Episode 184 with John Muir Laws
Fall More Deeply in Love with the World
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SHOW NOTES:
Join us for an inspiring conversation that challenges you to set aside the mundane tasks, step into vulnerability, and ignite your curiosity. With insights that remind us to appreciate every little moment, this episode empowers you to start your own nature journaling journey and fall more deeply in love with the world around you.
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SHOW TRANSCRIPT:
184 JOHN MUIR LAWS
John Muir Laws I'm going to turn off my cell phone.
Ginny Yurich Okay.
John Muir Laws But why don't we do a quick check to see if you like this?
Ginny Yurich Oh, look, we would match.
John Muir Laws That's right, Roger.
Ginny Yurich We could pretend like we are taking calls for customer service. How can I help you with your products today?
John Muir Laws Please hold. Thank you for calling. 1000 hours outside. Please hold your call. It's important to us. We'll be back with you shortly.
Ginny Yurich It does sound good. So if you're comfortable wearing it, it sounds great. And we match. So I like that.
John Muir Laws It's good to be twins.
Ginny Yurich You're the only person who's ever hopped on with the one that matches mine. People always have these, like, really nice. Sometimes it'll have a logo on it, like this one on the stand. And I've always got this.
John Muir Laws One square where, like this, The boom sticking in from the side. Like they're in a recording studio.
Ginny Yurich There's, like, a circular thing. I don't even know what all of it is. It's great. So we may add. This is fantastic. Are you ready?
John Muir Laws I'm ready. I'm ready. This is going to be fun.
Ginny Yurich Okay? I'm just so thrilled about this. Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. Wow. Is it cool what I get to do? My name is Ginny Yurich. I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside, and I've been looking forward to this for a long time. John Muir Laws is back with us. Thank you for being here.
John Muir Laws Ginny. I'm really delighted to be with you today. The Green Room before we started recording, we're already kind of cracking each other up. So I know that this is this is going to be fun.
Ginny Yurich It's such a good topic, but really, it's you. It's you that makes it such a good topic now. Our other podcast that we recorded together is episode 23. It's called You're Not Stuck With a Brain You're Born With. And in that episode you play the ukulele for us, which was fantastic. You talked a lot about dyslexia, so it's just such a fantastic episode for people to go back to. I actually remember before we got on to start talking, I was so encouraged. I cried in that one. We talked for 2 hours. I remember thinking, What exactly are we going to talk about for an hour about nature journaling? And then that one just really was such a beautiful conversation. So I encourage people to go back. It's episode 23. You're not stuck with a brain you're born with in your back. It's just such a delight to see you. Can you start off by telling us, Well, tell us who you are? People probably know, but you are the nature journaling guy. Tell us a little bit about your journey, how you ended up being where you're at.
John Muir Laws Well, let's say I'm a nature journaling guy, something that's really exciting about nature. Journaling is that a community that is growing up around this is actually incredibly diverse and dynamic, and there are really fun and inspiring people in it. But you just said nature journaling. What's that about? Probably the thing that people know me most for is that I encourage people to pick up a little notebook and a pencil and to run outside with it and to use that notebook or journal as sort of a springboard for deeper observation and connection with the world around you and how to kind of use this little paper hack to help us fall more deeply in love with the world.
Ginny Yurich And I love that. I think that that's one of the things that you do so well, is you have taken this concept of nature journaling, which for me was a little overwhelming. I was thinking like, how should I do it? How do I know I'm doing it right? You've taken this in. You have made it so that it's really an easy entry. And you even talk about that on your website, like when you're talking about what surprised you need, it's like, okay, well, yeah, you could have some watercolors. You can have this certain kind of paper, but like you just said, you can get by just fine with a pencil and a sketchbook. So that's one of the things you talked about before. It's easy entry and you even have your Wild Wonder Foundation where you're helping to provide resources. Can you talk about that?
John Muir Laws Yeah, that's new. Since the last time we talked. Yeah. So what we realized is that there's this community of people all over the world who are sharing a suite of tools that are similar enough to we can put it on the umbrella of nature journaling. And we wanted to find a way to help people who are practitioners of nature, journaling themselves or would like to learn how to do it or to teach it to their family or their students, help them get resources, and also help those people who are developing resources find those people who need them. So it's a501c3 nonprofit organization. We host conferences and workshops and produce all sorts of materials to help people able to do this. Like we recently produced this little zine, which is a little fold out book that gives you the basics of what nature journaling is. You can. Downloaded as a kind of eight and a half by 11 piece of paper and then re fold it to turn into this little booklet that kind of is this fun origami project. And that is just sort of one of many resources that we have. And what we find is that having these things just helps people be able to do this. And it's fun. Now I'm trying to re fold mine and I'm thinking like, Oh, I guess if you unfold yours, the little scene we have, there's stuff on the inside so you can take it and fold it and turn it into a little book. I didn't always have to kind of try to remind myself like, Oh yeah, I got it back. I got it back.
Ginny Yurich It's super cute.
John Muir Laws I feel proud of myself.
Ginny Yurich What a fun thing. Where can people go to find that?
John Muir Laws Oh, it's wild wonder dot org. Easy. And we've got that little zine right up there at the top. And also, if you've ever been out in nature journaling and people come out like, Oh, what are you doing? That's really cool. You can pull out little zine and say, Here, you try it yourself.
Ginny Yurich Brilliant. It's just a little one chapter. It's one sheet of paper folded.
John Muir Laws Fun, one sheet of paper. And let's emphasize the folded fun because the minute you pick it up, you can't help but unfold it and then try to re fold it, and then you're hooked because it's just called Z and Surfboard.
Ginny Yurich Yeah. Okay. Let's talk about something else that's coming up, The Wild Wonder Conference. How many of these have you done?
John Muir Laws You would think I would know that ish. Ish ish. Five ish.
Ginny Yurich I guess.
John Muir Laws Of four or five ish, something like that.
Ginny Yurich Okay.
John Muir Laws Numbers have never been my strong sister. I bet we can go on the website and find out if, like, the umpteenth annual. But what it is, is we started off live pre-COVID and we rented a conference facility in Monterrey and a bunch of people descended and we had these workshops and field trips and classes and community, and it was really, really, really fun. And then an infectious disease swept across the globe, and you can't do that anymore. And so we decided and we try this online and we did. And what was wonderful about that is that once we tried it online, we realized that there's all these people in all these different countries who are interested in being a part of this, and we can all show up. In addition to that, there are teachers in all these different countries who it would be prohibitive to ask them to fly out there with a massive carbon footprint. And now we can zoom that person is sitting in your screen. Part of the genius of this is that if you just learn from one person, like let's say you got my books and and things like that, and you said, all right, this is how your nature journal, you would get the impression that the right way to nature journal is the way that I nature journals but the way that I nature journal is the way that I nature journal because that's the way that I nature journal like my journals have lots and lots of pictures and because I'm dyslexic I ended up making more pictures than words. And so that's just an artifact of who I am. But when you see 30 different people presenting all these different ideas of how do you go about nature journals or what are ideas that you can use, it makes you realize that, Oh, I can. First of all, I can start wherever I am. Things that are already in my skill set are really, really important tools for nature journaling, and I don't have to make it look like Jack's journal because that's just the way that he's chosen to do two things with this. Imagine there's this huge set of tools. I'm leaning more on some than others, but they're all really, really useful.
Ginny Yurich Yeah, well, how cool. Okay, so this is coming up. This is September 13th to 17th. It's a global conference, The Wild Wonder Global Conference, people like you said, from all over the world. So there are 30 teachers and speakers. Give us just a little highlight. I've hardly done an online conference, but this one sounds fantastic because it's just really practical information, like stuff you could go do today or tomorrow do with your family. So who are some of the people that are showing up to speak besides you?
John Muir Laws Oh, I would actually have to pull it up. I'm terrible. So let's let's go there now.
Ginny Yurich Okay. Wait. I might have a list. I've got a list. Here we go. Okay. Are all of these people people that because this is an interesting thing. When you bring together 30 people, that's a lot of people. So you may not necessarily have personal touchpoints with all of them. That's right. So are there are a few that you have maybe a deeper relationship with?
John Muir Laws Yes, Yes, yes.
Ginny Yurich Like Amy Tan, because she's in your other book.
John Muir Laws Yes. So let's let's talk about Amy for a moment, because she has been such an inspiration to me and so many other people. She is known for her amazing writing and storytelling and observation of people. So many of us as adults, we identify ourselves by what we are already competent at and the vulnerability of starting a new project and learning something that you don't already know is. Really, really hard. You know, that's one of the hazards of fame. Must be that everybody has this impression of how you should be and super competent at all the things that you're doing. But what if you want to learn something new? And that's what she did. She decided that she wanted to get closer to the natural world and to birds. And she, as a child, had done a lot of drawing, but that had stopped. She wasn't encouraged to do that. And that shut down. She decided, what if I go all in on this? And she started taking some nature journaling classes with me. Absolutely. Fell head over heels in love with birds and drawing birds and started this project of just looking at the bird feeders around her house and watching what the birds did and realized that there were all of these epic stories happening in the backyard, birds that she was seeing. And she told those through the pages of a nature journal. And in the course of this, she was willing to be vulnerable, not just writing, but drawing pictures and became an incredibly exciting artist. So I'm not saying that the purpose is to become an artist, but that's what happened with her because she put in so many pencil miles. And anything that you do, a lot of it gets better and better and better. She put in so many pencil miles. She developed these incredible skills to be able to represent not just. This looks like a golden crown sparrow, but this particular golden crown sparrow who was visiting her feeder and all of its little nuances and quirks and the humor, the love of these birds just comes out in all of the pages that she has done. She's then put these together into a book, which will be coming out soon.
Ginny Yurich All right.
John Muir Laws Yeah, It's The Backyard Bird Chronicles. It's going to be a new book, and I've seen it. And it is absolutely wonderful for me. It's so exciting to see something where somebody stepped out of their comfort zone, developed a new skill and opened up their world. Isn't that an inspiration to all of us? That we can all do exactly that? And it doesn't have to be nature journaling. It can be anything that you are working on. You can develop these new skills and your world can open up in new ways.
Ginny Yurich What a story. What a story. Because I read her story in your book. It's been a while, and her story was the one where someone said to her something like, You're not any good at this. She had a passion for it, but someone discouraged her. Teacher I think something like that to really a powerful story. I read a lot of books and that one stuck with me. What a thing. She has a book coming out.
John Muir Laws Yes, a book on. It's got lots and lots of her bird drawings in the book, as well as these stories that she's put together that really inspires me. That really inspires me.
Ginny Yurich It's a lot to overcome the negativity of others.
John Muir Laws And especially when we're I think there are several different there's several vulnerable points. When we are really young, we're fearless and we take all sorts of risks. And then as we begin to mature, our self judgment starts to grow. And that's when she got hit with a really negative comment from somebody who discouraged her in her art, and that completely shut it down. You think as a as an adult, I've got thicker skin, but also as an adult in our heads, we're thinking, I've got more at stake. I've got more at stake because I need to show the world how confident I am. And we often kind of put on this competency act as grown ups instead of being vulnerable to whatever it is that we don't already know.
Ginny Yurich I love her story. That's just incredible. I'm delighted that she has a book coming out. What a neat thing to have come full circle to have overcome that and to show that you can dive back in to the passions that you had as a child that maybe got squelched or you just ran out of time for. So how thrilling. So Amy will be part of the Wild Wonder Conference. How about one more?
John Muir Laws Oh, sure. Let me tell you about another really interesting person. That's Pratt is the California executive director of the National Wildlife Federation. And I met her many, many years ago before she took on that really important role. She was then passionate about wildlife and protecting and preserving wildlife. But in this role, she has in California been able to do. Build all sorts of amazing bridges between people and wildlife, both metaphorical and physical. She's starting to put in helping us create our first wildlife overpasses over freeways to connect up wildlife corridors in the state of California. And she's going to be talking to us about the bridge between falling in love with nature the way that we do when we are nature journaling and becoming a voice and advocate for protection of wild places and spaces. And that's a real and really important part of the conversation as well.
Ginny Yurich This is exciting. Yeah. It says, Sharpen your pencils. The 2023 online event will offer classes, panels and lectures. 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. So all day long Pacific Time daily. This is September 13 to 17th. There are more than 30 teachers, journals, writers, artists and thought leaders. And so you're going to be learning about nature. Nature journaling. Nature writing, visual thinking, conservation, like what you said. So all of these people coming together. I really like the timing of it, Jack. Like, I think that September tends to be a very busy month. Like it's a scramble month, right? Kids are going back to school. You are getting back into this routine that's often very busy. And so I love that the timing of this coincides with that season. As a reminder to slow down, to have fun, to connect. So if people are interested in joining in on that, which they totally should. September 13th, the 17th. Where is a good place for them to go to find information about it?
John Muir Laws I would head right over to Wild Wonder dot org.
Ginny Yurich Okay.
John Muir Laws And it's very easy to find the conference there. There's a big picture of a mountain lion. You click on the mountain lion face and you're into into that section.
Ginny Yurich What's your favorite part of a conference like that or what's a favorite part?
John Muir Laws For me, something that I'm really looking forward to is that when you're at a live conference, one of the most interesting parts of it is usually when you get to kind of hang out in the cafeteria and you're just having conversations with people. What we're going to do is there are a couple of opportunities for that. We're going to have what's called pencil miles and chill, where you can just get into conversation rooms with other people who are in nature journaling and talk to other people yourself. So instead of a presentation, there's going to be lots again, lots and lots of presentations by all sorts of amazing poets and illustrators and cartoonists and, you know, people with the incredible skill set. But we're also going to have time to meet each other, make connections with each other, and also every day at the end of the conference, we're going to have a sort of backstage give back to what we call the sort of a backstage pass where you can drop into a conversation room with myself and whoever chooses to be there from that day. And we can have more open, free ranging conversations about whatever is interesting us. So those are, for me, so much fun.
Ginny Yurich How exciting. You do such a great job of fostering connection beyond the connection with nature, but the connection with others I even saw recently. There's a bunch of teens, a bunch of teenagers that are connecting over their nature, journaling. So what an awesome thing in a world where they're very inundated with screens, they're connecting over this concept of nature journaling.
John Muir Laws That's right. Who knew that the analog still has power and it absolutely does. We're really excited about the teen involvement and participation and guidance in where we should go. We don't want this to be a movement that is just organized by a few people in a hierarchy. The Teen Nature Journal Club was started by a bunch of teens who liked nature journaling and realized that let's make connections with each other. And now we're trying to help them further those connections, creating an online platform for them and asking, What else can we do to support what you want to do and your growth in this? There's a really active teen community. Something that's really fun about nature journaling. It's something that is absolutely intergenerational. It's got something to offer all of us. Some people are super active climber explorers with notebooks and going ice skating out on glacial lakes to study icebergs in their nature journal. Other people are doing their nature journaling from home and are not able to get out and about. But. We realize that we can see infinite wonder in a houseplant or a vegetable in the refrigerator.
Ginny Yurich Yeah, it's so true. I loved learning more about nature journaling since the first time you and I talked and I talked to this woman who her nature journaling is about. She's super interested in the nature that affected old writers. So, you know, the writers and a lot of people have read their work. And so she'll study. Where did they grow up? What was the nature like around them? How did that affect? And she has this whole nature journaling thing about that. And so I love when you talk about there's all of these different ways that you can do it, whether you're adventuring or whether you're right around your home. Some people just do it off the pictures off their phone. So I talked to someone. She takes photographs when she's out on her nature walks and then she comes home and that's what she uses to journal. So I love that there's so many different touchpoints, so many ways that you can join in. And by coming to a conference like yours, you start to see, Oh, there's a lot of fascinating things to learn about life in a lot of different ways that we can do this.
John Muir Laws I think that that's that's true. It's a really, really big tent. And just sort of jumping back to what I was mentioning earlier about, like there's not one way to do it. Let's say you like writing or you really like poetry and you do that. You'd say like, Well, am I really doing nature journaling?
Ginny Yurich I would imagine that gets asked a lot.
John Muir Laws Yeah, because. Because my journal doesn't look like yours or let's say I'm a numbers person. I've got all these lists of birds and how many I'm seeing in different places like this. But, you know, it's that nature journaling. And so the answer is like yes and yes and yes and yes and yes. So if your comfort zone is drawing pictures of things, that's where my comfort zone is. Your journal is probably going to be mostly pictures of things. But if your journal is mostly pictures, if you challenge yourself and push yourself to start to add a little bit more writing in, you'll think about things differently. If you try to write a little haiku, you'll think about things differently if you start to measure or count things. And similarly, if you're a journalist mostly writing, that's great. That is nature drilling. This is all apps, it's all nature journaling. But you will start to think about things a little bit differently If you add in a map or a little diagram or you start to count them. And so if you're writing a haiku is your normal thing. Well, you can also then try I'm going to make a list and then tally things. And you realize that doing that made me look at this place in a slightly different way. And it doesn't mean that it's the way that you were looking at it before was wrong or it isn't as good, but it's different. And that just for the fact that it's different, that's really, really, really useful. That's really, really useful.
Ginny Yurich It really broadens the way that you look at the world because then you're incorporating all of these other different new things. Let's camp there for a minute because this conference is coming out. Like I said it a really busy time of year and I always feel in August this pressure to enroll my kids in things I feel every August and then I tend to enroll and then in September I tend to regret. So it's this cycle that happens every year. But coming in the middle of September, in this time when things ramp up, and I think so often things like nature journaling get pushed to the wayside. They seem frivolous. They seem unimportant in comparison. So can we just can't for a minute on why? Why should someone journal? Why should they nature journal? That's probably a really big question, isn't it?
John Muir Laws No, no, no, no, no. This this is it's a it's a really it's a really it's a really important question to ask because we only have a limited amount of time, both in the day and in our lives. What are you going to do with that? It's very Oliver says. What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life that is in a relatively important charge? And in that poem where Oliver asks that, what is she decided to do with her life? She's decided to look at a grasshopper. Look at a grasshopper, and she's making this really powerful statement. What do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? She's looking at a grasshopper. And in that grasshopper is so much is every little moment around us is infinitely rich. So what are you going to do about that? It turns out we cannot spend our life observing every grasshopper with intensity and clarity and depth, because the moment you're doing that, you're not looking at the other grasshopper. And what about the other other grasshopper? So there's so much nature out here. And so then we kind of get just like, Oh my gosh. And then what I should do is spend a little bit of time with this grasshopper and then a little bit of time with that grasshopper. And there's this like, so nature, there's this, this or anything we do, we have this now, this idea of fear of missing out. So if I'm doing this one thing, I'm not doing something else. And I would say, yes, that's absolutely right. And it's okay. And I like nature driven. The reason that I nature journal is that when I do, the world around me slows down the world comes into focus and common, ordinary things that are in front of me every moment reveal their wonder and their mystery and their beauty to me in ways that I will never see if I weren't doing it. And this does profound things for my sense of connection with the world. It does profound things for my mental health. It gets me outside. It gets me connecting with the natural world. It really motivates me to the other. I'm about to go off on a tangent. Okay, here we go. It's just the other. Last. Last week, some people came by my house for making a documentary about dyslexia, and we decided we're going to go up into the redwood forest and do some filming. And at a time that turned out to be basically kind of a motorcycle race going by the area where we were. So we're trying to kind of get footage between your film, which came through on the audio. But when I was up there, I found these orchids that were still in bloom in the redwood forest, and I started to sketch one of these that was being was covered with aphids and was not in bloom. And then I was thinking, like, it seems to me that I've got a couple of them that have these efforts on them and they're not in bloom. And a bunch of the ones that are in bloom, I'm not really seeing aphids on that. And that was sort of in the back of my head. I made a little note about it, and then the next day I woke up and I realized, Oh my gosh, what I need to do is I need to get back there and make a little chart where I'm counting and measuring the number of orchids that have aphids on them and whether those are in bloom or not in bloom. And they sort of make a little kind of four part chart. So whether you have aphids, yes or no, and whether you're in bloom, yes or no, and then kind of measure all the all the orchids in there. And I couldn't get back out into the field because I had I went up to the Sierra Nevada to teach a little a class coming back from that. This question was still stuck in my head because I had drawn this little note about this little orchid with assets on it. This mystery was enough then to motivate me. After dinner, I kissed my kids and my wife and drove right back up into the redwood forest as the sun was setting. And then the mosquitoes then came at me. So in a cloud of mosquitoes counting and measuring every orchid I could find in and in pursuit of this little mystery that had kind of piqued my curiosity. Had I not been nature journaling, here's what would have happened. I would have walked out there and gone, Gosh, the redwood trees are pretty. Oh, look, there's an orchid. I didn't think that they were still in bloom. And then I would have walked down the trail and gone, Oh, look, the trees are so pretty. Isn't that interesting? And then I would have come back later. And folks who say, What did you do that day? I said, I went and looked at the redwood trees. Gosh, they were pretty. And then a week later, I would have forgotten almost all of that experience. But because I was journaling, my brain had time to notice things that it otherwise wouldn't have seen those stuck in my head like Krazy Glue. And then it motivates me to, Oh, okay, after dinner today, I'm going to run and kind of grab my things. I'm gonna head back out into the woods and I need I've got a mystery. There's a mystery that I need to untangle and it gets me back out there. So why that also does is it makes the experiences that you have out there even more resonant so it improves your memory. We have the subjective experience that being out in nature, I'm experiencing all these beautiful, wonderful things. I'm going to remember these moments forever. The problem is that we can't even remember them by that afternoon. And what the Journal allows me to do. The Journal can hold much more information than my little wad of electric meat between my ears that can dance with about seven ideas at a time, plus or minus two. And my piece of paper, my journal can hold as many ideas as that page can hold, and it can hold them in relationship to each other. So it changes the way that I think it changes the way that I observe and I find that profound. It's connecting. Yeah, it's exciting, it's invigorating. So for me and my one, my one wild and precious life, I am choosing to. Pay attention. And the Nature Journal is my best tool to help me pay attention. If you keep a diary, you pay much more attention to your experiences over the course of the day. And what we find is people who keep diaries are more emotionally intelligent than people who don't. I don't keep a diary, by the way. That tells you a lot about me. But it's a incredibly powerful tool in the process of just trying to be more present in this one little moment that we get to go play on this planet.
Ginny Yurich Yeah, it's such an interesting thing. I think that answers the question so well. We're heading into a busy season. Why is this important? It's important because it makes all of it more meaningful and all of it more present, along with all of the other benefits that you were talking about. I love the sentence from your website that says, What if you could change one simple thing and make yourself a more astute observer, a more curious explorer, more creative thinker, deliberate investigator, a better naturalist. You can't just keep a notebook. And what's really interesting about that story, Jack, is that that really actually wasn't what you were going to go do. You weren't going there to Nature Journal. You were going there to film a documentary. You just happened to have your things with you.
John Muir Laws I think they wanted to get some Let's get some footage of you nature journaling out in the field, so I know it's going to do that. What I wasn't expecting was that phenomenon to hook me and to grab me by the ears and say, You've got to come back and play in the forest again. And there's an open loop and there's another open loop. If you look through my journals, it's filled with unanswered questions, millions of unopened loops that invite me.
Ginny Yurich Is that what you say? Like when you talk about the scientific method and you say it's actually a misinterpretation of a scientific process, it's not really what most scientists do. Is that sort of where you're at there? Like with these open loop things and these experiences that kind of spur you on to question.
John Muir Laws So the scientific method thing deserves a little bit more unpacking because the scientific method is not the method of scientists. The scientific method, as we have been taught it in schools, is a linear progression that goes from I'm going to make observations, I'm going to ask questions, I'm going to propose a hypothesis, I'm going to collect data around that. I will analyze that data. I will either refute my hypothesis or get evidence that supports it, and then that will prompt me to then ask the next question. It's a sort of very linear chain of events, and all of those things are things that scientists actually do. Scientists do do those things, but not always in that particular order. Sometimes they loop back. The scientific method came from one journal article that was published in the 1940s, right? Because we think like the scientific method. It's been around since sense and sense way, way back. No. The thing that we've been taught in school started in the 1940s where one scientist wrote letters to a bunch of scientist friends saying, What are things that you do in the course of your day that are science things? What does science look like? And all these people wrote back all these different things. And then that scientist took some of those and put them into the little sequence that I described and said, you know, look, these ones kind of like it tells a story, right? You know, that you start with this question and this is what you did. We should teach this in schools. So all of those things that everybody wrote in were methods of science, their science practices. But the linear one method is not the way it really looks in the field. So, yes, asking questions, coming up with a hypothesis. Scientists do all those things, but not necessarily in that sequence. And sometimes we loop back, but we also do. Playing with hypotheses is just one part of what scientists do. Scientists also tinker with things. We just kind of go out and we like. We want to learn about swallows. So what do we do? We go out, we sit on a stump, got our binoculars and our notebook. We start watching a lot of swallows. And what are the swallows doing? And then what do they do? And then what do they do? Huh? That's neat. And so, you know, you can learn a lot by looking. There's no hypothesis there. That is all just direct observation and some questions we can explore by coming up with hypotheses and testing those hypotheses. Other questions. You sit on a stump.
Ginny Yurich Mm hmm.
John Muir Laws So when I'm talking about that, I'm not saying that these are not science things or that they're not useful, but I'm saying that science is a much bigger, more interesting suite of tools that you can learn. And unfortunately, that this approach to thinking about what science is is now. Also being taught in our schools. When I went to school, we learned the scientific method.
Ginny Yurich Yeah, same thing. What if someone were to just put your a nature journal in your hand and said you can learn a lot by looking?
John Muir Laws Yes, that's right. And hypothesis testing is wonderful and really, really useful and gets us to really tighten our screws on our thinking. But it's just one tool in a much larger toolkit. So when when we're going out there and we're nature journaling, you're behaving as a scientist, you are observing, you are exploring, you are learning from the world around you. You don't have to be doing hypothesis testing to be doing science.
Ginny Yurich That's so encouraging.
John Muir Laws Yeah. And so now in schools, many states have adopted what are called the next generation science standards. And in those they don't refer to the scientific method. And in fact, that's when one point in their documents they kind of explained like, yeah, not so much that, but they talk about science and engineering practices and many of these as a suite of tools that we can apply to investigating the world around us. And it's, it's a much more useful way of thinking about science. And it's, it's more accurate to what the process is and makes people really realize that that, gosh, this is fun.
Ginny Yurich Well, that's exciting that if you had a child that was interested in observing the birth, that there are scientists. That's right. I mean, that's that's really it opens the door to a lot more people to enter in to that field in new ways. I love that. I love it. So, so much goes on with the nature journaling and it's just a worthwhile thing to include in your life. Can we bounce back to the documentary about dyslexia? Oh, yeah, because I know people are going to ask you about that. And it's one thing that, you know, as a lot of parents listening in homeschool parents us and into. So it's something that comes up often. So what does that documentary when is it coming out?
John Muir Laws The documentary I actually they told me but my dyslexic brain doesn't hold up in numbers. And that's why I didn't even know like, we're like, is this the this nature journaling conference? Like even little numbers I actually have in my wallet a piece of paper that has my telephone number on it for when I forget what that is.
Ginny Yurich That's so incredible. It's such an important thing that you do. And I remember this distinctly from the last conversation that we had where you were talking about how like when you were a kid and maybe your because of the dyslexia, you're saying, like I'm struggling with my grammar or I'm mixing up letters or things like that. And then you said, but it doesn't preclude you from being a successful adult, like you said. Well, you have so many books out now and you put out so much content and you're like, Well, other people do those parts and I do these parts and we all come together and create this finished product. And it was such a such a hopeful message. I got so much out of that really stuck with me that especially for a child, because there's kids that listen into the podcast, you, you look like you don't have to be able to do every single thing. You don't have to know everything. We all come together and and make it work. And so it's great when you share stuff like that. I think it helps people a lot.
John Muir Laws And the documentary is going to be a really useful part of that conversation. The documentary is sort of based out of research done by Brock and Frenette. Eddie called The Dyslexic Advantage.
Ginny Yurich I love that.
John Muir Laws How is dyslexia an actual advantage? Turns out it's not an advantage in the spelling bee, but if you are dyslexic, you have throughout your life there are tasks that for all of your peers have been really, really easy. And for you, you couldn't do those in the way that everybody was expected to do those. And so what we have to do as dyslexics is it's not just figuring out, you know, can I do this? We realized that when we are struggling with something very often, I still am not a very good speller. I am teaching my daughter's multiplication tables right now, and I'm not very good with my threes. A little bit better with my fours, sixes, sevens eights. Yeah, that's. Well I've got a trick I do on my fingers to help me with the nines and you know, these sorts of things. I'm still struggling with that, but I'm a fully functioning adult because I've found other ways of working around it. Like I can't go through the front door. Then dyslexics get very good at going. Like, let's let's go around the back, let's look for the side door. Or we realize like third story window is left open. So we dyslexics get good at sort of figuring out like different ways of doing things and. Very often as an adult, having somebody who's a sort of lateral divergent thinker and can see the windows where everybody else just sees the door is incredibly useful. So dyslexics are overrepresented as CEOs of Fortune 500 companies because we think in all these sort of novel ways and there are often people that help us with our spelling. So this documentary is it called The Dyslexic Advantage. It may be this documentary is going to be interviews with a bunch of different dyslexic who do things in different ways and how the challenges that we face in our dyslexia have pushed us to sort of novel solutions and how that is something that is of real value.
Ginny Yurich Jack, You are doing such cool things. Such impactful things.
John Muir Laws It's fun.
Ginny Yurich And people just if they follow along on your website, you put out the information, then they'll be able to find what they need there.
John Muir Laws And they can also probably get that to you. So you can link to that in the show notes.
Ginny Yurich Yeah.
John Muir Laws And they'll know the name of the.
Ginny Yurich I just think you help encourage people to to be who they are and to grow and to be excited about that and to learn and and to find simple ways to do that. It doesn't have to be extravagant. Just I'm always so encouraged coming away from conversations with you. I know that the listeners are going to be so grateful for this and they have an opportunity to rub shoulders with you at the Wild Wonder Conference, a global conference coming up September 13th to 17th with 30 teachers and speakers and community and fun and wonder at such a good time of the year, like because it's a busy time of the year. That's why you should join in. That's why. Yeah. So that you can set yourself up to have a year that has some moments of slow.
John Muir Laws And just to kind of piggyback on that, if I could, Jenny. I think that what we want to say, that it is a busy time of year, but perhaps that's that's appropriate just to kind of emphasize the point that we do have to make choices and it is okay, we cannot do everything. But what we want to do is to be deliberate about what is it that I do want to do, and then I can make choices. And that means that there will be things that I am not doing. There will be grasshoppers that I don't observe. And if nature journaling isn't your thing, that's also okay. I'm not saying like you're doing it wrong if you're not doing nature journaling. I find it incredibly useful. I find it incredibly powerful. And it's not one of these things where you need to be an artist in order to do it. Wherever skill set you have, that's what you need to do to step through that door and shoot it so your skill set will grow, right? And so you're not stuck. I think we talked a lot about this in kind of growth mindset the last time that your skill set will absolutely grow as you do this more, but you get to decide what it is that you want your brain to be about. So what I want to encourage people to do is to not let our current schedule dictate that, but to change our current schedule, to make time for the things that are important for you. So if this is something, a skill that you want to get. All right, let's schedule that in. If you say I'm going to do this once the house is clean and all the tasks are done, that point will never arrive. The laundry is never done. They're making more dirty laundry right now as you as I speak. Right. So what I want to do is I can schedule it in. I can make room for it, just like going outside. If I say I'm going to go outside into nature, when all the laundry is done and all the tasks are done, you are never going outside. So what I want to do is make room for that intentionally and deliberately, and it's a choice to do that. And I want to invite everybody who's listening to take charge of those choices that you can and make that happen. If that's what you choose. You want to you choose to do, go make that happen. And also, if the scheduling doesn't work for when this conference is or if you're hearing this podcast later, we're going to have a recording of it and you can see those at your leisure.
Ginny Yurich Well, that was brilliant. Yeah, I'm glad you said that.
John Muir Laws And it does help. It does help.
Ginny Yurich Because people are definitely going to listen to it after it's over. I'm so glad that you brought that up.
John Muir Laws But something that is that you can't get from the recording is sort of live interaction with the community. But there are lots of other ways to do that through the Wild Wonder Foundation. We've got a nature journal clubs, sort of social media Facebook page where a bunch of people are sharing their journals. I know there's lots of problematic things about Facebook, but we're also looking into how to create non Facebook discussion groups. There are live events happening all over the world, so there are new nature journal clubs that are popping up. You've got a map that help people find the Nature Journal Club that is closest to you. And if you don't see any that are close to you, we've got the instructions on how to do that. We've now got a person on board who, if you want to start your own nature Journal Club, will be your kind of coach and mentor to help you start that club. So there's lots and lots of ways of getting engaged with this community, with this skill set. The Wild Thunder Conference is one of those. But there's also this. Very large and vibrant community of people who are coming together to develop and share these resources.
Ginny Yurich So awesome. Incredible. Jack, Always encouraging. I did see that on your website to start a Nature Journal Club. Thank you for taking this time to be with us again. You know, it's so cool that a conversation from years ago can still ring in my mind. I think about the growth mindset. Often so many of the things that you shared. So appreciate you come. I think about the ukulele. I mean, it's is great. It's a thank you for coming. Is that what it was? Is the ukulele right? And you're playing a scale.
John Muir Laws That's right. So yesterday I had had fun. My mother in law is clearing out her house and gave my wife her grandfather's ukulele and brought that home. And I strung a ukulele and tuned it to low G. And so now I'm trying to figure out like, oh my gosh, there's this new ukulele in the house, but this is my first time stringing a ukulele. And so I had to I learned how to do that. That was really fun. So that that is still still a work in progress. My daughters are still much, much better than the papa, but that's one reason why I like to watch Let them watch me practice is because then they also see that like, oh, you know, you practice. It's okay if you're not, you know that, you know, Pop is practicing this, but but it's okay that he's doing this and he's he's not quite where we are, but he's got a little bit better. Bless his little heart. That's.
Ginny Yurich I love it. John, thank you so much. Thank you. And hope it's a fantastic conference for you. Thank you for all you do.
John Muir Laws Thank you so much for letting me be here. Ginny. Thank you for what you do to connect people with the natural world and get us outside on this amazing planet.
