Coyote Mentoring Core Routines: Journaling
What It Is—and Why It Matters
Journaling is the practice of capturing experience, memory, and curiosity on paper. In Coyote Mentoring, it is more than a record—it’s a deepening tool. A journal can hold drawings, maps, lists of species, questions, weather observations, dreams, stories, or tracks. It becomes a container for personal connection to place and self. It’s not about spelling or grammar—it’s about attention and relationship.
The book emphasizes journaling as a key way to help learners “notice what they notice.” It slows down the experience and reflects it back, making the invisible visible. Journals often hold the first sparks of awareness: the day the crow flew overhead right before the rain, or the first time the learner heard the forest go quiet. These entries become markers of growth.
Journaling matters because it supports integration. It allows learners to remember their Sit Spot changes over seasons, track animal patterns, or notice their emotional responses to place. It also gives mentors a window into what learners are perceiving and caring about. Over time, the journal becomes a kind of mirror—reflecting the learner’s unfolding relationship with the natural world and their own sense of belonging within it.
What It Might Look Like
The learner settles in with a worn notebook.
They sit cross-legged at their Sit Spot, pulling a pencil from behind their ear. They sketch the bent grass where the rabbit fed. They write, “Heard robins calling. Wind from the west. Sky heavy.” It's quiet, simple, real. No one checks it—this is for them.
A journal becomes a map of connection.
The pages hold months of drawings: frog eggs in March, fox scat in April, the path of the sun across the meadow in June. Over time, the learner sees cycles. They begin to anticipate bloom times, animal patterns, seasonal shifts. The journal is no longer just record-keeping—it’s pattern recognition.
Mentors invite story through the page.
A mentor might ask, “Can you draw what surprised you today?” or “What question did the forest give you this week?” These prompts stir reflection. They shift the learner from passive observer to meaning-maker. Writing becomes a way to track not just nature, but inner movement.
Journaling ripens into relationship.
Eventually, the learner returns to old entries. “I used to call that tree ‘Big Arms.’ I remember when the owls nested there.” The journal becomes an archive of friendship with place. And like any good friendship, it deepens with time—quietly, honestly, in the slow unfolding of attention.