Nature, My Teacher: How to Be Alive in a World under Threat

by James Kevin Thornton

" Powerful and moving. Make this book your friend." - Arianna Huffington James Thornton is a lawyer whose client is the Earth. He visits his client. It speaks to him. In Nature, My Teacher he passes on some of those teachings. Presented in twelve books, each a sequence of intimate essays, James investigates the nature of human consciousness. What is memory? How do you summon compassion? How do we care for ourselves? Answers reveal themselves all around us. As a Zen priest, James knows that people are part of the natural world. It impacts us with its beauty, and we quake when it is hurt. This book ripples with that beauty, and also gazes steadily at climate anxiety. James is clear-sighted. We are right to be troubled by ecological collapse, but there are ways to save ourselves and save the world. This is a fierce and tender study of how to be alive in a world that is under threat. "A profound guide to discovering the great wisdom in the natural world, this book by James Thornton is a treasure for all ." - Roshi Joan Halifax, Abbot, Upaya Zen Center

230 pages, Hardcover

Published April 16, 2024

Reviews

[Corey Norton · Rating 3 out of 5]

An odd combination of poetry and short essays. Some of it was really beautiful and moving, and some of it I think went way over my head. I kind of felt like some parts were even a little pretentious, but maybe I just didn't connect with them. In general, it was a lot of artistic framing of the issues we face as a species without offering much in the way of solutions or learnings (which the title led me to believe it would offer). Overall not the book I expected it to be, but it did inspire me to start writing some short-form stuff based on my own observations in nature and self-reflection, so I have to give it credit for that.