Return: A Journey Back to Living Wild
In this stunning memoir, beloved internationally acclaimed earth advocate chronicles her journey to reconnect with the earth, offering a model for how we all can nurture the wild around and inside ourselves.
In 1991, twenty-four-year-old Lynx Vilden crawled out of a sweat lodge covered in mud, her face streaked with tears, and whispered a promise to the earth: "I will love you and cherish you, I will learn how to live and share what you teach me." That promise became Vilden's life purpose: to return to the ways of our oldest ancestors, to a simpler life, and to listen deeply to Earth and what she has to say. Over the next thirty years, Vilden's mission would lead her far from the city streets and punk bands of London and Amsterdam where she was raised, on a long and winding journey spanning continents and seasons, and filled with indigenous wisdom, Stone Age hunting skills, and important lessons from nature.
In this illuminating memoir, Vilden shares the joys that await all of us when we reconnect with the earth, when we recognize what has been lost, and understand what we gain by meaningfully returning to our roots and become rewilded. Return is a glimpse into her extraordinary world--from stories about mentoring Silicon Valley millennials at her Stone Age immersion in rural Washington State to adventures traveling among Sami reindeer herders in Arctic Sweden to detailing the intricacies of just how to pursue and survive a wild lifestyle inspired by Stone Age humans.
This extraordinary debut ultimately invigorates our hunger to renew our bonds with the earth and awaken our wildest, most primal selves.
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Lynx Vilden has been practicing and teaching primitive living skills both in the US and in Europe since 1991. With her experience traveling, exploring, and researching the nature and traditional cultures of arctic, mountain, and desert regions, she started the Four Seasons Prehistoric Projects program in 2001, which is dedicated to learning and sharing the ancient skills of primitive living, and also created Living Wild in 2011. Vilden and her work have garnered major international media attention, including features in the New York Times, Outside Magazine, the Guardian, and other outlets. She currently lives on an old homestead in Norway.
"Lynx Vilden's life has been an atavistic quest to find, and perhaps even recover, some fundamental meaning and substance that still lurks in our most elemental human nature. Here, Lynx has shared her life's work- her relentless passion to explore, identify, and recapture the organic and symbiotic relevance of the human experience. In Return, this remarkable woman has faithfully sought and truly found the marrow in the bone." -- Joe Hutto, author of Illumination in the Flatwoods, The Light in High Places, and Touching the Wild
" ...an exploration of what a closer relationship with the natural world can offer us...a spirited debut. A rigorous, colorful portrait of true wilderness living." -- Kirkus
"[A] mesmerizing and ethereal autobiography mixed with aspects of spirituality..." -- Booklist
"Return is a story of a remarkable woman who is living the Stone-Age ways. For Lynx, the past, present and future are intertwined. By learning the skills of our ancestors, she reminds Mankind of our forgotten abilities." -- Miriam Lancewood, author of international bestseller Woman in the Wilderness
