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

by James Kevin Thornton

Overview

“Make this book your friend,” says Arianna Huffington.

James Thornton’s Nature, My Teacher, is a powerful guide to being human in a time of eco-crisis.

In Nature, My Teacher, poet, lawyer and founder of top global environmental group ClientEarth, James Thornton offers a meditation on being alive while the planet fights to survive. He explores topics such as memory, climate anxiety, and human consciousness through a series of short essays, arranged into twelve “books”, each closing with a poem and a photo to leave readers in a reflective space.

As a Zen priest from Los Angeles, James contemplates what he has learnt from observing and listening to nature, and shows that when the planet is hurting, we too feel its pain.

The way this book is opening hearts and minds is remarkable. Arianna Huffington found it “powerful and moving”, Zen abbot and author Joan Halifax sums: “A profound guide to discovering the great wisdom in the natural world, this book…is a treasure for all”.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781909954939
Publisher:	Barican Press
Publication date:	04/16/2024
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

James Thornton is a poet, Zen Buddhist priest, and founder and president of ClientEarth, the leading global not-for-profit law group. As a lawyer, with the Earth as his client, James sees that 'Nature speaks in the grammar of science’. He is a Conservation Fellow of the Royal Zoological Society. The New Statesman named him one of 10 people who could change the world. Irish-American, born in New York, James is also the author of Client Earth (Scribe 2018), co-authored with his husband Martin Goodman, which received the Judges’ Selection, Business Book of the Year Award 2018, and the Green Prize for Sustainable Literature from Santa Monica Public Library. He has twice won Leader of the Year at the Business Green Awards. For his legal work, The Financial Times awarded him its Lifetime Achievement Award. His writing includes two novels, a book of spiritual practice, and three volumes of poetry. He was a judge for the 2020 Laurel Awards for Ecopoetry. He lives in London and Los Angeles.

Read an Excerpt

Nature is my teacher

By then I'd been studying with my Zen teacher Maezumi Roshi many years. We were up in the San Jacinto Mountains at his mountain center, near the ridge top. I could hike up, find blooming lupine bushes swarming with bumble bees, and look out over the desert far below towards Palm Springs.

Martin was picking me up at the end of a long meditation retreat. He had never met Maezumi, and it was time. I arranged for them to have a private word.

Martin told Maezumi that his own practice was to go to mountains and experience the sacred. He asked Maezumi if he felt the same way about mountains. Maezumi said that of course he did. Even his name meant Big Mountain. He invited Martin to come walk the mountains next time I was there meditating on my cushion.

Then Martin thanked Maezumi.

"Thank you for the teachings you have given James all these years. They are very important to him."

"I am not James's teacher!" thundered Maezumi. "Nature! Nature is his teacher!"

 

 

Voice of the valley

You stand at the head of the valley. The voice of the wind emerges by touching things. Stones, leaves, flanks of hills. The voice comes soft as a light breeze, then builds. Leaves, mostly it's leaves moving side to side. In the distance you see them move, waves on an ocean, on a wheat field. When shaking in storm, a million hands wave angry.

The sound percusses and you perceive. Listen to green summer leaves their sound mapping onto air to your ears their growth, water into roots up trunk into shapes where chlorophyll makes sugars feeding life.

Recently a different note entered, a drier timbre as hot winds from Africa cross the waters with dessicant affinities. The forest sounds like autumn though the calendar says late spring while birds still raise their young.

You connect this forest tone of voice with global patterns and wonder how long the forest will endure how long will we. Looking out one day and listening, words come to your mind. What you hear is this. The verdure endures, not you.

Table of Contents

Introduction	15
The Book of Nature	16
The Book of Self and Other	44
The Book of Memory	62
The Book of Questions	80
The Book of Mind	98
The Book of Millions of Years	114
The Book of Compassion Arising	128
The Book of the Warming Earth	144
The Book of Anxiety	160
The Book of Unapologetic Rest	184
The Book of Simple Wants	196
The Book of Things I Need to Remember	210
Endnotes	229
Acknowledgments	231

Editorial Reviews

"Powerful and moving. Make this book your friend. It gives wise and insightful counsel, and is bursting with love for the natural world. I will be returning often to its pages." - Arianna Huffington, Founder & CEO, Thrive Global

"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

"James Thornton is an environmental hero of the highest order. James’s extraordinary book Nature, My Teacher is captivating, mesmerising, and manages to capture so beautifully our true relationship with the natural world. This is a hugely important book." - Ben Goldsmith, author of God is an Octopus

"This marvellous, poetic collection of insights is full of humility, wisdom and wonder. Some are satirical, some joyous, some uncomfortably challenging and some just plain sad. But weaving through all of them is Thornton’s irrepressible faith in humankind. “Help me do something about it”, he says, when writing about the dwindling of the natural world. And then he offers a beautiful roadmap for how we can find the resources inside ourselves to do just that. Unmissable." - Gabrielle Walker, author of Antarctica

"This is a beautiful, important and uplifting book. In it James Thornton lays out his love for the planet in a way that is thought-provoking and lyrical, a spacious blend of prose and poetry flavoured with the subtleties of the author’s Zen training. I came away inspired by the wisdom I had encountered in these pages and by the unmistakable aftertaste of compassion." - Antony Osler, author of Stoep Zen

From the Publisher