RETURN

A Journey Back to Living Wild

In this stunning memoir Lynx Vilden 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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  • … a mesmerizing and ethereal autobiography mixed with aspects of spirituality…

    — Booklist

  • …an exploration of what a closer relationship with the natural world can offer us.’…spirited debut…rigorous, colorful portrait of true wilderness living.

    —Kirkus

  • Many wonder what it would be like to return to living wild, yet few have walked that path as intimately as Lynx Vilden.

    —Rosalee de la Forêt, author of Alchemy of Herbs and Wild Remedies

  • 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

About the author

Lynx Vilden has traveled, explored, and researched the nature and traditional cultures of arctic, mountain, and desert regions from Hudson Bay to the Kalahari Desert. She emerged from her first sweat lodge ceremony in 1989 with the realization of the calling back to the Earth, learning, sharing, and teaching the old ways. She has been practicing and teaching primitive living skills with passion both in the US and in Europe since 1991 for a number of schools and programs, including her own. Lynx is a respected member of the primitive skills community internationally and has led and participated in some of the longest running primitive living experiments in the modern/western world, including months of primitive living immersion with fellow practitioners and students. She's lived in a Sami village in Scandinavia, the desert Southwest and the mountains of Montana and Washington, a cave in the Perigord, France. She now lives in the lake region of central Norway where she hosts year-around primitive skills courses.