"We have to learn to read the poetry of ecosystems the same way one learns to reads tracks and signs across a landscape—and to let it reshape and nourish our minds the way food nourishes and shapes our bodies." Minnows scatter like starlings from a field...

"Stories are food. They feed the depths of us, where we are wild. What happens in this story is a version of what we must do to be nourished by the wildness inside our own humanity." There is a glen in Ireland. The entrance is difficult to find—you have to...

"Everything follows the dao, which is to say wildness is an inescapable quality of existence. There is no forest in which the wild is not present." At 5 a.m. I pulled myself out of bed into the still-dark morning. It was late May but cold in the Lamar...

"The mountains and rivers are inside of me just as surely as I am inside of them." When I was very young my family lived on a ridge that divides two watersheds. On the eastern side of the ridge there were several acres of forest and marsh. The rain that...

“What we do to the wildness outside us, we do to the wildness within. . . .” I. It is a clear day on the Dingle Peninsula—or nearly so. Beyond the Smerwick Harbor, a series of peaks called the Three Sisters sit like a wall on the horizon before opening...