“When I’m drawing a leaf,” he says, “I’m falling in love with that leaf. Not the idea of a leaf. This leaf. Right now. What’s its story?” We spoke over the phone from his home in California, not long after he led a workshop where children were asked to find and draw a single plant. Then came the game: they had to find someone else’s plant based only on their sketch. The shift was immediate. A child who moments ago had never noticed that plant was now its fierce protector. A relationship had formed.

 

By George Cassidy Payne

In an age when our attention is relentlessly monetized, spliced into data, sold to the highest bidder and sculpted by algorithms designed to addict, John Muir Laws offers a quiet rebellion:

Give it away freely. Not to screens, not to clickbait, but to leaves. To beetles. To clouds. To the texture of bark in your palm.

“Attention is an act of love,” he tells me. Not a metaphor. A practice. A kind of dharma.

For Laws, a naturalist, artist, teacher, and spiritual interlocutor with the wild, this truth underpins everything: every field note, every contour sketch, every lesson given with a kneel in the dirt and pencil in hand. He’s a man who has trained his nervous system to slow down to the speed of moss, not out of obligation, but out of reverence.

The Devotion of Looking

“When I’m drawing a leaf,” he says, “I’m falling in love with that leaf. Not the idea of a leaf. This leaf. Right now. What’s its story?”

We spoke over the phone from his home in California, not long after he led a workshop where children were asked to find and draw a single plant. Then came the game: they had to find someone else’s plant based only on their sketch.

The shift was immediate. A child who moments ago had never noticed that plant was now its fierce protector. A relationship had formed.

“Something goes from being an ‘it’ to a ‘thou,’” Laws explains, echoing Buber. “And everything changes.”

This isn’t idle spiritual poetry—it’s practice. It’s radical humility in a culture trained to dominate. Nature isn’t a thing to be managed, he says. It’s a community we belong to. We aren’t stewards. We are participants.

“I wouldn’t be so bold as to say how nature sees us. I can’t speak for it. But I know I’m part of it. And that’s enough.”

Against the Illusion of Knowing

Laws tells a story of being in a museum, where a group was enthralled by a fossilized beast—“a love child of an armadillo and a Sherman tank,” he jokes. Then someone named it: glyptodon. The spell broke. They moved on.

“That’s what our brains do,” he says. “We name something, then let it go. But naming isn’t knowing. And it sure isn’t loving.”

This is where Laws’ work as a nature journaler comes in, not as an illustrator, but as a mindfulness teacher with dirt under his nails. He invites people to resist the drive-by labeling and instead stay with the not knowing. Stay curious.

His simple structure is a gateway:
I notice…
I wonder…
It reminds me of…

“That’s it,” he says. “Curiosity is like a sea anchor. It slows you down to the speed of wonder.” When you notice with your whole body, when you slow to the pace of a beetle’s crawl or a hummingbird’s pause, you begin to wake up. You remember. You feel.

It’s not that the world starts to reveal itself. It’s that you do.

A Journal, a Pencil, and Permission

Laws still has his first nature journal. His mother gave it to him as a child when she noticed that her distractible son could sit still, entranced, if he was sketching something wild.

“You don’t need talent,” he insists. “You need a little notebook, some nature, and permission.”

He’s the founder of the Wild Wonder Foundation, a hub for global nature journaling education. His books (The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling, The Laws Guide to Drawing Birds) are used by everyone from teachers to field biologists. But it’s not about art. It’s about access, the kind that reconnects people to Earth, and to the part of themselves that never stopped longing for communion.

Urban kids. Neurodivergent adults. Birders. Buddhists. Scientists. Laws has seen them all fall in love, one sketch, one breath, one miracle at a time.

Where Science Meets Spirit

Although he’s trained as both artist and biologist, Laws doesn’t draw a line between disciplines. “Science without wonder is brittle. Art without observation is shallow,” he says. “They need each other.” But he also resists the imperialism of knowledge. Not everything needs to be named, classified, or solved.

“This isn’t about control,” he says. “It’s about reverence. About how much I don’t know. And how beautiful that is.”

It’s the Buddhist not-knowing mind, alive in the field. A devotion to presence, not possession. Some things, maybe the things that matter most, can’t be Googled. But they can be noticed. They can be wondered at. And that’s enough.

The Sacred Koan of the Leaf

At one point, Laws laughs and says something I haven’t stopped thinking about:
“You can’t handle the leaf.”

It’s his joke-koan—a riff on “You can’t handle the truth”—but also a tender teaching.

The leaf is not just a leaf. It is a galaxy of chloroplasts, a vascular system, a fingerprint of time. A living, trembling archive of light and weather and form. You can’t handle it. You can barely comprehend it. But you can bow to it. You can draw it. You can fall in love with it.

And maybe that’s the point.

In a world hurtling toward collapse, where certainty is marketed and speed is mistaken for wisdom, John Muir Laws is pointing to something ancient:

Go outside. Sit still. Pay attention. Fall in love.

And let that love transform everything.
Photo: Pixabay

Editor: Dana Gornall

 

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Buddha Nature and Mindfulness: When Emotion Pulls Us into the Abyss

Journaling as a Mindfulness Practice.

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