David O'Hara

This afternoon several of my alums and I talked about what it means to be an environmental writer and storyteller right now. We look back on those who inspired us and, much as we love their work, we recognize that our own writing needs to respond to a different moment.

I’ve been revisiting a number of the writers who inspired me this year: Rachel Carson, Ursula LeGuin, Kathleen Dean Moore, Henry Bugbee, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Parker Palmer, Wendell Berry, John Elder, Gary Snyder, Wes Jackson, Bill Vitek, Robin Lee Carlson, Cindy Crosby, Suzanne Simard, Norman Wirzba, Mary Evelyn Tucker, Thomas Berry, Dan O’Brien, Aldo Leopold, Terry Tempest Williams, Strachan Donnelly…the list is longer than that, but those ones are a good sampling.

Each one has their place in my personal canon. Each one has helped me see something where and when they live. Each one brings their experience and shows me how they use it. Kathleen Dean Moore’s job might be most like my own; Aldo Leopold’s and Cindy Crosby’s landscapes are most like mine. Robin Lee Carlson has helped me become a better teacher. LeGuin has helped me to imagine worlds differently. And so on.

My alums both feel deeply the urge to make a difference with their lives. Both have earned graduate degrees, and do good work in their fields. But they—and I—share the sense that we need good stories.

The question is: what do those stories look like right now?

A.I. is a new challenge. How long until we are hit with a deluge of words not handcrafted crafted in the forge of human imagination but mass-produced by machines?

Another challenge: some say idylls and paeans to nature are a luxury we can no longer afford. Others point out that we are already weary of lamentations and nature obituaries.

Many of us want to write words of hope, be we also know they have to be tempered with sobriety.

For today, at least, we have settled on this: right now, as we welcome our children and grandchildren into the world, we want to bear witness, to testify to what we see, while we see it.

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Weekly Thing 307 / Attention, Goose, Pulse weekly.thingelstad.com

It’s one of my go-to reads each week. Makes me wonder how he finds so many interesting things to share! Here’s one of my faves this week: you might share a pin with a lot of other people.

His first paragraph is itself a work of art, and could be taken as a summary of what a good education looks like:

• knowledge of perspective and dimension;
• teaching from someone who understands the parts of things;
• study of nature;
• time spent with old masters;
• practice.

God who suffered with us,
Please remember what it was like
to be human,

Incarnate as a baby
Who could only cry for help
With the most basic needs;

Enfleshed as a youth
With tight skin and growing bones,
And awkward, rapid growth;

Enmeshed in an adult economy
With tight finances and growing commitments,
And new obligations to young and old alike;

Embodied in a fragile frame
That bends with age, and declines,
And falters, and slowly gives way to time.

Eternal God, we ask you to remember
What it was like to be us, without eternal sight,
And full of love for this small space and time

And all who dwell within it.
Be with us, and help us to love those who suffer as you did.
And remember us, we pray.

—-

I wrote this while thinking and praying this morning for a number of friends who are suffering from what seems like untimely cancer. I had cancer when I was in graduate school, not long after the birth of our third child. The doctor scheduled me for surgery two days after the diagnosis. When I asked if I could get a second opinion, he told me I might only have a few weeks to live, so I’d better get that opinion quickly. I opted for the surgery instead. That was 25 years ago now, during Holy Week in the year 2000. I had surgery on Good Friday. It’s not Lent yet, but for my friends who are either receiving chemotherapy or preparing for it this week, this year likely feels like a long Lenten fast, one which will leave them with hard memories and some bitter scars.

It is far from a perfect prayer, if by perfect we mean ready for inclusion in a breviary. I very much appreciate breviaries, because they tend to include prayers that others have found helpful to pray, and one has the sense of praying in community that stretches across time when reciting those prayers. They also tend to be poetic and memorable. I’ve tried in this quick writing to be poetic, mostly because the poet’s tools help to frame ideas succinctly.

As I prayed this morning, I wondered: does God dwell in eternity in such a way that makes “these momentary afflictions” seem unimportant? Intellectually, I can stretch my imagination to think that might be so.

But this prayer was one I wrote to invoke a God who has been God with us, and who has experienced pains both small and great. As Victor Frankl pointed out in his book Man’s Search For Meaning all pain is great pain, because pain, like a gas, expands to fill available space. The pain of an infant, the pain of a growing adolescent, the pain of a young adult, and the pain of an aged relative or neighbor (all people are our relatives and neighbors) are all real pain.

And in praying this prayer I am not so much trying to change God as to remind myself of a God who understands suffering. As I have written elsewhere, prayer is, for me, a stretch before a long run, and a preparation to act as I think a loving God would act.

I welcome your responses, but I’ll say in advance that if this prayer strikes you as failing to match your version of orthodoxy — whether that be a theistic orthodoxy or an atheistic one — I invite you to pray as you will. This is my prayer, and it might be helpful to someone else even if you don’t care for it.

29 January 2025

Reading Leonardo On Painting. So good.

For the last year I’ve been intentional about sketching and painting as a means of studying nature.

There are other upsides, too: I feel better, and I enjoy doing something creative that no machine can do for me.

In case you’re wondering: I’m a philosophy professor who studies religions and liturgies, great texts, freshwater invertebrates, rainforest ecology, salmonids, mathematics and A.I., classical and ancestral languages, and world philosophies. Inter alia.

Thinking about this good word by Leibniz:

“The majority of the philosophical sects are right in the greater part of what they affirm, but not so much in what they deny.”

I think it’s true not just for philosophical sects.

Source: G.W.F. Leibniz, “Letter to Remond,” 10 January 1714 in Gerhardt, C.I., ed., Die Philosophischen Schriften von Leibniz (Berlin: Weidman, 1875-1890, reprinted Hildesheim: Olms, 1965) Vol. III, p. 607

Another book just arrived in the mail today. Send help. (Help = bookshelves.)

Strayer’s Freshwater Mussel Ecology: A Multifactor Approach to Distribution and Abundance.

(More info in Alt text!)

Who is doing a good job of low-tech freshwater mussel restoration? I like the floating gardens that Urban Rivers is doing in Chicago, and they have some promise. Are there other examples?

All of us who study freshwater mussels are eventually asked the same question:

“Can you eat them?”

The frequency with which we are asked that question is helpful for understanding some of our environmental problems: We value what we know how to use.

Which means endangered mussels don’t just need regulatory protection; they need us to value them even when we can’t think of what use they are.

(Image: two dead freshwater mussel shells on the bottom of a sandy lake. I took the photo in Ontario in the summer of 2024.)

Part of my work is to think about little things that we don’t tend to think about very often. This morning I am thinking about the social importance of the forehead.

I splurged and bought myself a copy of Wendell Haag’s work on freshwater mussel ecology. Mussels play such an important role in clean water, and we have done so much to harm them, probably because we don’t notice them.

My hometown was full of artists and musicians. It’s funny to look back and remember that I thought it was a normal place. I babysat for a famous musician’s grandkids, and despite the gold records on his wall beside his grand piano, I thought of his family as the people who lived across the street.

John Meyer interviewed me for his Leadmore Podcast. John’s a great interviewer, and I learn a lot from his good questions.

Recently realized that The Big Pink was a short bike ride from my childhood home outside Woodstock, NY. I miss the weirdness and wonderfulness of that place. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_…

A helpful tool for reading sacred stories is to read the story, and then to ask where you imagine yourself in the story.

It’s common to imagine ourselves as the hero, the protagonist, or the wronged victim.

In this passage, Jesus responds to a question with a parable.

The parable is another helpful tool, one that keeps us from thinking about religion and ethics as merely academic questions.

The parable is a story in which we can see ourselves from multiple angles, if we are willing to take the time to try.

I sometimes imagine myself as the academic lawyer, trying to ask an academic question to examine another academic.

My question is turned back on me, and I, the clever academic, give a good academic answer.

Jesus then turns my academic answer into one that touches my skin. That gives me goosebumps, and I cover my skin with another academic question. I’m safe again, or so I think.

Jesus kindly sees me protecting myself from having to live what I claim to believe, and gently offers a story. The story disarms the academic because it seems so unimportant in my academic world.

But it turns out the story is a mirror, and when I open my eyes even a little, I see that I am in the story.

And I’m not where I thought I was. But the story gives me a chance to consider another question: if I could choose, where would I like to be in the story?

It’s a perennial question for legislators and school boards: how should we fund public education?

Behind that question lies another set of important questions that we find much harder to answer, like these:

• What is education’s purpose?
• How should it proceed?
• Whom does it serve?

As a college student preparing to become a public school teacher I wound up taking a lot of classes that I didn’t know much about when I was in high school. These were classes in educational philosophy, pedagogical practice, and policy.

The classes in educational philosophy were the most interesting. The classes in pedagogical practice were a mixed bag. (Ironically, some of the worst teachers I have ever had were those who taught pedagogy.)

The classes in policy were the ones that helped me decide not to become a public school teacher; it was there that I saw that the work of teachers is molded by educational and political philosophies that can shift with each election.

I was drawn to education because I’d had so many good teachers, teachers who were plainly motivated by a love of learning, a love of their discipline, and care for their students.

Teaching is, for many of us who teach, first and foremost a work of love. It’s why so many of us accept a job that is so challenging and that pays so poorly.

Unfortunately, our work—especially when it is funded by acts of legislation—is subject to the whims of legislators.

Some of that is reasonable, but it also means that classroom practice can be changed significantly by people who don’t teach.

This is probably why I found the courses in educational philosophy to be most interesting. It was there that we discussed the big ideas in our community that shaped educational policy. Those courses were about what education is and who it serves.

Most of us when we are in school don’t ask questions about whether education is being done correctly. We simply don’t have enough information to work with.

In our educational philosophy classes we broadly considered at least three possible primary aims of education:

1. Does education primarily serve the individual and the nurturing of their unique talents and aspirations?
2. Does it primarily serve the civic interests of the community and the state by developing a citizenry with common goals and ideals? Or
3. Does it primarily serve the economy, teaching young people the skills they will need to earn a living, and to serve the needs of the community’s prominent industries?

Obviously these ends are not mutually exclusive, but budgeting and policy making will always wind up giving preference to one of these or to some competing aim. And even these three can and will be influenced by other factors.

For example, if education aims to help the individual flourish, who decides what is meant by flourishing? Does flourishing look the same for everyone, or does each person have unique talents that need to be cultivated? Does the student decide what their talents are, or do their parents or teachers discern them? Are there certain virtues or qualities that all people should have? If so, how do we measure the success of an educational plan in fostering those virtues? If not, what do we do with students who have competing and incompatible virtues in the same classroom?

This is my morning reflection that is prompted in part by reading the news. Thoreau urges us not to read the Times but the Eternities, so I’ll end this morning reflection by returning to the eternal:

Before reading the news, I begin my day with simple prayer. It’s a way of acknowledging before the cosmos that I am not as wise or as good as I would like to be, and of resolving to do what I can to remedy that today.

Similarly, before I begin a semester I pray for my students. This takes on a number of forms, but one of the simple ones is this: before the semester begins, I go to the classrooms where I will teach and I walk around the room, imagining the students who will sit in each chair, and wondering what they will need from me. I let my hand rest on each chair or table for a moment and ask for good things for the student who will sit there.

I don’t know what this does for the students or the chairs, but I know it focuses me, and it reminds me that whatever the policymakers decide, the work of teaching will always be for me a work of love.

Today in church we read the story of the Wedding in Cana. It’s a fun and surprising story: Jesus, in his first miracle, turns water to wine for people already deep into their party.

I’ve often been moved by Mary’s role in this story. We don’t have many of her words written down, but here she says two things:

1. To Jesus: “They have no more wine.”
2. To the servants: “Do whatever he says.”

I’m not part of a tradition that venerates saints, so I don’t have any special connection to Mary as a saint.

But I like the simplicity of her words: she sees a problem, and she tells someone about it, someone she believes can help. Then she tells others that they should follow his lead.

It’s not boisterous or bold or brash. It’s just a clear statement of the problem, followed by a clear directive about how to solve the problem.

And then she gets out of the way. No protests, no explanations, no demand for recognition. Just a few simple words.

And it’s all so that the party won’t end too soon.

What a marvelously simple approach to being a leader.

I recently met a biologist who is one of the world’s experts in his subject area. I found him to be a brilliant resource and a good teacher, and he is in charge of an important resource at a major university. But he doesn’t have tenure, because he never finished his Ph.D.

Academia is often a place of smart people with some dumb policies.

I wrote a little more about my lack of credentials, and why it doesn’t bother me here.