Ever since I was a boy growing up in a small working-class shipyard town in the great Pacific Northwest near Seattle, I have experienced the jaw-dropping beauty of the natural world and human kindness overflowing, right alongside the numbing horror of human cruelty, war, racism, and environmental damage. It didn’t make sense, this joy and woe, so I’ve had a life’s mission to find ways of healing and integrating a broken world. These books have been a balm and refuge, offering me a deeper perspective, spiritual grounding, and pathways toward “the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.” I hope they might benefit you too.
I wrote
Unbroken Wholeness: Six Pathways to the Beloved Community: Integrating Social Justice, Emotional Healing, and Spiritual Practice
One of the best books I’ve read in years. Kimmerer is a university botanist and a Potawatomi elder, and she applies modern science and Indigenous wisdom to the troubles of our times.
I was moved to tears many times as I read her stories about connecting so intimately with trees, ponds, and plant life cycles. Her stories made me realize how much I’ve been conditioned to feel separate from nature when, in fact, I am a descendant of trees, plants, rivers, and other creatures.
I love how grounded the author is and how beautifully her language expresses something deep and buried in me. This is a brilliant, beautiful, buoying book.
Called the work of "a mesmerizing storyteller with deep compassion and memorable prose" (Publishers Weekly) and the book that, "anyone interested in natural history, botany, protecting nature, or Native American culture will love," by Library Journal, Braiding Sweetgrass is poised to be a classic of nature writing. As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer asks questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces indigenous teachings that consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers. Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take "us on a journey that is…
I am deeply troubled by how we are harming the earth, our Mother. I have also been a student of Thich Nhat Hanh’s for over 30 years and now a teacher in his tradition. This is his last book before he passed, and perfect for me, as a spiritual practitioner and an environmental activist. The book is an antidote to my periodic bouts of despair about climate change. It provides penetrating understanding of the suffering on the planet and its root causes in greed, hatred, and the delusion of separateness. I loved his stories, teachings, and practical advice for healing and transforming the roots of suffering that lie deep in my/our consciousness. A profound and moving book that I return to frequently for solace and guidance.
“When you wake up and you see that the Earth is not just the environment, the Earth is us, you touch the nature of interbeing. And at that moment you can have real communication with the Earth… We have to wake up together. And if we wake up together, then we have a chance. Our way of living our life and planning our future has led us into this situation. And now we need to look deeply to find a way out, not only as individuals, but as a collective, a species.”
A magisterial history of Indigenous North America that places the power of Native nations at its center, telling their story from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today
I was hooked from the opening pages! I resonated with the author’s personal stories of how he felt the wrongness of many things as a child like I did. I had an early sense of how broken things were—struggling parents who drank too much, Catholic school that taught me how sinful I was, working-class neighbors who beat their children, clear-cutting of forests near me, and more.
I loved the author’s gorgeous, almost poetic language and short 2-3 page chapters with trenchant headings like Separation, Breakdown, Interbeing, Cynicism, Evil, Miracle. I completely agree with the premise that the ills of the world have an underlying story, what he calls the “story of separation,” which is breaking down, and we are headed towards a new “story of interbeing.”
A beacon of hope in the face of our current world crises, this uplifting book demonstrates how embracing our interconnectedness is key to world transformation
In a time of social and ecological crisis, what can we as individuals do to make the world a better place? This inspirational and thought-provoking book serves as an empowering antidote to the cynicism, frustration, paralysis, and overwhelm so many of us are feeling, replacing it with a grounding reminder of what’s true: we are all connected, and our small, personal choices bear unsuspected transformational power. By fully…
This great book re-inspired me about Gandhi’s nonviolent and spiritually grounded approach to social justice and liberation.
I first read Gandhi when I was 16. The author digs into Gandhi’s three-level “iceberg” approach: first is “self-purification”—healing, self-care, transforming unwise views and attitudes, cultivating love and compassion; second is “the constructive program”—engaging in community improvement, new ways of doing things, restorative social practices; and only then could a person take part in “satyagraha”—the great marches and protests aimed at liberation from British colonial rule.
The author then applies the approach to current problems in our world. I loved Gandhi’s integration of social justice, healing, service, and spiritual practice and his faith in nonviolence as a way of life, not just a technique—it's a profound teaching.
The Gandhian Iceberg presents a bold, new interpretation of Gandhian nonviolence from the rare perspective of an author who is equal parts writer, scholar, and frontlines practitioner. The book faces the current crisis of climate change and the intensification of social unrest around the world, and calls for a new convergence of serious, spiritually-rooted US nonviolence activists prepared to offer themselves in service to a social change movement unlike any seen before. The book approaches radical social transformation and its realistic requirements, with a blend of solid research, moving personal testimony, and compelling vision. The Gandhian Iceberg is written from…
What happens when a person is placed into a medically-induced coma?
The brain might be flatlining, but the mind is far from inactive: experiencing alternate lives rich in every detail that spans decades, visiting realms of stunning and majestic beauty, or plummeting to the very depths of Hell while defying…
This book deeply touched me. I gained a larger perspective on climate change. I loved the author's use of poetry that connects humans to “wild” earth and that I/we are expressions of nature and cannot be separate, ever. I marveled that in an indifferent cosmos, humans love the earth.
Hinton believes the cosmos is learning to know/love itself through us. He tracks how the dualistic splitting of humans from nature, heaven from earth, and spirit from the mind has led us to sever our inherent kinship with the earth and cause such damage to our Mother.
We may not be able to pull back from environmental suffering, but the more we love and reconnect with our kinship with everything, the greater the chances of avoiding total collapse. This is an uplifting and relaxing perspective.
Exploring the confluence of ancient Chinese spirituality and modern Western environmental thought, Wild Mind, Wild Earth reveals the unrecognized kinship of mind and nature that must be reanimated if we are to end our destruction of the planet.
Earth is embroiled in its sixth major extinction event—this time caused not by asteroids or volcanos, but by us. At bottom, preventing this sixth extinction is a spiritual/philosophical problem, for it is the assumptions defining us and our relation to earth that are driving the devastation. Those assumptions insist on a fundamental separation of human and earth that devalues earth and enables…
In our world today, suffering is deepening, the center is not holding, and our relationships with the earth and each other are out of whack. Knowing this breaks our hearts, and we naturally want to help. We also carry deep in our hearts notions of the world we want—safe, compassionate, generous, just, sustainable, creative, and caring. The “beloved community” is a term that embodies this aspiration.
In my book, I explore six interconnected ways of helping to make the beloved community a reality. These ways integrate social justice, emotional healing, and spiritual practice. I offer stories, frameworks, and practical tools from my life’s work and learning. May it benefit our miraculous and hurting world.
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. This book traces the story of the bull in the sky, a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull.
Why We Hate asks why a social animal like Homo sapiens shows such hostility to fellow species members. The invasion of the Ukraine by Russia? The antisemitism found on US campuses in the last year? The answer and solution lies in the Darwinian theory of evolution through natural selection.
