“It has been a long time since you experienced wildness—so long in fact that you have forgotten what it is. None of your myths or legends, scriptures or stories can reach back as far as the wild.
“Part of the problem is how much you fear it, even though you don’t know what it is. Even the wildness of simple things—birds and flowers, insects and weather—you subject to endless classification. But you will never arrive at any true understanding of these things without grasping them within yourself.
“Once all knowledge was the knowledge of a flower. Once all wisdom was the wisdom of the wind. Once all beauty was the beauty of butterflies and beetles. But you have reduced all of these to the thinnest, palest shadow of what they truly are, and that shadow haunts the mind like a ghost or a specter—the memory of all that you feel has been lost.
“But you can no more lose your wildness than you can lose your shadow on a sunny day. You can no more escape your true nature than the mind can leave its place within the body and take up residence somewhere else. You live in this world and you are the world, with all of its green and growing things—its animals and birds and fishes, its wind and water, dust, dirt, rock, and sand. You are nothing but these, and they are you. Your wildness is the only true mirror of the world.”