Nature, My Teacher

"Captivating, mesmerising, and manages to capture so beautifully our true relationship with the natural world." ~ Ben Goldsmith

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.

© 2024 Barbican Press (Ebook): 9781909954946

Release date

Ebook: 16 April 2024