Laws admits attention can border on obsession. “If you get me out in the field looking at birds, I am gone for the day. For years, I assumed my partner would share that same passion. I even tried to turn her into a birder. Sometimes, I resented that she wasn’t.”
By George Cassidy Payne
Talking with John Muir Laws is a delight.
Warm and unhurried, he lets each question settle before answering with a sincerity that feels both grounding and expansive. In conversation, he is as likely to reach for a book of poems to illustrate a thought as he is to draw from his own experience.
Fresh from explorations in Maine and Greece, Laws spoke with me about wonder, journaling, and love as an act of attention. Our dialogue began with travel.
“If we see something again and again, that becomes our baseline,” Laws said. “But if you crack through that, the world becomes different. What’s ‘normal’ is just the intersection of whatever phenomena present themselves regularly. The world is vast, diverse, ever-changing. The very concept of normal doesn’t make sense.”
Travel, he explained, shakes the mind like an etch-a-sketch. Assumptions that feel inevitable dissolve the moment you step somewhere they no longer apply. “Being in places that are different reminds me that I am choosing certain ways of living,” he said.
Yet Laws is quick to note that wonder doesn’t require distance. “People say, ‘Let’s go to nature,’ then drive five hours. But nature is in the spider in the corner of your apartment. Wonder is all around, all the time. To make life most alive, we must apprehend the daily presentations life gives us. That is the fabric of life itself.”
Learning to Notice
He recalled working on a field guide in the Sierra Nevada.
“High in a meadow, I picked a wildflower to paint. As I worked, I looked up, and it had wilted in my hand. Out in the meadow, it had been radiant; in my grasp, a shadow of itself. Paying attention can bring shame. I had made a transgression. I carefully returned the flower, whispered an apology, and promised a new approach: I would paint flowers alive where they lived, and offer thanks when I left. That moment changed me profoundly, shaping my art and my relationship with the world.”
This devotion to noticing took root in childhood.
“I had what would now be labeled ADHD—attention scattered everywhere: squirrels, birds, leaves, sunlight. Art, journaling, and observation became survival mechanisms. They gave my floodgates of attention a structure, a place to land. Paying attention became a way to inhabit life fully, even when the world felt overwhelming.”
Love, Obsession, and Difference
Laws admits attention can border on obsession. “If you get me out in the field looking at birds, I am gone for the day. For years, I assumed my partner would share that same passion. I even tried to turn her into a birder. Sometimes, I resented that she wasn’t.”
Maturity softened that view. “She understands this passion is all-consuming, and she gives me space. Accepting difference allowed us to stay connected. She became a natural history enabler without inhabiting the obsession herself. That doesn’t make me lonely or disconnected.”
Even in cities, he said, attention offers the same lesson. “Paying attention, sharing wonder, and respecting difference—between myself and the world, and between myself and others—becomes a way to navigate obsession without tipping into despair.”
Attention, for Laws, is inseparable from grief. “Every act of attention is an act of love. Each encounter with the natural world rehearses loss. We are in a mass extinction event. Fields from my childhood are now farms or roads. I feel sadness, anger, frustration, despair. What keeps me going is action rooted in love. I lead with wonder, not despair. Nature journaling reconnects people with the intensity of life, motivating action.”
Through his books and the Wild Wonder Foundation, he works to spread that ethic of wonder and stewardship. “Mutual respect and kindness are foundational. Non-hierarchical approaches allow more people to participate and fall in love with the world.”
Wendell Berry’s words guide him: “I rest in the grace of the world and am free.” Raised with a father who battled depression, and confronting it himself, Laws has found nature to be an antidote to despair. “Pulling attention into the world, through noticing, wonder, and joy, is one of the most powerful ways to break despair.”
The Last Line
As our conversation wound down, I asked a final question: if his last act on Earth were to draw one final line in his notebook, what would he hope it carried?
“To give the pencil to someone else,” he said without hesitation. “I would show them how to make their own lines, to continue attention and immersion in beauty. My last mark would motivate someone to keep going. That’s why I teach—because you never know when the last mark will be made.”
He recalled a mentor, Malcolm Magoglin, who had believed in his Sierra Nevada field guide project. “He saw everything I was trying to do. The day before yesterday, he died of Parkinson’s complications. Eventually, I will be there too. Between now and then, what will I do with this one wild and precious life? If I died today, my legacy would be teaching someone to notice the details of an acorn, the light on a blackbird, the geometry of a sea pod.”
For Laws, mortality is clarifying, not morbid. “Death makes every moment matter. Seeing beauty or experiencing wonder is not infinite. That makes each moment more meaningful. Noticing, planting a tree, kissing the earth, being joyful, this is the ethics of attention made manifest.”
The Gift of Wonder
In the end, his message is simple yet profound: paying love through attention is both our responsibility and our gift. Whether in mountains, city streets, or a patch of weeds by the sidewalk, wonder is always available. And when shared, through teaching, mentoring, or handing a pencil to another, it endures.
Photo: Pixabay
Editor: Dana Gornall
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George’s essays have appeared in publications such as The Good Men Project, The Buffalo News, The Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, and many more. A poet at heart, his work often blends memoir, philosophy, and theological reflection, rooted in the belief that language can be both a balm and a spark.
Whether reflecting on the writings of Marcus Aurelius, the parables of Jesus, or the mindfulness of a Jain monk sweeping the ground before them, George writes to make space for wonder, doubt, and dialogue.
He joins The Tattooed Buddha as a regular columnist to explore themes of death, inner peace, activism, grief, and contemplative life in a world on fire—and to ask, again and again: How can we live as if everything we do matters?
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