“There’s a race of [wo]men that don’t fit in, A race that can’t sit still; So they break the hearts of kith and kin, And they roam the world at will. They range the field and rove the flood, And they climb the mountain’s crest; Their’s is the curse of the gypsy blood, And they don’t know how to rest.”

– Robert Service

“This is why once you’ve traveled for the first time all you want to do is leave again. They call it the travel bug, but really it’s the effort to return to a place where you are surrounded by people who speak the same language as you. Not English or Spanish or Mandarin or Portuguese, but that language where others know what it’s like to leave, change, grow, experience, learn, then go home again and feel more lost in your hometown then you did in the most foreign place you visited. This is the hardest part about traveling, and it’s the very reason why we all run away again.”

–Kellie Donnelly

“What if one’s tendency to go wandering off is truly a gift? What if the driving force beneath the curiosity that leads a person to wander off the beaten path is not immaturity, but the wild, untamable Spirit of God, drawing them into the wild to be refined, to discover fresh insights, and pioneer a new way forward for a new group of people?”

-Brandan Robertson

“I enjoy the wild things,

Call me at 3 am and tell me you’re waiting at my door.

Give me sunsets in different cities and road trips on dirt tracks not sighted on maps.

Whiskey for breakfast & cheap thrills for dinner.

Give me happiness in a smile and nothing of certainty but the way we make each other feel.

There so much life in living while you’re alive & I’d give absolutely anything to have it all with you.”

-Nikki Rowe

“Sometimes I think I live in a gap between two worlds, one world that I have to wake up to, be adherent of the rules and live in a place that is dictated by others. A place I sometimes feel the fear of aging and dying before I have figured out what it is I am here to do.

That other world is sweet, fresh and misty, inviting adventure into the unknown, melding ancient wisdom with new discovery; the sunlight turning into moonlight and the spell of eternal life is never broken.

Perhaps in that gap I should repair the forgotten bridge from one side to the other, but truth be told, I don’t want to. I don’t want to because I don’t have the energy to fix what is broken within. I am a wild, wandering nomad, I belong everywhere and nowhere all at the same time, and in that gap between worlds, I am free.”

-Riitta Klint

“Ask her what she craved, and she’d get a little frantic about things like books, the woods, music. Plants and the seasons. Also freedom. Not being bought and sold by some idiot employer, not having the moments of her days valued in fractions of a dollar by somebody other than herself.”

-Charles Frazier

“My wild spirit is my deepest truth, my greatest expression and my highest love. It cannot be contained. It defies rules and explanations and logic. I embrace my untamed spirit and unleash her into a world that is meant to be filled with joy and love and laughter. I feel the wind in my hair, lift my gaze to the sky, raise my arms and invite the thunder. I remember how great it feels to be exposed and wildly alive.”

-Adrienne Enns

“Nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a [wo]man than a secure future. The very basic core of a [wo]man’s living spirit is [her] passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”

-Jon Krakauer

“I am a free soul, singing my heart out by myself no matter where I go and I call strangers my friends because I learn things and find ways to fit them into my own world. I hear what people say, rearrange it, take away and tear apart until it finds value in my reality and there I make it work. I find spaces in between the cracks and cuts where it feels empty

and there I make it work.”

― Charlotte Eriksson

“You’ll learn as you get older, that rules are made to be broken. Be bold enough to live life on your terms, and never, ever apologize for it. Go against the grain, refuse to conform, take the road less traveled instead of the well-beaten path. Laugh in the face of adversity, and leap before you look. Dance as though EVERYBODY is watching. March to the beat of your own drummer. And stubbornly refuse to fit in.”

-Mandy Hale

“She lives her life like a flame; a dance of purposeful choas…Her enchanting light can guide you and quell your fears…She’s hot; warming those who respect her and burning those who don’t… She is a flame with an unforgettable glow… A weak man will try to dim her luminance…but her soul mate will take pleasure in fanning the blaze.”

-Steve Mariboli

“[…] the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

-Jack Kerouac

“Dear Fellow Human Being,

You are born wild, You do not deserve to be tamed!

Tell yourself,

You do not deserve this!

All those toxic words you have to listen from people,

All those fears they try to pin on your mind,

All those giggles they aim at your dreams,

All those judgmental stares inspecting your individuality,

All those fingers pointing towards your crude character,

All those shackles that tie your feet to social expectations,

All those cages that do not let your imagination fly free,

Listen deeply, you do not deserve any of it.

My dear fellow human, you do not deserve this hostility.

You are born wild, You do not deserve to be tamed!”

-Jasz Gill

“Once the soul awakens, the search begins and you can never go back. From then on, you are inflamed with a special longing that will never again let you linger in the lowlands of complacency and partial fulfillment. The eternal makes you urgent. You are loath to let compromise or the threat of danger hold you back from striving toward the summit of fulfillment”.

-John O’Donohue

“Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life”.

-Herman Hesse

“The greatest gift of life on the mountain is time. Time to think or not think, read or not read, scribble or not scribble — to sleep and cook and walk in the woods, to sit and stare at the shapes of the hills. I produce nothing but words; I consume nothing but food, a little propane, a little firewood. By being utterly useless in the calculations of the culture at large I become useful, at last, to myself.”

-Philip Connors

“The mountain has left me feeling renewed, more content and positive than I’ve been for weeks, as if something has been given back after a long absence, as if my eyes have opened once again. For this time at least, I’ve let myself be rooted in the unshakable sanity of the senses, spared my mind the burden of too much thinking, turned myself outward to experience the world and inward to savor the pleasures it has given me.”

-Richard Nelson

“Learn from animals for they are there to teach you the way of life. There is a wealth of knowledge that is openly accessible in nature. Our ancestors knew this and embraced the natural cures found in the bosoms of the earth. Their classroom was nature. They studied the lessons to be learned from animals. They are constantly teaching us things about ourselves and the way of the universe, but most people are too blind to watch and listen.”

― Suzy Kassem

“If you have not touched the rocky wall of a canyon. If you have not heard a rushing river pound over cobblestones. If you have not seen the tree line recede to the top of a bare crested mountain. If you have not looked into a pair of wild eyes and seen your own reflection. Please, for the good of your soul, travel west.”

-Daniel J. Rice

“We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”

-Henry David Thoreau

“As you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged by a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens.”

-Stephen Graham

“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity.”

-John Muir

“is not a dew-drop on a blade of grass more beautiful than a pearl set in gold? Is not a living spring, which gushes up before us, we know not whence, more beautiful than all the fountains of Versailles?”

-Friedrich Max Muller

“For the 99 percent of the time we’ve been on Earth, we were hunter and gatherers, our lives dependent on knowing the fine, small details of our world. Deep inside, we still have a longing to be reconnected with the nature that shaped our imagination, our language, our song and dance, our sense of the divine.”

-Janine M. Benyus

“What is adventure? If a lone wolf lifts his plaintive call into the moonlight near your campsite, you might call that adventure. While you’re sweating like a horse on a climb over a 12,000 foot pass, that could be adventure. When howling head winds press your lips against your teeth, you face a mighty struggle. When your pack grows heavy on your shoulders as you climb a 14,000 foot peak, you feel the adventure. When you suffer freezing temperatures and 20 inches of fresh powder on a hut to hut trip in the Rockies, that could be called adventure. But that’s not what makes an adventure. It’s your willingness to conquer it, and to present yourself at the doorstep of nature. That creates the experience. No more greater joy can come from life than to live inside a moment of adventure. It is the uncommon wilderness experience that gives your life expectation.”

-Frosty Wooldridge

“I think I like wildflowers best,” I explain. “They just grow wherever they want. No one has to plant them. And then their seeds blow in the wind and they find a new place to grow.”

-Rebecca Donovan

“People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.”

-Iris Murdoch

“We are animal in our blood and in our skin, exulting in the wilderness from which we’ve all come and to which our souls are still bent.”

-Jay Griffiths