David O'Hara

I have now given two TEDx talks, both of them reluctantly, after friends pestered me into doing them. This week I received a great reward for my most recent one: one of the regional tribal offices asked me about collaborating to improve local water health. Yes!

Columbine and forget-me-nots in my garden today.

As I drove in to work today, singing part of the liturgy as my morning prayer, I was transported in my memory to my time in grad school at St John’s in Santa Fe. We only had one car so I’d leave the car with my wife and kids and walk to work in the pre-dawn hours, often walking through arroyos to avoid traffic and to take in the rosy dawn and the awakening high desert wildlife. And as I walked I’d quietly sing the liturgy. Nature’s liminal edges, the thin air of the high desert, the thin space where heaven and earth are so close in the words of the sursum corda. A heartening memory.

Met this beautiful western foxsnake today. It rattled its tail like a rattlesnake so I sat down beside it at a respectful distance so I wouldn’t tower over it. It looked me over and then slid away into the tall grass. What a fun encounter! They’re relatively common, but it was my first urban encounter with one. Non-venomous, with wonderfully curious eyes and a goofy smile.

Hairstreak in Amarillo.

Everywhere I go I look for small lives. I’m always glad when I find them.

At the Episcopal Church Grasslands Eco-region meeting in Amarillo this weekend. Presenting about our church’s food forest, and the work my students and colleagues and I have done to grow food and create outdoor learning environments on campus.

Can’t help sketching this beautiful church we are meeting in while listening to the other presenters.

Some things I am thankful for this morning, in no particular order:

• Home
• Friends
• Family
• Food
• Rain
• Trees
• Meaningful work
• Books
• Libraries
• Peace
• Good government
• Health
• Growing older
• Becoming an elder
• Conversation
• Coffee shops
• Local community
• Perennials in my garden
• Food I am able to grow
• Wood ducks
• Insects
• Moss
• Lichens
• Crayfish
• 70+ species of ladybugs
• 300+ species of native unionid mussels
• 4000+ species of native bees
• The one spike of Solomon’s Seal popping up in the prairie garden
• The dratted rabbit that ate the liatris buds
• The Cooper’s hawk that ate the rabbit
• Sunflowers
• Perennial sunflowers, like Maximilian’s
• The peace of wasps as they walk the tall Maximilian’s stems
• The small lives I have yet to find in nature
• Hidden treasure everywhere
• The full sky

Just learned that my first grad school advisor died suddenly this weekend at the too-young age of 66. We had been corresponding over his future travel plans just last week. He changed my career as a teacher, and I am deeply grateful for his life. Rest in peace, my friend.

Tonight I got to speak with one of my alums who is working on her PhD in entomology. She helped me start the beekeeping program at my university, and I created a class just for her because we didn’t offer a class on Hymenoptera, which were and are her passion. So I made the class up from scratch and then made her my teaching assistant. It was such a delight to hear her tonight as she told me about her research. She now knows far more than I will ever know about bees, and she just keeps learning and growing. A teacher’s dream! As she talked, I took notes about her dissertation, and I started making sketches in my notebook. When she mentioned Lasioglossum (some of my favorite tiny bees) I had to sketch one. Here it is, in honor of my wonderful alum.

Links to some of my public speaking:

davoh.org/speaking/

This was my second TEDx talk — I gave one in Fargo a few years ago — and it was nice to be doing one in the city where I live. I spent the first half of the evening with my wife and some friends in the audience, then went backstage for the second half so I could get miked up (mic’ed up? What’s the right way to type that? So they could put a wireless mic on me.)

I spend much of my life standing in front of groups and talking with them about “ideas that matter.” It’s what I do as a teacher, and it’s also a big part of what my business does. It’s a good feeling when people come up to me later and tell me that they learned something helpful, something that helped them to examine their lives, and to live as better neighbors, better ancestors.

I don’t advertise my business, but I let it spread by word of mouth. No website, no contact information or “landing page,”no description of what I do. Maybe that’s a bad business strategy, but it seems to work pretty well.

The day after my TEDx talk I gave a presentation at the Dakota Conference at the Center for Western Studies at Augustana University. Two men who came to my TEDx talk (and whom I did not know before that) came and sat in the front row. Before my talk began I apologized and said they’d be hearing a lot of the same material. They said that’s why they were there! They liked it the first time around, and had told friends to come to my second talk. They seemed pleased with the second round as well.

Tomorrow I give another talk for a local faith community, then I’m off to Texas this week for another talk, once my classes are done. So far, no worries about running out of work to keep me busy!

The Sioux Falls talk is not available online yet, but I’ll post a link once the TED channel has edited it and posted it.

The pines I planted along my driveway have become home to a half dozen bird nests this spring, a welcome set of additions to my garden.

Getting ready for my TEDx talk tonight at the Washington Pavikion in Sioux Falls.

Fascinating and disheartening to watch small colleges gamble away their strengths (small classes, close relationships between teachers and students, excellence in liberal arts, connections to communities, heritage and tradition) in an effort to chase the “best practices” (an insidious euphemism) and the apparent safety of imitating the mediocrity of alleged comparison or aspirational schools.

The students in my Classical Asian Philosophies class really seem to enjoy the lesssons I give them in how to play the game of Go, in Chinese calligraphy, and in writing Sanskrit.

Some say that college should focus on job skills, but I’m busy over here teaching the liberal arts, fostering delight in learning, and having my heart filled by the smiles and laughter of my students as they learn to use a brush pen and explore ancient ideas that still have life in them.

It might just be that the “job skills” my students most need are found in the practices of wonder, attention, curiosity, love of neighbor, rigorous thinking, reading closely, learning others’ words, examining their own lives, sitting still with texts, developing skills of conversation about great ideas, living lives that include contemplation and not just busy action.

For several years a group of friends and I have been gathering to discuss the history of the Peloponnesian War. We’ve been reading primary sources, and working our way through them together.

The process has been helpful for me as a teacher, because it has deepened my understanding of the context of some of the ancient philosophers whose works I teach regularly.

More importantly, it is a reminder of how perennial these texts are. My friends and I work in a range of different fields, but each of us notices how relevant the old histories are for our times.

Perhaps best of all: reading and talking together has been a good practice in friendship.

If you’re in Sioux Falls tomorrow, feel free to come to my TEDx talk! I’ll be speaking about my research over the last decade on the native freshwater mussels of our rivers, why they’re important for making clean water, and what we can do to restore them.

Mussels have been called “the livers of the rivers.” They can clean 25 gallons of water a day. They also have complicated reproductive lives, and it was easy for us to disrupt them. Restoring their ability to reproduce will take work, and it will require us to ask better questions.

Come tomorrow and I’ll tell you what questions we should be asking, and how to begin to answer them together.

In my informal logic class I begin every day by reading a passage from a mystery story. I don’t tell the students the name of the story or the author (and no, I won’t tell you, either).

It’s an incentive to show up to the beginning of class, of course, so you don’t miss out on the next installment.

Each day we also talk about how the detectives are reasoning about the evidence, which always leads into a discussion of informal logic.

It’s probably not how I’m supposed to teach, but I’ve been doing this for 25 years and it hasn’t failed me yet. Some would argue that I should spend more time on logic exercises, get more formal about informal logic, use the precious time to teach the terms and to give examples from a textbook, etc.

I began to wonder recently whether I needed to switch my approach. Do students really want to hear a professor read a story to them? Maybe that’s outdated and childish.

But I have stuck with it because I believe we have been a story-telling species for a long time, and that we often learn best through stories.

Yesterday in class I thought I might finish the story, but I still have a few pages to go and ran out of time. When I stopped on a cliffhanger, the students groaned. How does the mystery get solved? How does it end?

Turns out they’re engaged and eager to see it through.

I doubt that would be the case if I were using a standard textbook.

A rare sighting of a great blue heron on campus today led me to get out my sketchbook, binoculars, and watercolors and spend twenty minutes observing. A photo with my long lens would have captured lots of details that others might like, but I think I saw more this way. I’ve never noticed how many colors there are on this bird, or the different kinds of feathers on its breast.

I hear a lot about vibe-coding at work but it seems we keep buying software from outside vendors that is worse than the software we currently have, at least from a UI/UX perspective. I wonder how long before that changes.