Only when I got back home did I begin to reflect more on the unreflective wonder of those days. I remembered how my Czech philosophy mentor Erazim Kohak explained how cities, like mirrors, reflect ourselves back to us. Not healthy over time. We were meant to inhabit a living world of stone, earth, flora, fauna. These are our relatives, and we miss them when they’re far away. I remembered poet and essayist Gary Snyder’s reminder to practice the wild. He draws inspiration from ancient Chinese poets who understood the vast emptiness in which we live and move and have our being as ”the wild existence-tissue cosmos open to itself, awakened to itself in the form of human consciousness.” Those are the words of poet and essayist David Hinton, but they resonate with Snyder’s vision. Snyder describes enlightenment as “another aspect of our wildness—the bonding of the wild in us to the (wild) process of the universe.” This wildness is everywhere, including in our microcosmic bodies and imaginations. But if we forget this or wall ourselves off from contact and awareness of it, we suffer and cause human and other creatures to suffer.. As we face the shadow side of civilization, with its extractive and exploitative rapacity, its imperial imposition of boundaries, and its war economies, I find it helpful and hopeful to return to the earth. I’m happy to question how we have “denied first soul, then consciousness, and finally even sentience to the natural world.” A return to the wild, then, is not immoral. It isn’t a regression. It is charged with respect, reverence, and joy in collaborating with neighbors, human and otherwise, in a permaculture of mutual vitality.