Wild by Jay Griffiths

She left her flat in Hackney and spent seven years traveling the world in search of elemental wildness.

How's this for an opening paragraph:

“I felt its urgent demand in the blood. I could hear its call. Its whistling disturbed me by day and its howl woke me in the night. I heard the drum of the sun. Every path was a calling cadence, the flight of every bird a beckoning, the colour of ice an invitation: come. The forest was a fiddler, wickedly good, eyes intense and shining with a fast dance. Every leaf in every breeze was a toe tapping out the same rhythm and every mountaintop lifting out of cloud intrigued my mind, for the wind at the peaks was the flautist, licking his lips, dangerously mesmerizing me with inaudible melodies that I strained to hear, my ears yearning for the horizon of sound. This was the calling, the vehement, irresistible demand of the feral angel – take flight. All that is wild is winged – life, mind and language – and knows the feel of air in the soaring “flight, silhouetted in the primal.”

…

“I was looking for the will of the wild. I was looking for how that will expressed itself in elemental vitality, in savage grace. Wildness is resolute for life: it cannot be otherwise, for it will die in captivity. It is elemental: pure freedom, pure passion, pure hunger. It is its own manifesto.”

...........

These days I feel most peace when in movement.

At Gatwick now. Off on first big trip. NYC for street games festival, Harbin Hotsprings, Northern California Dance Collective summer camp, and the Nine ways of Zhikir at Esalen. Feeling OK on 2 hours sleep following long night of preparations, including an obsessive mission to make a dress. Messy process: nice end product. Have been magically upgraded to 'world class traveller plus'. 1 inch extra bum room. Nice.

More from Jay the verbose:

“I was homesick for wildness, and when I found it I knew how intimately – how resonantly – I belonged there. We are charged with this. All of us. For the human spirit has a primal allegiance to wildness, to really live, to snatch the fruit and suck it, to spill the juice. We may think we are domesticated but we are not. Feral in pheromone and intuition, feral in our sweat and fear, feral in tongue and language, feral in cunt and cock.” (!). “This is the first command: to live in fealty to the ferral angel.”

“As I went, I found myself increasingly needing to distinguish wildness from wasteland. Wastelands, such as forests razed to the ground, are the inscriptions of tragedy while wildness erupts with the raw carnival of comedy, laughing its socks off, grace notes galore, honouring the erotic.”

“To the rebel soul in everyone, then, the right to wear feathers, drink stars and ask for the moon.”