You’re Not Stuck with the Brain You Were Born With: John Muir Laws Talks Nature Journaling, Dyslexia, Growth Mindset, Ukulele, and so much more!

Written By Ginny Yurich

Ginny: Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. Today we have special guest John Muir Laws.

John Muir Laws: Ginny, I'm absolutely delighted to be here with you. Thank you so much for having me on the show.

Ginny: Yes, I'm really, really excited about this episode because I am a newbie to nature journaling. And so I know that personally for our family, we're just going to learn so much. I just want to read your bio here. 

John Muir Laws, a.k.a. Jack, is an artist, naturalist and nature journaling mentor. He has been journaling for decades, has written many books and is working tirelessly to bring nature into the minds and hearts of people across the world. Jack talks about how paying sustained, compassionate attention to nature and to the people in our lives profoundly changes the way we relate to each other and interact with the world. What a bio. You're impacting the world.

John Muir Laws: It's so strange. Before COVID, I was doing lots of stuff focused in the San Francisco Bay Area, and so every month I would go around on the circuit and teach these free nature journaling workshops and lead these field experiences for people. And those were really popular with folks and families all over the Bay Area. 

When COVID hit, I couldn't meet people face to face anymore, and I went online and it opened up this. It's opened up all these workshops to an audience across the globe, and it's really fun. Now when I teach these classes, there are people tuning in from the other side of the planet. There are youths showing up. You can see on their videos that they have a headlamp on, which means it's pretty dark over there now. It's really, really fun. And it's just wonderful to meet so many more people. 

Ginny: Yeah, I mean, everyone speaks so highly of you. You know, I've listened to a couple of podcasts that you were on and then Elizabeth, she just talks about how generous you are, you know, and how you just have all these materials that are free and you know, you’re just touching so many lives. So what a gift to be able to talk to you this evening here. Thanks for being on.

I have a couple of your books here. And actually, we had friends over today, Jack, and they were like, “Oh, we have that book.” So it was really cool. So I've got “The John Muir Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling.” This is hefty. You feel like you are getting your money's worth and more out of these books like, I'm like, Does this thing cost a thousand dollars? You know? No, it's only thirty five bucks, you know? 

John Muir Laws: It seems to be sort of the thickness of a telephone book. 

Ginny: Yeah. 

John Muir Laws: And so some people told me that somebody discovered that it is useful for pressing plants. 

Ginny: =And I don't know if I want to get you'd get all the dye in there, though, I guess if you have wax paper, you know. But yeah, I mean, these are hefty books. I love books. And so you buy a book sometimes and you know, you spend 25 bucks, you get a couple things out of it. You know, this book, it's like every page. They're fantastic. They are. 

OK, so here's where I'm at. I feel kind of guilty and remiss like I've been missing out on this. But your book didn't add to that guilt. It just inspired me like, “Oh, I'm going to add this in.” You know, that tone of it and you just get so much out of the book. 

John Muir Laws: Let's kind of pick up on that thread there, because I think you touched on something that a lot of people feel that like, I feel remiss. I feel kind of guilty and remorseful because there are so many things that we sort of feel that we ought to do that we should be doing. And if I wasn't doing them already, I was doing something wrong and now I'm behind. 

Ginny: Right. 

John Muir Laws: And so if I'm so far behind, why even start? Because isn't it too late to start putting in my time on developing some new skill? But this is a set of interlocking skills that you can come to at any point. 

And the interesting thing is that you probably will have some part of this. Everybody has some part of the skill set already much more developed. So you can use that as sort of your safety zone, your comfort zone.

So for instance, if you are more comfortable with writing and using words, you can launch your own nature journal and have it be mostly words. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to be prodding you and getting you to like. All right, let's just start to add in a little map or a little diagram. All right. A little tiny sketch of this. Next time, maybe we'll try to and or let's see if we let's start counting things, you know, can we measure that too? And what happens is that starting where you are comfortable, you can then take little baby steps beyond that and you're going to build up this suite of other associated skills. 

And a lot of people think that you have to be born an artist in order to draw pictures, and it's completely false. Yeah, of course, if you don't draw, you're not going to be somebody who draws, but nobody starts being able to draw. Nobody starts being able to do really any of these skills. There are things that you develop over time and as an adult, if you start doing this on a regular basis. You're going to find that those skills that you haven't developed yet will come. They will develop really, really fast, surprisingly fast. 

Ginny: I mean, this is so encouraging. This is really what I got out of your book. 

I grab it and I'm thinking, OK, I got this podcast with Jack. We've never nature journaled - and I pick up these books and I think, you know, I think the tone of the book could be, you missed out. What have you been doing? 

But the tone of the book is so encouraging. Even as a book for parenting or for teachers like you talking here about the growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work. That brains and talent are just the starting point. You say that does not mean learning new things is easy. You talk about the productive struggle. So I'm getting out of your book this inspiration to nature journal, but also it's rippling it's rippling my thoughts in other directions.

John Muir Laws: And concepts like the growth mindset just have this universal applicability. Sort of the general idea is that you're not stuck with the brain that you were born with. It's the brain that you make by the decisions and the work that you do while you're alive. And what neuroscience has shown is that throughout your life, your brain is constantly reorganizing itself and reconstructing itself and laying down new tracks of neurons based on a very clear and simple signal that you give your brain. And that is repetition with effort. 

Ginny: That is really inspiring. I think that we all have things that we're intrinsically interested in, but maybe not intrinsically naturally good at, you know? 

John Muir Laws: Yes. 

Ginny: And so I just took so much out of the beginning of these books, just as a parent, as a person, as a home educator. As a homeschool-mom-teacher, you know? 

John Muir Laws: As a homeschool parent, this idea of growth mindset. It's one of the critical ideas to get across to your youngsters, and you can do that in all sorts of ways. But it is strange how just sort of in the way we think that we're supposed to encourage our kids, we can very easily end up reinforcing a fixed mindset. 

So there's this fascinating set of research that shows, for instance, if you say to a little youngster like, “Oh honey, you are so good at math, you are such a good mathematician, I'm really proud of you. You're really good at math.” First, all saying to yourself, like, this is positive reinforcement and it's about math. What could possibly go wrong? The thing is, the way you're reinforcing it is in the framework of a fixed mindset. So you are saying you have this trait called being good at math. And lucky, either you are or you aren't. And now a trait like that also has a limit. There's going to be a point at which you are no longer good at math. 

Ginny: Wow. 

John Muir Laws: And so when you reinforce kids like that, they are more likely to cheat. Because they don't want to let you down. It's heartbreaking. And they're not as willing to try things that are challenging for them. 

So there's this one beautiful study where they gave this test to kids and it was in two parts and part way through the kids stopped and took a little milk and cookies break. And during that, the researchers went to some of the kids randomly and they said, “You know, we were looking at the way you were solving these problems. We just wanna let you know you're really good at math. You're a fantastic mathematician and you've got just this great skill. You're really good at math.” And with others they said, “We're watching you during the test and we noticed that you kept going when you're doing things and they're challenging you. You kept going into other places where you were trying things in different ways. You know, mathematicians do that, too.” So they're focusing on sort of about the way that you do it, not about a trait that you have. 

And then here's the amazing part for part two of the test, they're going to say to the kids, there's two piles of tests here and you can pick whichever one you want. This pile over here on my left, it's questions just like the ones that you were doing before sort of the same nature of problems. And over here in this other pile, there are some problems here that are a lot more challenging, but there's some really interesting ones in there and you might find that, you know, really interesting and engaging. And then you go ahead and pick. 

Well, those kids who you told they were good at math. They go right for that pile where they know they can do it and they don't want it because they do want to let you down. And those kids who are thinking about their process and like trying different things in different ways, they pick up the challenge pile and they dove in and they do well. 

Ginny: Wow. It's really, really powerful. It’s interesting that you can take a book about nature journaling and the way that you wrote it and sort of this approach that you take, you know that everyone can draw. 

It's actually interesting that you brought up the math because I used to be a math teacher and for high school students. And I think math and drawing are similar in the fact that people think they're either good at it or not good at it. And they shut down, you know, and then they wear that badge forever. You know, people are adults and they say, I've never been good at math. I can't draw. Even there was a story in your book from Amy Tan, you know, and she said that a teacher told her she had no imagination. And that's what was necessary for creativity. And so she stopped drawing. So there's an interesting parallel there.

John Muir Laws: One of the sort of the great growth mindset researchers, Joe Bowler, is a mathematician and has done most of the growth mindset math research. She has said to me that she believes that probably the biggest thing that people have a very clear fixed mindset about is mathematics. They say, “No, I'm not a math person.” Right? And she's been able to prove quantitatively that this is a completely false notion.

The second topic that people have the greatest sort of fixed mindset kind of initial approach to is drawing a picture. 

Ginny: Yeah. So it really is fascinating. I mean, I read this introduction in “How to Teach Nature Journaling” from Amy Tan. First of all, she said “Before words, we have wonder.” I thought, what a cool statement. All little ones - they're pointing, you know, they're so interested before they even have words. 

And she talked about how little ones are doodling and they're scribbling, and they're so into it, you know? And then by kindergarten age, I think you're already starting to notice I'm not as good or that that person is better than I am. You're starting to have this comparison creep in. And you really doubt you know what you're creating. And so I love in the book how you say draw not to make a pretty picture. You know, you say if you're drawing something new, if you notice something new, your drawing is successful. 

John Muir Laws: That's right. We're moving the goalposts. It's not about making that pretty picture. The goal is the experience that you have as an observer. So if you see things that you otherwise wouldn't have seen or remember them more vividly, or maybe this process makes you just slow down to the point that questions that otherwise wouldn't have come to you come up and can dance with you. That drawing, that journaling process is successful. 

It did what it is there to do and that’s when you really embrace that idea. It gives you permission to make lots and lots and lots of drawings and diagrams and maps and just little doodles that help you know the part of your brain that is involved with making a little picture is a different region of your brain that is involved with either mathematics or with language. And so when you are bringing those little doodles and maps and icons and little sketches and pictures to bear on whatever you're observing or whatever you're thinking about, you are quite literally engaging different regions of your brain. You've got more of a neural trampoline to engage with any of these ideas, 

Ginny: and then your brain functions better in the long run. We’re encouraging families to get outside. It's because going outside changed our life. And I was really struggling as a mom, but I did not have a clear understanding about nature journaling, just like how I didn't have a clear understanding about how nature helped all of us grow in so many facets anyway. 

But it's been so interesting to read about how journaling really helps brain growth. And I think about brain function - and when parents know those things, you know, I was thinking about how so as I'm reading through your things, I'm thinking about how we had five kids in eight years, so they're eight and under. And I just remember thinking like when we used to go outside and I had this double stroller and a little platform off the back for another kid to stand, and I had a kid on my back and we had so much stuff, you know, I mean, it's like things are overflowing. 

And I kind of was before I read your books, I would have thought, “Wow, how could I possibly add in nature journaling?” But then I thought, “Well, how easy is it to throw in a journal and some art pens?” You know, I mean, there's so many cute little art pen cases. I mean, that's easy. And there really are truly so many times where if we're in the right environment, we're not by a road or anything, the kids are just exploring. And I could have had a little nature journal out and I could have been drawing and modeling for them, and I'm sure they would have come over and joined right in, too. So for parents to know, it's so powerful to know that this is helping with brain growth and that those are lifelong benefits. 

John Muir Laws: Yes, you're absolutely right. So you hit on two really, really interesting themes there. So one is that the amount of stuff that you have to do to kind of enter into this is that the bar is low. 

Ginny: Yes. 

John Muir Law: Right? 

Ginny: Yeah. 

John Muir Laws: But you get yourself your own little kind of just a little cute mini kit. And then you described what you did with it. Is that rather sad like, you know, “Danny, I need you to come over here and sit right down. I need you to nature journal right now.” Like, no, you said that you were going to pull it out yourself and just make a little sketch. Do a little bit of nature journaling here, a little nature journaling there. And they, you know, they don't listen to anything we say, but they watch everything we do. And then next thing, you know, little Dan is going to be like, 

Ginny: yeah, they're going to take your pen and your book. We're going to take your pen from you. And so like you said, it's very accessible. You had said in here that you had a little hook. You hung your journal up. So you said, “In time I realized I had too much stuff in my kit.” You know, you had to pare it down so that it's easy to grab. And you said your system is that it fits in an over the shoulder bag and hangs on a hook next to the front door. So you just grab it and go, you know, you could have the cutest little bag.

John Muir Laws: My daughters call them the adventure kits. I've got my adventure kits. And so, you know, there's just a little microscope thing in there. There's the binoculars in there. There's journaling supplies. My daughter's also when they were little, I would tell them these adventure stories starring two brave and adventurous little girls named Amelia and Carolyn, which of course, are their names. And there'll always be one point in the story where they're getting ready to go on this adventure. And so they're packing a kit. So they're like, they're getting their flashlight. They're getting journaling supplies. And we kind of go through this again and again and again, and so they want it. So they started making their own adventure girl kits. And one thing that's in the stories there's, I would always say, and of course, they packed a rope because you always need a rope. And so of course, you'd have to figure out some point in the story where you'd have to have a rope in order to get up down, over, around or through whatever obstacle or to, you know, put a leash on the dragon or whatever it is that is going on in the narrative. So my daughters then put ropes in their kits, then they've got this rope. They've named the rope, “Elizabeth” Elizabeth rope [00:23:17][80.1]

Ginny: That’s awesome. 

John Muir Laws: Elizabeth comes with us. We were just up in the redwood forest exploring around this last weekend. We found an albino redwood tree, did a little bit of nature journaling and then came around the corner, there's this incredible magic, climb-me redwood tree. But part of it is inaccessible. And you know you need Elizabeth to get up it. 

Ginny: These books embody your fun and you're accessible and you're just wanting to draw people into this world. Your books are full of practical, right? Like, as a parent, I want to make this fun. I get a cool little bag. You know, like you said, that the entry point is low. It's not expensive. This is going to be airing on Thanksgiving. So we're heading into the holiday season. Well, get your kid an adventure kit, you know, with their journaling stuff. Get them the book. 

I want to talk more about the whys you have in the how to teach nature journaling book. I mean, just pages after pages about “the why” that I was unaware of it. So can you hit me some high points? It's a really big question. But why nature  journal? 

John Muir Laws: For folks who haven't experienced this before, what we're talking about with nature journaling is basically, you're out in the woods somewhere and you have a little blank notebook in your hand and just very basic drawing tools, writing tools. You're making observations of what you see and translating those down onto your page along with the questions that you ask. You know, you're talking about how Mary Oliver said at the start, We have wonder and we want to reinforce that wonder instead of putting a little stopper in it. 

So we're training ourselves to find the questions and find the question behind the question. So we're writing those down in our journals and sometimes we figure things out. We write those down in the journals. Sometimes we say, this reminds me of this and we're writing those down in the journals. Sometimes that kind of almost creates a little poem. We write those down in the journals. So the journal is this medium that is between your brain and the world that is in front of you and it reflects back to you everything that you've noticed and wondered and thought. 

Ginny: So I just want to say I had written down on this paper, “What is considered journaling?” But I was a little embarrassed to ask. So you started with “the what.” I'm so grateful that you did that because I asked “the why” because I was kind of embarrassed. It's really neat to see the vast array of what this nature journaling could look like. 

John Muir Laws: So I think that's why that's a great approach to do it because everybody's journal is going to look different. So that's why in the how to teach nature journaling work in that book, I've got journal pages from a bunch of different people who keep nature journals.

Ginny: Yes. Different languages, even. 

John Muir Laws: Yeah, because there's not one way to do it. So if I just had all my stuff in there, people would think like, Oh, in order to do nature journaling, journaling should look like John Muir Laws stuff. But no, I mean, all these people are taking totally different angles and approaches to doing what they're doing, and they're getting different things out of it. 

And so you can start where you are with whatever your comfort zone is and then you just push yourself a little bit outside of that. So let's say for you, it's writing, that's where I feel. By the way, with the writing, you don't need to spell correctly. You don't need any kind of grammar. Right? You're just using words. The journal is for you. Yeah, it's not for a presentation to somebody about look at the drawing that I did.

The journal itself is your brain on paper. And you don't want anybody else looking at it. Just tell them it's your diary. Yeah, and then everybody leaves us alone. 

Ginny: And so, OK, so that's “the what.” 

John Muir Laws: So that's that's “the what.” 

Ginny: I really am really thankful that you took the time to, um, to talk through that because it was a little fuzzy for me. But like I said, I was a little embarrassed to ask, So way to go. OK, so then “the why?” I mean, there's pages and pages in your book about “the why.” 

John Muir Laws: So I think it's important for us as educators to understand “the why,” because then if we can translate that authentically to our kids, they intrinsically get it like, Oh. Mm-Hmm. I get it. Yes, this is something that I want to be part of my game. I see why you're doing this isn't just one of these kind of busy work things that grown-ups sometimes come up with.The grown ups will sometimes have these grand ideas of what you should do. That's not what this is about. This is this is for you by you [00:29:51][36.5]

Ginny:  self-directed 

John Muir Laws: and yeah, so a big part of this is kind of engaging our intrinsic motivation to do it ourselves. 

A couple of just sort of big picture ideas that I think are helpful. One is to realize that as wonderful as our human brains are, they are incredibly limited. It's like a little computer out there. There's lots of problems, by the way, with the computer analogy for brains, but I will use it here just to make this one small point. It's like a computer, like the one I'm working on that doesn't have a lot of memory. You try to do too many things on it and it's going to slow down and it's going to crash. 

And so all I have to do is, you try to remember the bird had a red band across the upper chest, white on the throat and then white lower down on the belly. No wing bars and maybe a little bit of dark at the tip of the tail and your brain is completely full. And it's useless for doing anything else. So what you do is you just take those observations and you put them down in the book. You take those observations, these other observations, you drop them down in the book. The book is now going to hold them for you and allow you to do something greater than you could do just inside the walls of your brain. So this is essentially the journal is thinking outside your brain. 

Ginny: Wow. 

John Muir Laws: And it is extending the capacity of what your brain could do because they're in two very places. One is that you can get more stuff in there than you can get into your brain, which can handle maybe sort of seven different thoughts plus or minus two at one time. And then thank you very much, it's full, 

The other is that when you get these ideas down on the page and you look at them, you know all your observations, your questions, your things, everything you've noticed is reflected back at you and you can now actually notice what you have been noticing. You can think about what you have been thinking about, how am I thinking, what kinds of questions am I asking? It makes the whole process that is usually behind the curtain available and accessible to you. 

This is something that neuro psychologists call metacognition. So the idea of thinking about what you're thinking about and if you're able to do that and really reflect on your process, you end up thinking better. But the problem is, if I told you right now to start thinking about what you're thinking about, you actually can't do it because the minute you start thinking about what you're thinking about, you are no longer thinking about what you were thinking about. You are now thinking about thinking about that thing. Right? And so it gets pretty messed up, pretty fast. So you're not able to observe yourself thinking. 

When you look down on the journal page, you see yourself thinking right there on the page line by line, stroke by stroke, with a picture, with a diagram, with words, with things that you're counting, things that you're measuring. 

It also makes your memory bulletproof. Human memories, we have the impression we have the illusion of having good memories. You can remember some experience you had in childhood vividly. Well, what research has found out is that lots of the memories that we have are the things that are mostly the stuff that we made up. 

Ginny: No way. 

John Muir Laws: Yeah. It's called confabulation. When your brain remembers something from the past, what it's doing, it's not just like pulling up a file in a computer. I think the best analogy that I have for it is a really bad photocopy machine. So let's say you have some experience. That's your picture. You put it in the bad photocopy machine. This terrible reproduction comes out of it. You look at the terrible reproduction you, oh, that's a terrible reproduction. So get out your pen and you touch it up and you fix in all the places, right? That's what your brain does. It takes some of these old memories. They come up and then they're all these gaps. Your brain seamlessly fills in all the holes, but you have no knowledge of what was stuff that you made up and what was the original file. Now, the next time you remember that same phenomenon, it's going to be starting from this modified file, from starting from this bad Xerox copy that you retouched. You put that back into the bad Xerox machine. It comes out with a bad copy of the retouched bad copy. Now you retouch that again. So every time you're remembering something, you're actually modifying your memories. 

Ginny: Wow, that's scary. 

John Muir Laws: Yes, especially if we have the illusion, though, that we are kind of that our memories are good and solid. Um, and I know what I saw. And but data doesn't back that up. So when you make an observation and you write it down in your journal, Those items aren't going to be modifying and changing over time. Because you've got them there on paper, you can come back to that, you know, major details of our past, of the things that you observe. So in your journal, you can have stuff about your nature observations. You can also have your thoughts about, you know, you can sort of splice this in with the practice of keeping a diary. People who keep a diary are more emotionally intelligent than people who don't. 

Ginny: OK, Jack, wow. 

John Muir Laws: One of the things that increases people's emotional intelligence is to get them to start journaling. And then it goes because people who do that, they they actually learn from their mistakes 

Ginny: because they’re remembering correctly.

John Muir Laws: Yeah. Partially. I'm sure there's so many reasons why. And it makes you more reflective. There’s a story that we tell ourselves that kind of keeps our self as the hero character kind of bopping along, making good decisions in the face of adversity 

If you ever heard somebody tell a fishing story, you know, that changes over time. So do our stories of our past and our hero's journey. And we change our internal narrative to fit the story that we would like to tell. And I do this too. It's just a human trait. 

But if we're trying to make decisions based on these, these terrible memories of this inability to really observe deeply and all these sorts of things, having a brain outside your brain that can hold things in a way that keeps them and doesn't have them modify over time. And that is intentionally using these three different languages words, pictures and numbers. So those are each engaging different regions of your brain. You are giving yourself this Swiss Army knife mental toolkit that you can then open up on any phenomenon or experience that you have going forward in the rest of your life. 

You know, for instance, if your kids start to do this on a regular basis, they will become, if they're not already, they will become visual thinkers. They will become people who can think with pictures. They will become people who can communicate with pictures and that ends up being incredibly important. 

There have been a number of times in my life when I've been in meetings where we've been having a discussion about something. Ideas are floating around and nothing is really concrete or coming together. And then there's somebody who's kind of quiet and she's sort of sitting over at the end of the table and then she reaches out and she pulls a napkin over to her and she makes a little doodle on the back and thinks for a little bit more changes. The doodle and then pushes it across the table says,
“Well, I'm seeing it this way. There are actually three parts, and this is the one that separate from these two are interacting with each other. But this is the one that is out on my own, and that's where we're putting all of our resources. But really, all the action is over here.” And everybody looks at this little diagram that this person made. There's a moment of silence and everybody goes, “Well, duh.” 

And what that person did is they used visual thinking to frame ideas. And if you can be somebody who takes an idea and turns it into a picture, you, the person who controls the napkin, controls the meeting.

Ginny: Wow. 

John Muir Laws: And if you can't make your own napkin, you or your kids are just going to be subject to other people's napkins for the rest of their lives. 

Ginny: Well, it is a great way to put it. It's such a great way to put it. And I think you're just scratching the surface here of the depth of benefits. You know, I think I heard in the podcast you were just talking about gratitude and presence. And you know, so beyond this brain enhancement, there are all these other things as well. One thing that grabbed me was, you said that while researching this book, you said we interviewed working scientists about how they use journals and studied the notebook pages of naturalists and thinkers from Leonardo da Vinci, to Charles Henry Turner, Nikola Tesla. You know, you said looking for patterns, how did they capture ideas and build meeting meaning? 

So that captured my attention because I've never thought like, oh, other people are journaling and doing these things that are helping them to increase their intelligences and emotional intelligence and other things. 

John Muir Laws: That's right. So people say, isn't it lucky that, you know, Leonardo da Vinci was this incredible genius and happened to leave behind these notebooks and we can look back into Leonardo's notebooks and sort of see some of that genius. I would say that that actually kind of misses the point. Leonardo da Vinci was Leonardo da Vinci because Leonardo da Vinci kept those notebooks. And if Leonardo da Vinci didn't keep notebooks like that, Leonardo da Vinci would not have been the da Vinci that we came to know. Every scientist who has significantly contributed to our understanding of the way that the world works, that you can name, kept a journal.

Ginny: Come on.

John Muir Laws: And the ones who didn't, we don't know their names because they didn't really contribute anything. 

Ginny: Wow. That just shows you how powerful it is.

John Muir Laws: Yeah, it is. I believe that keeping a journal is the missing piece. And you know, it's interesting. You know, there's a number of people who were totally tapped into this, like, you're talking about homeschooling families. Um, if you're familiar with the Charlotte Mason system. 

Ginny: Well, she is the one who says kids should be outside for four to six hours whenever the weather is tolerable. She's the start of our journey. 

John Muir Laws: Yeah. So Charlotte Mason is out there saying, All right, frankly, get yourself outside. And number two, bring a journal with you. And so between you and me, we're just sort of going back to old school. Charlotte Mason, 101 Read yourself some books. Yeah, go outside. Bring a journal and case closed.

Ginny: Yes, yes. And I think there is hope in that simplicity that we can do less and gain more. 

John Muir Laws: Boom. You know, and you just knocked it out of the park. That's right. This is not complicated. This is basic stuff. And it can become sort of routines that are not just things that you do with your kids because you have to kind of follow some curriculum. But these are practices in your life and you will do for the rest of your life as well, and they will carry these through for their life. They will have lifelong readers. They'll be going outside for the rest of their lives. They'll be keeping notebooks and journals and thinking on paper. 

Ginny: I think it's a gift, Jack, to be able to present material in a way that helps to strip away that guilt. I'm just going to go for it. Yeah, I'm ready. 

John Muir Laws: And it bothers me when I look at books that are kind of written from the perspective of “look how well I can do this skill. Aren't you impressed by that?” I like books that kind of get under the hood and say, “Here's how I did this. Here's why I did this. You want to do it, too? I did this, this, this and this. These are the things I was doing intentionally. And then this kind of works with practice and time.” So just to try to demystify a whole bunch of this process of I'm going to pick up a paper pencil and grab this paper and I'm going to make an image of something and that's going to help me look at it. [00:45:05][33.2]

Ginny: Demystify is like such the perfect word for the book. It makes it attainable. The books make it attainable and also intriguing, or it pulls you to say, Oh, wait, it's dark. But now I can't wait till tomorrow because I've got my journal ready. I'm going to go try it. And, you know, I know my kids are going to follow it. 

Can we talk about, I think that this is going to be a subject that's really interesting to parents is that here you are, you are influencing the world, you've got these phenomenal materials. You're dyslexic. 

John Muir Laws:Yeah. 

Ginny: And that's a big part of your story. You talk about it in both books. You know, and I know that a lot of our listeners, their children are dyslexic. And so I was hoping to read and wanted to read a little section in here. You say, 

“My journals stoked my curiosity and accelerated my learning. I was, I am dyslexic. In those days,I struggled academically. Nature was my refuge, and my journals were a safe place for me to wonder, think, write and draw without fear of judgment or criticism.” 

And you talk about it in both books. It's very encouraging.

“You might be interested to see early drafts of this manuscript. The writing is filled with phonetic misspellings. In my childhood, I thought that not being able to smell to spell meant I was stupid. I was struggling in school, but in nature, I felt alive and safe from the red pens.”

Wow. 

John Muir Laws: Yeah. Yeah. So if there are any dyslexic kids who have listened to this podcast know that you're not alone. 

There's a lot of us out here and the time that is hardest is right now in school. They put so much weight on knowing how to spell those words or memorizing the multiplication tables. I still don't know my multiplication tables. I still can't spell. 

And when I was in school, I thought that the fact that I could do those things was a reflection of how smart I was. I thought that, you know, in those days, we really didn't know very much at all about learning disabilities. I was in a bunch of the early dyslexia experiments and research. And teachers, you know, they had models of how brains worked that, you know, basically if I just applied myself and worked harder, I would get through these things. Right? And just kind of work your way through it. I still don't know how to spell. 

But the difference is that now I know that that's not the most important thing, and I know that that's not an indication of my brain's ability to learn and grow. I don't judge myself based on those narrow, narrow criteria. 

Turns out when you grow up, if you've got good ideas, somebody else will spell, check them for you. 

Ginny: There you go. 

John Muir Laws: There will be. But the danger is that if we give up on ourselves and I almost did, when I was in high school I looked at all the evidence and I thought to myself that the simplest explanation for this was that I really wasn't that smart. And that there were smart kids and dumb kids. I was one of the dumb kids. 

And if you believe that? Then it doesn't make any sense to try so hard, I could knock myself out trying to get those spelling words, and I still couldn't do it. At the end of the day that paper would come back just covered with that red pen. And so if I didn't really try that, if I didn't give it my best, I was, I used that then as my sort of way of kind of insulating myself from the shock and the shame, the shame that I felt for not being able to do that and found other ways to kind of make my mark. I sort of became a disruptive factor in school. I was the class clown. And sort of used my sense of humor to further insulate me from the shame of dyslexia. But I was lucky. There were two teachers who saw through that. 

Ginny: You write about them in your book. 

John Muir Laws: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and so for the teachers out there and for the parents out there just to know what a difference that they can make. You don't need to have great teachers every step of the way, but somebody who really sees through that. These two teachers, Leroy Voto and Alan Ridley, they didn't have any dog in the fight, and they saw through it. And they looked at my ideas in a way that other people hadn't. And they put away their red pen and they came back to me, to me, with my ideas, with other ideas. And they asked me questions about my ideas, and I had more ideas about those ideas. And then it just went on from there. And in a matter of one year, they turned my world upside down.

Ginny: Wow. And here you are, really just influencing the entire globe. You know, and and so you said your journals were a place for you, you know, to sort of retreat. And that's a gift, you know, so that's that's a whole other branch. 

John Muir Laws: So, yeah. And so, you know, the journal itself, it's so it's not about pretty pictures. So if pictures aren't your thing, right? Don't worry about the pictures, but use pictures because they'll change the way you think. If you can't spell. Don't worry about the spelling. Don't worry about the grammar, but use the words to help express your ideas. Because again, it's a different kind of thinking to use numbers to help you think in a totally different way. 

Ginny: Well, there's something in here that I have never seen before and which was about, well, you call it forest karaoke and there's journaling about transcribing bird songs. And I thought that was fascinating, grabbing the rhythms. Well, and then you also talk there's you have a history of birding with your dad and that I've heard you talk about

John Muir Laws: before we go on to this, just maybe I want to circle back to the dyslexia one more time because I've got one other thought that I think is relevant in there. 

So I'm speaking directly to any other dyslexic kids out there. So the danger is, though, was is what happened to me when I gave up on myself. When you get out of school and you're in the rest of the world on the other side of this account, there's somebody else who's going to check your spelling for you. It's going to be OK. The hard part is getting through this part right now because there's like all this pressure and all this value on these things that I still can't do. And um. What you want to do is, Whitman said, “I contain multitudes.”

You contain multitudes. You are so much more than the way you spell. Then you're transposing numbers.

I have a card in my wallet that has my telephone number on it for when I forget what my telephone number is. And what will happen is you kind of go along, you'll figure out these strategies and ways to compensate for this and embrace. This dyslexia, it is actually a gift.

I know you're thinking like, no, no, no, no, no Jack, you don't understand. No, actually, I did. And here's why I say that's a gift because through your whole life and your school training here, you've never been able to go in the front door and you could watch all those other kids walk in straight in through that front door. And that was never accessible to you. So what if you don't give up on yourself? You have had to learn how to go round to the back side and find the other entrance, how to find the window that's open a little bit, climb up two floors and get in through that window. So you end up realizing that there's for any one problem. There's the one way which everybody else is taking that hasn't been your way. The dyslexia forces us to take all these different other crazy, circuitous paths. And if we don't give up on ourselves down the line, that becomes an incredible strength that is so much more important than your ability to spell anything. And that's what makes the difference, so dyslexics are statistically way overrepresented as CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. 

Ginny: That's awesome. 

John Muir Laws: We're also overrepresented in the general prison population. OK, because we can give up on ourselves, but if we don't give up on ourselves this struggle that you're in right now is going to train dyslexic superpowers in your head, in your mind and you will look like magic to other people. Because you know how to climb up. 

Don't give up on yourself. If I can be of any help to you or any families out there who are listening to this, I invite you at any point to just get in touch with me.

You can just cold call me. My telephone number, my email is all on my website. And if you would help to have somebody else to talk to, I'm here for you. Or perhaps just my story and knowing that you're not alone, there's many of us out here. You can do this and you are not broken. 

Ginny: What a message. It's so important. And even just through your books, I think that kids and parents and teachers will get that message to talk about it in the introductions. 

You know, it's interesting, Elizabeth, she sent me a podcast of yours to listen to with someone else. I can remember the name. And it was an hour and a half and I was like, “How could they talk for an hour and a half about nature journaling?” You know, here we are, and there's so much here, you know, so much here. That I guess I just didn't realize at all. And so much about you. You know, that's impacting the world through what you've discovered and through your persistence.

I wanted to touch real quick on just some of the cool things in the book. You have different activity ideas that are enticing. Like “I noticed, I wonder, It Reminds Me Of,” “My Secret Plant.” So I know we're kind of running short on time here, but

John Muir Laws: Well, on my end, I've got all the time in the world. 

Ginny: [00:58:59] OK, so if you're listening to this. Make some popcorn out there, everybody. We're going to be here for a while because I'm into this.

John Muir Laws: This is fun for me. I'm really enjoying the chance to talk to you, but that idea is sort of like my nature journaling mantra. And the way that this works is sort of when I go out, there are three fundamental ideas that I'm trying to engage with. I'm trying to supercharge my ability to observe, supercharge my curiosity, and supercharge my creativity and my creative thinking, and my sense of connection with that. And so the shortcut to that is this little phrase “I notice. I wonder, It reminds me of” and the way you use it. It's like this you walk up to whatever it is and you just start saying out loud or document writing down on your piece of paper, all the things that you notice. And then the next thing, the next thing, the next thing, the next thing. And so we're intentionally sort of starting with this baseline. Baseline of data of observations about the world around us, and that then starts to stimulate our curiosity and questions. 

And so as questions come up. I write those down in my journal as well. And what I want to do is to try to stimulate myself to ask more questions. Can I make myself more curious? How many questions can I come up with? If you're a parent who has a real young youngster in the house, you know that they are a, you know, a little child is a question mark running around on two legs, right? And just just little question marks like what, what, how does when, when will that, you know, all these sorts of things? What happens is, I think as we kind of get older. That insatiable curiosity gets trained out of us. 

Well, you know, if we've got questions, and the questions that you have are going to be the same questions. The ones that are most burning for you are going to be the ones that are burning for most other people. But asking those obvious questions and then following that up was the question behind the question. And then you follow that up with a question behind the question behind the question. You can get better and better and better at asking questions. Asking really good questions is one of the critical skills to develop as a scientist.

We started off as question marks, by the time we are done with our formal schooling, most of us end up as periods.

Ginny: There's several activities that are in the how to teach nature journaling book. But I notice I wonder, it reminds me of it's a conversation starter. It's an easy way, and it's an entry point. 

John Muir Laws: You can do this with a phenomenon in science, a phenomenon in nature. You can also do this when you read a book like what did you notice about that chapter? What questions you have and what it reminds me of is a really interesting part of it. So it reminds me of a lot of people, kind of they kind of intuitively understand, like, I notice, I wonder, but like, what is that it reminds me of this ends up being a really, really, really big deal.

It's there for two reasons. And that's your creativity and connection. So what you do with it reminds me of is you think to yourself, what have I seen, read or experienced in my life that one way or another? However, tangentially, I can connect with this. And what you're going to do is say, like, you know, so this is kind of like this other thing. 

And when you practice kind of finding the relationships between things like this, you get better and better and better at it. So my working definition of creativity is your brain's ability to make useful connections between seemingly unrelated things. So if you can become one of these people like, Oh, that's kind of like this, like this, be one of these people who sees those connections and can see those relationships. That is really, really powerful. That's really, really powerful. And that is being somebody who is a connector in their head is a skill set that you want to develop, and it's something you'll get better at with practice. 

The other way it comes in is it helps you build a relationship with things, with nature. If I'm looking at this little mushroom out here and it reminds me of let's say it's like, Ooh, that's like Jabba the Hutt Palace, right? OK. You know that it's tying into something that I already have some neurons that are kind of built around this idea. It's got more meaning for me and I'm more likely to remember those things that are connected to other sorts of stuff.

A little thought is likely to drift out into the ether. But if I can anchor that with some other observations or experiences, I will be better able to keep it. I will also be training myself to be a creative thinker. 

Ginny: And so the benefits here are there's such a depth and breadth to them. You know, it's like, a better visual learner, you know, for life long, we're better at making connections and being more creative. But also, we're connected to previous generations. And you know, we have these beautiful reminders of people who have walked alongside of us. It's quite layered, beautifully layered. Yeah, my dad's favorite bird is the red winged Blackbird.  You think of that person. That's really special. But there's so much packed in here. And that's a gift, you know, to have a book with so much packed in there and so many things that feel accessible. 

John Muir Laws: Well, that's all the stuff in that book has been tested with tons of people in the field. Yeah, and it's sort of guided by practical experience teaching people how to do this stuff. And that is I think one of the things why people have found those books really useful resources. 

Ginny: Yeah, they're fantastic. 

John Muir Laws: Well, you look at kind of an educational guide and it's obviously made by somebody who's never worked with kids. 

Ginny: So that is the “How to Teach Nature Journaling” and then in the other book, which is even a little bit bigger, this is the drawing, “The Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling.” And I found it interesting that you said, it's practical information. But that also doesn't come across as like you have to do it this way. It's like a helper, you know, so you have all these sort of step by step instructions.

OK, so there's an animal section, there's birds. There's landscape. I was intrigued by the dragonfly. I love this speed of drawing dragonflies. Like who doesn't want to speed draw a dragonfly, right? The way that you present the information draws people in and transparent wings. You know how to give the illusion of transparency by painting a ghost of objects seen through the wing? So, you know, even this, I think it could be boring, but it's not. 

John Muir Laws: I love books that you can pick up. You can open it to a random page and you look down and within 15-20 seconds, you find something useful. Yeah, it's not kind of buried in there. And so what I've tried to do is I've tried to make that book really, you know, I want to I want that to be on every page and I want it's probably it's because of my dyslexia. If the Nuggets are hidden in paragraph seven, I'm not going to get to it. So I want to take all those nuggets and kind of get it out there in your face in the most visual way that you will remember. 

Ginny: Wow. 

John Muir Laws: [Yes. So I wrote a book that is all sponsored by Audubon, The Law's Guide to Drawing Birds.” So it's a book entirely about drawing birds. There's the “Law's Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling,” which has birds in it. But all these other topics as well how to teach nature journaling. I also have several field guides one on Birds of the Sierra Nevada, one on wildflowers of the Sierra Nevada, another one that is birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, insects, mussels, clams, worms, slugs, snails, stars, mushrooms, trees, shrubs, flowers of the Sierra Nevada. And so I wanted to make one book that a person could bring with them backpacking and everything that they find is going to be in that book. 

Ginny: Wow. 

John Muir Laws: So that was the result of seven years of just roaming through the woods and trails and hills painting everything that I saw.

Ginny: Could you ever have imagined as a student that you would have had all these books as an adult?

John Muir Laws: In high school, I was hiking the John Muir track and my backpack was filled with field guides and books, and that whole time I was fantasizing about the one book. The one book to rule them all. 

Ginny: All right. So you did it. 

John Muir Laws: And so I, you know, I kept waiting for somebody to make that book and then realized that nobody was. It was actually then when my grandmother, who is sort of my artistic muse, was at the end of her life and was in the process of dying, all family members went down and spent some time with her. And we did various jobs to kind of help take care of her in her home. And my job was to sit up with her at night in case she woke up and had a lucid moment and could talk to somebody. And so I had a lot of time to think about when I am in that bed, what do I want my life to have been about? And at that time, I decided I was thinking, like, would I have any regrets? And I realized that I would be sitting there thinking, You know, I should have made that book about the Sierra Nevada.

Ginny: Wow. 

John Muir Laws: And her last gift to me was that after she died, I came home. I quit my job. I went and studied scientific illustration for nine months and then filled my backpack up with paper and granola bars, took off to the Sierra Nevada and began. Mary Oliver says that one day you finally knew what you had to do and began. And I just started and knew that one way or another, I was going to make 

Ginny: It sure did. It sure did. Your resources are so phenomenal. There's a couple other things I thought were really interesting in the “How to Teach Nature Journaling Book.” One I had brought up just for a quick second earlier, about the bird songs and paying attention to the patterns. So you want to talk for a minute about birding? 

John Muir Laws: I would love to.

Ginny: I thought the birdsong piece was fascinating. And then there's a whole section in here about math, and I used to be a math teacher and I just thought about all these graphs and tally marks. And it just makes math look fun. 

John Muir Laws: So math is fun. Math is beautiful, and it kind of goes along with the birdsong. So I thought maybe we could just geek out on that too.

So let's talk math because math gets a bad rap, because math in a lot of places is taught solely as calculation. And math for a mathematician is a way of thinking about the world. So if you were taught literature just by spelling and grammar rules and never read a book, you would think that writing was boring. 

Ginny: Oh, you're so right.

John Muir Laws: But that's the way we teach math out of context.

Ginny: Yeah. 

John Muir Laws: Rules of calculation. And then we time you on how fast you can calculate those things and whether or not you can memorize. You can memorize the multiplication tables and then how fast can you calculate this? This thing will have somebody calculating square roots without an understanding of what it even means. And why you would want to so with the nature journaling, one of the things you do is we get people to start counting things, measuring things, timing things, 

Ginny: looking for patterns

John Muir Laws: Yeah, looking for patterns. And if you can't be specific to estimate and how can you kind of figure out how your estimations are? How can you sample things? So you take one measurement, OK? What if we take 50? How can you understand that without having to calculate the mean and standard deviation? The and math all of a sudden has a relevancy because it's in a context of, you know, squirrels that you're looking at. And then it makes sense. And so I think that if you start math from real phenomena and we kind of get there, I mean, doing a word problem kind of suggests this. But even doing a word problem is out of the context of. 

Ginny: Yes, I agree, I think they're boring. Yeah, but you're fascinating. I was just talking recently about the sunflower and how the seedsm it’s like the Fibonacci

John Muir Laws: The Fibonacci spiral is built into this

Ginny: and how that makes it so that they can take in the most sunlight. Well, that's fascinating. I never heard that. 

John Muir Laws: And the arrangement of the leaves going down the stem is in another Fibonacci pattern. So the number, if you look at the positions that those leaves come out around the stem as it goes down, if you count the number of positions to go down, it's a number on the Fibonacci sequence and the number of times it spirals around. To get to that same position is a number on the five and Fibonacci sequence two positions lower on the sequence, then that other number that you got for the number of positions there is math. 

Ginny: Wow. 

John Muir Laws: Everywhere around you, you live in a math world. One of the things that's really useful in the book is I teach people how to make stem leaf plots. There's this wonderful, very intuitive way of I like it is, you realize, like, Oh, I don't have to calculate the mean and the standard deviation, and I can understand a large group of numbers. 

I think one of the critical things that's missing from Western education is an understanding of statistics. And so we don't understand that statistics, so we're afraid of it. So anything with kind of hints at statistics, everybody just kind of quotes Mark Twain's and says stances are lies. Damn, lies and statistics are that you know that. It is a way of playing with numbers and thinking about numbers that allows us to reveal the patterns and to also identify when there are not patterns there. When we thought they were because our brains are such sort of crazy biased things that we will see, we're great human beings are great at, um, at seeing patterns where there are no patterns. 

And so one of the things that statistics helps us do is to play with that. But we don't teach people statistics. But we will teach people advanced calculus that they end up not using. Well we don't teach statistics, and if we do teach some statistics, it's again only about calculating the mean and the standard deviation and not how to think about. Like you know, the way that numbers behave, numbers have behavior and there's, you know, lots of sort of strange, counterintuitive things, but you start to kind of, you know, play with that. And numbers become less threatening. 

Ginny: Well, I love that. Yeah. Less threatening.

John Muir Laws: So numbers are one of the three languages. 

Ginny: So this is the stem and leaf plot page. You know this if you look at these particular journals and then you talk about angles, you talk about using your hands to show angles. You talk about percent cover. Yes. I want to do this. Let's go play around with numbers. 

John Muir Laws: Play with numbers. Yeah. So like, the idea of innumeracy is really interesting. Then you have an intuitive idea of what three looks like. You have an intuitive idea of what five looks like. 127? What does a flock, how big is a flock of one hundred and twenty seven ducks? How big is a flock of two thousand five hundred ducks? Yeah, once we start to kind of get into larger numbers, our ability to even visualize those starts to fall apart. So one of the things which we teach in this is how can you get better at estimating 

Ginny: which is an important skill? 

John Muir Laws: Yeah, I think that's an important skill, lifelong estimation. You can do this, you know, waiting at a bus stop, you look across the street and they say, I think that there are 20 people at that bus stop. And then what you do is you group count them. So you go one two three four five five 10, 15, 20. Oh, about twenty five, huh? So and when you group count them by in a little cluster chug, chug chug chunks, you get more than you're able to sort of see, you know, my an initial count of those. I kind of came in too low. Am I regularly an underestimater? Turns out I am. Other people are regular. Overestimate. So where do you fit in? And then what you do is you sit there and you count them individually. One person two three four five six seven eight nine 10. All right. 

You're at a concert. How many people are in this room? Mm hmm. So what you can do is you can say, all right, one two three four five seven, 10, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, if that's 50, then that's 100. Now let's count by 100. That's 100, then 200, 300, 400, 500. You can get the more that you practice this, the better you're going to get consistent numbers each time you do it. And if you are able, then in some of these circumstances, then to turn around and ground truth to find out. Actually, this is how many people were in the concert hall that day. Then you are going to be able to also over time, make yourself not just more precise. Getting the same number each time you estimate, but also improve your accuracy so that you are getting closer to the actual number of people in the room. And so you can conquer your own innumeracy to the degree that you are sort of working with. Within the range that you normally normally, you know.

For instance, we have a national debt in the trillions. All right, so what does that mean? so it turns out that even theoretical mathematicians cannot visualize a trillion. And so you might as well be saying that we have a national debt in the blah blah blah blah blah blah. It's the magic numbers. It's now a magic number because it's a number that is so large that your brain cannot wrap around it, right? 

Ginny: You know, I taught math and it was so sad these kids came and you know, is this I know, like forever and I'm not good at math. But then, you know, I look at your book and I'm like, Well, this is fun. Even fractions. I think fractions are such a turning point for kids. But I think if they spend a lot of time outside, you see fractions in a lot of different scenarios and you see symmetry. And I don't know, I guess just as a whole, I feel like this is such a great book. For anyone, right, for a parent, for a teacher, for a child, for a grandparent, and I just think it's really neat that it ended with the math and it made it seem like it was a really fun thing when most kids don't think so, you know. 

John Muir Laws: ]Yeah, it is. So I think it's burdensome. Mathematics is a language. Before describing the world. And it is as beautiful as the world that it describes. 

Ginny: That's great. Yeah. I was really, really I was very fascinated and, you know, I wasn't quite sure what to expect, you know, like I said, we've not been nature journaling, but we definitely will be.

John Muir Laws: OK to help you on that. So every week, I teach two free classes on how to do nature journaling. And there are people from all around the world who just sort of tune into these classes. And if you're if you don't make them, I record them and I put them up on YouTube. 

Ginny: Elizabeth said that you have so many free resources.

John Muir Laws: Yeah. So this is accessible to any family, anywhere. There is no paywall that you have to get through. So every Tuesday is what we call “Ask Jack” where people come in and they say, “I'm having a hard time drawing waterfalls. How do you handle that?” And you know, or whatever topic is kind of burning on their mind? What do we do this? So this last Tuesday, they came in there and they said, Jack, trying raccoons, raccoons, they've got this weird shape. And then there's all these crazy patterns and we just did a deep dove into drawing raccoons. 

Thursdays are more of a formal class where I know what I'm teaching before I get there, so I might have materials prepared for me, but you don't get to pick the topic. So I picked the topic. I come with my materials. All those subjects are announced on my website, which is Johnmuirlaws.com. 

And also, if you are a homeschooling parent or an educator or you run a nature center every Wednesday, we have a free Nature Journal Educators Forum, which is also a Zoom meeting where we have a wide ranging or sometimes very focused discussions about best practices in nature journaling both for working with a large group or working with a small team like a family. 

Ginny: Jack, this is incredible. And then you also have a conference. 

John Muir Laws: Yes, that’s what the Wild Wonder Conference is. We had our first one was pre-COVID and was in-person. And then we've had since then we've had two online. Wild wonder conferences, we get really incredible speakers and who will kind of help you in all sorts of different aspects. We've also had them in association with at a Nature Journal Educators Conference, which is a multi-day event, a series of speakers to kind of pull you through like, you know, here's the major framework for what we're doing and kind of help people build the skills so people can get video passes to those. If there's an economic hardship, you just send us an email and say, Hey, I've got an economic hardship or can I get into this? I'd really love to see this. 

Similarly, if there is something that you see that as I have a store on my website, something that you see on that that you need and at this time, you can't afford it, all you have to do is just send me a private email and I will do what I can to send you what you need. You don't have to explain why. And if there's some point in the future that you can pay me back, I appreciate that. Otherwise, what I encourage people to do is just to find another way of paying it forward with an act of stewardship in nature or an act of kindness in your community to just make the world a little bit of a better place because somebody sent you some free nature journaling supplies. 

Ginny: Yeah, yeah. And those have some lifelong benefits. I have to ask about your name.

John Muir Laws: Yes. So I am first of all, am I a descendant of John Muir? Well, yes and no. I'm a direct descendant of John Muir, but not the one that everybody is thinking of. Okay. My John Muir, I think, never saw the Sierra Nevada and was a bit of an ornery longshoreman. But growing up, I thought that I was related to. My parents named me John Muir, so I didn't change my name.

Ginny: So this is your name? 

John Muir Laws: This is really just my name. That's what it says on my driver's license and it's what it says. Actually, I just got hold of my original birth certificate. Let's see if I can find that right here, because it's weird to find your own. 

Ginny: Does everybody ask you this? I tried to find it on the internet, so as not to have to ask, but I couldn't really find it. 

John Muir Laws: People are curious about this especially because it's such on what they call an apropism. It's like, you know, if John Smith becomes a blacksmith. 

Ginny: I've learned a couple new words today, confabulation was another one. 

John Muir Laws: Both of my parents were members of the Sierra Club. My mom was a Sierra Club lawyer. So they were like they were down with John Muir. 

Ginny: Yeah. And then it was a family name.

John Muir Laws: and then it's a family name. And the final piece was how I got the nickname Jack. Because my grandfather was also a John, went by the nickname Jack. And somebody wrote my mom a letter, apparently with beautiful handwriting and said, You know, All right, Betsy. It's been way too long. You have to name this child. And I think that you should name him. John Muir Laws, but everybody should call him Jack. And then she had this beautiful script, and she wrote out in this flurry, she wrote Jack Laws. And then she wrote, it sounds like a stagecoach driver.

Ginny: Well, Jack, I so appreciate this. I think people know where to find you, we'll definitely put the links in all those things. And we always end our podcast by asking about a favorite outside memory of yours from childhood. 

John Muir Laws: Let me go back to the day that I fell in love with birds and actually. Already alluded to that. I liked the outdoors, I liked nature, I. Birds were OK, but I wasn't crazy about them. My dad was having some heart trouble. We needed to get my dad out and exercise. Turns out he didn't like to exercise, so, um. What I could do is I could say, “Hey, dad, do you want to go birdwatching?” And he’d go, “Well, son, that sounds like a great idea.” because he loved birds. And so we'd go bird watching. And so we went out and we'd kind of walk around some place and go birdwatching. 

Well, this one day we went out birdwatching at a place called Five Brooks Pond in Point Reyes, and we were walking around the pond and found a wood duck that was really cool. But then my dad went over to, he said. He said, “Son. I want to show you something.” And he came over to this willow bush by the edge of Five Brooks Pond and as he made the strange little pissy noise, I saw movement in the bushes and whatever it was kept coming closer and closer to us. It was this little bird and the noise that he was making attracted the bird and it popped out and sat on the branch and branch in front of us is this tiny, little tiny thing? And then out of the top of its head, it spread its feathers and this red crown pops out on top of its head. 

And I was hooked. That was a ruby crown king wit that he had fished out of the bush. And so then I grabbed the field guide. But now this time I went through and I found the bird. I said, that's the ruby crown king wit. And from that point on, I was hooked. And then a guy like, dad, you want to go birding and and I really wanted to go birding. So yeah, the first bird is free. And then you're hooked. 

Ginny: We can reframe so many things, you know, for ourselves and for our kids - reframing someone that doesn't want to exercise, but they want to go birding? That's a great story. What a cool story. And now you have a field guide and you have a how to draw birds book. 

John Muir Laws: That's right. 

Ginny: Awesome. Well, Jack, I cannot tell you how much I have enjoyed this time. You have inspired me. I know that the people who are listening will be so inspired as to grab a little journal, make a cute little hiking adventure kit and grab and name their rope. Put a rope in there and give it a name. 

John Muir Laws: That's right. Yeah. If I can be of any help or support to you kind of getting your journal on, remember there are those “Ask Jack” Sessions, and I've got hundreds of hours of free tutorials and stuff on my website. 

Ginny: Yeah, I mean, you are a wealth of information, so I know my kids really like to draw. And I actually like to draw. I actually illustrated a kid's book of my own. It's called The Little Farmhouse in West Virginia. I wrote it - it’s a kid's book. I'll send you a copy. I wrote a kid's book a couple of years ago. About like my first early childhood memories of visiting my great uncle who had a dairy farm in West Virginia and we would go visit as kids and there were no toys. And so this is just some of my earliest memories of outside. And so I thought, I'm going to write a little kids book about it. And then I had a friend. I thought her son would illustrate it for me because he was really good at drawing and he was too busy. You know, he was like, in high school and was like, I don't have time for that. So I'll take a stab. 

John Muir Laws: Did you also do the little inset there on the little frame, the little duck and duckling?



Ginny: Yeah, yeah. 

John Muir Laws: See, that's a nice touch.

Ginny: I did it because my kids, when my kids were like, Oh, that's cool, mom, you know, so I like to draw, you know, I think everybody does. I think most people like to draw. They like to doodle until we start judging.

John Muir Laws: Yeah, the judging, it kind of kills us. The judging is the creativity killer. And so that's something that I address in a lot of my programs really directly like, how do you handle that inner critic who says “You're not worthy? Who do you think you're fooling?” Like you know, you can't do this like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Or if you wanted to do this, you know, it's too late, you should have started earlier. All these sort of bad reasons not to start. And yeah, but all those bad reasons are just bad reasons. And this is something you can start wherever you are. The more that you kind of go forward on that path, you know, it is surprising how fast you know it. You develop the skills you like. I, you know, people who didn't think they could do arty stuff. And then in retirement, they started doing something. And all of a sudden you're like, Wow. 

Ginny: Yes, you say this in your book, you put this in there. I think I read in your book something like, you know, you take your thing, look back six weeks, you know, do it once or twice a week or whatever. And six weeks later, look back at the beginning and you'll see improvement. And you know what? We don't really have the opportunity to see improvement in many aspects of our life. 

John Muir Laws: And that's what's so cool about the journal is that if you're putting all of your notes and drawings in there and for terms of learning growth mindset ideas, it's going to show you two things. One is how much you've progressed. You go this many pages back and you go like, Oh, I wasn't as good then. Now I'm better now. Well, I can see myself getting better. And the other thing is, it shows you how many pages it took to get there. So you have the amount of work that you did and the result of that work recorded in the same document. 

Ginny: What a fantastic thing to see visually, especially for a child, I think. Yeah. You know, to have that baseline. 

John Muir Laws: Yeah. So with my daughters, what I do is let them know that when you fill up this journal, you get to go to the art supply store with me and we get to pick out a new journal and you get to pick out any journal you want. 

Ginny: All right!

John Muir Laws: So they want to get their next journal. And then what we can do is we can kind of open up the journal. Then let's go get a couple of journals, go look at what you're drawing. We put the dates in there, so what you're drawing. You know, two years ago. Look at what you're doing now. Where are you seeing improvement and you'll be able to see this dramatically. 

Ginny: This improvement is that growth mindset. It’s transferable. So when they try other things throughout their life, they're going to know. 

John Muir Laws: Exactly, exactly. So, you know, and I try to, any chance I get to, demonstrate growth mindset. So right now, I'm as of a few months ago, I'm learning how to play the ukulele. 

Ginny: All right!

John Muir Laws: And both my daughters have been playing ukulele for a few years, and they're both much better than I am. And so I let them watch me practice and watch me struggle, and then I ask them for help. And then I take what they showed me, and I do it again, and I do it again, and I do it again, and I do it again, and I do it again and I say, Am I better? They say, “Yeah, you just got better on that.” And so you can demonstrate it. You can see it happen in yourself. So try to get yourself on some interesting part of a growth curve. 

Ginny:You know, have you ever read John Holt? He talks about how kids learn. He has a book called Learning all the Time, but he says kids need some sense of the processes. You know, the processes to get a job done. And so often they don't see the process from start to finish. So he says, you know, let them watch you build the table. And he specifically says, you know, show them your skills. And if you have none, learn something. You know, that's basically, you know what he says and learn it in front of them so that they can get a sense, you know, of the process and how we grow and how we learn, and that it takes time. That’s so neat that that's what you're doing now. 

John Muir Laws: I think that some people think that. They need to show competence to their children. That, you know, and this is not something that I'm good at, so I shouldn't do this in front of them. We also don't want to show our incompetence to other adults because especially with lots of grown ups, a lot of our identity is through our competencies. You ask somebody, you know, what do you like to do? And they'll tell you the things that they're good at? And so instead of showing your competencies, show your process and embed yourself in that growth mindset set framework. 

This is something that you are not good at yet, right? And if you've got a goal and you're not there yet, let them know and let them know that you're working towards this. You're talking about the process of things. 

For me, a big thing that kind of got me help me kind of realize that is that I was I was a Boy Scout and with Boy Scouts, you kind of go through these ranks and you kind of when you were starting a new little Boy Scout like an Eagle Scout, is this unattainable thing way up there? It's a little plaque on the wall with all the names of the Eagle Scouts underneath. Instead of sort of thinking of it that way, this unattainable thing, you do this little thing and then you get this little badge and you do this, this and this and this and you get this and that pulls you towards that. And then you do this and believe you towards that and you see that all the things that you're doing. 

It doesn't happen all at once, but you're building the skills to get you where you want to go. And that's why we see that in all sorts of places. Being a parent is such a wonderful adventure in this way that we get to reflect on these important lessons and then try to demonstrate them ourselves.

Ginny: eah, it's such a gift. And then, you know, then you hope you get to do it again as a grandparent. You know, it's a beautiful, beautiful journey of life, for sure. And someday I'd like to hear you play the ukulele. 

John Muir Laws: Someday I will play for you. Or if you would like to hear me play a few misplaced notes. I could do that for you. It's over there. 

Ginny: Let's end with that. I think it's the perfect ending. 

John Muir Laws: So you'll hear somebody who's been playing ukulele for just a little while. 

Ginny: Let's hear it. All right!

John Muir Laws: So here's my little ukulele. So what I'm intentionally doing right now is not saying, um, you know, sometimes when people are sort of sitting down like this, they will tell you this is going to be terrible, right? But I don't want to frame things like this. But I can show you sort of where I am in my process right now. I'm really proud that I can rock a scale. Oops! There was a scale with a goof in the middle of it. We got c d e f g a b c c b a g f e d c. 

Oh, how about that? 

Ginny: You sound so proud. What's interesting is that the first time you went through it, Jack, and you said I made a mistake or something, I didn't hear it, you know, and I think that's part of life too, you know, is that other people, we hear our own mistakes, but other people usually don't, you know? 

John Muir Laws: Yeah. And so it's for me, it is so cool being able to, um, what? I'm trying to learn a song from the movie Harry Potter. Yeah, called fireworks that made my daughter really wanted to play that. They're both like jamming on it and the. But this is the way it starts. That's the start of fireworks. 

Ginny: That's awesome. 

John Muir Laws: You're not stuck with the brain that you're born with. It's the brain that you choose to build through repetition with effort. 

And so it's your brain. What are you going to do with it? 

Um, and there are lots of things that you could do. Something that I love about this process is just sort of embracing the vulnerability of not being there yet. The ukulele is a little bit of a sweet and kind of goofy instrument - sometimes that might be helpful in letting me let go of some of that adult ego that wants to cling to competency and not being willing to be vulnerable in that place of not being there yet. 

Ginny: There's this book called Smart Moves. It's written by a pediatric occupational therapist. Her name's Carla Hannaford, and she says that as we get older, if we play an instrument, we have a 69 percent less chance of developing dementia or Alzheimer's. So 69 percent less chance. So it's just interesting. Like movement protects our brain, you know, and learning complex things and it protects our brain. It enhances and protects. So there's so many benefits there. 

I think that was the coolest thing that you just modeled to everybody that you're learning something new. You're doing it in front of your daughters. What a cool ending to the podcast. 

And if anybody ever was curious if you could talk for two hours about nature journaling, the answer is yes, you can! I give that a big thumbs up. 

I so appreciate your time. I have had an absolute blast. I cannot wait to share this. I'm so excited that it's coming out on Thanksgiving, heading into the holiday season. You know you want to check out John Muir Laws because he has all sorts of book. You have all sorts of supplies there, you know, for people. These are great gifts like they're giving kids lifelong benefits. You buy it for your family, for yourself. His books are phenomenal. If you're a grandparent, you know, get these for your grandkids. They're so cool. How to teach nature journaling. They're both fantastic. Any of the field guides. And Jack, thank you so much. 

John Muir Laws: It's been a hoot. Really appreciate it. Be well. 




Ginny Yurich
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