most of the other visitors.

Sometimes when I stand to sketch or paint people come up and ask if they can watch. Of course! I’m happy to share the process and to talk about what I am doing and why.

Today one family asked if their little girl could see my work. I sat down in the shade (it was about 100°F) and invited them to sit with me.

I asked if she had art tools with her on her vacation and she said no. So I gave her a lesson in watercolor pencils and then gave her mine. I’ve been using them all summer so most of them were half used up anyway. She seemed happy, and so did her parents. I also gave a pencil lesson to two other kids and then gave them my last sketching pencils.

When I’ve given away my tools, that is probably a sign that it is time to head home! The fall semester is approaching, after all.

Still, my heart longs to stay in the high desert, to wander among the rocks, to sketch the dry, thin spaces, and to watch the meteors in the night sky. 🎨

On my way out of the National Forest last night I had the road to myself — to myself and the cattle and wildlife, that is. Came upon this wonderful vista just as the sun set, looking east towards Capitol Reef and Moab. Our public lands are treasures.

Yesterday on my drive from Las Vegas to Moab I stopped in Fishlake National Forest to see Pando, the world’s largest tree. And to spend a little time walking around the grove and sketching the tree. 🎨🌳

Spent the last week at a Wild Wonder nature journaling workshop in the Sierra Nevada – a last gasp of my sabbatical, and a great preparation for this fall semester’s environmental studies teaching.

Spent a week learning with John Muir Laws and Robin Lee Carlson, both of whom have taught me a lot through their books.

And I was blissfully offline, since we met at the San Francisco State University Sierra Nevada Field Campus, where there is no wifi and no cell reception.

We spent a lot of time outdoors, and some time sitting at microscopes to look at bees and other invertebrates. And when we needed information about species, habitat, etc, we did some radical stuff: we asked one another (a lot of us there had expertise to share) and we looked in books.

Now I’m catching up on email before beginning the 2000-mile drive home. I’ve got my tent and sketchbooks in my car, and I plan to stretch this out a bit, so if you email or call, you might have to wait a while for a reply.

Most likely, I’ll be sitting on a hill or by a river somewhere, sketching and journaling. Feel free to leave a message.

Here’s an unedited photo of the sunset two nights ago from Saddle Pass. The colors were stunning as the sun set on one side and the moon rose over the Sierra Buttes on the other side. We alternated between trying to capture the colors with ink and paint, and just sitting there in awe of the wild wonder before us.

Not a bad way to bring my summer to a close, and an excellent way to prepare for another year of teaching. 🎨

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. 🎨