Wild things are free to exist and experience the full range of life with all its fairness, unfairness, freedom and struggle, only to come out of it sharper and better in each new generation. Wild things are not docile, quiet, resigned and defeated but will fight to the last breath to stay alive and thrive in the most unwelcoming of conditions. Wild things are those truly alive and there is rarely a more sad sight for the soul than to see something wild and free broken staring with dead complacent eyes.

Most of the zoos now (we won’t go into the morals of a zoo’s right to exist or not now) are nothing like the first gray boxes in which animals often died for no apparent reason than the disjointed environment not attuned to their biology and not being allowed to simply be – wild. Zoos of today mimic the natural environment and serve the animals needs while you’re a visitor in their world. Things die if not where they were supposed to be – it might be fast or it might be a slow death of a thousand cuts. You’ve been kind of domesticated, from a wild tribal animal, you allowed cut after cut of compromise for the sake of “progress” to make you into a secluded hermit in its own four concrete walls. But the memory of your evolutionary story remains engrained in the cells and the deep parts of the brain – that’s why you enjoy having plants in your home – to make it look more like your natural HOME, and the biome that raised and shaped you. The defeated look of unnatural life patterns reflects in the city bound human’s eyes now as the same one a caged animal has. But you do live in another world now full of benefits of a sheltered and privileged safe lives in concrete jungles. Yet sometimes you feel it so strong, pulling you back, this deep visceral need of harking back to nature. You can find the balance and re-wild yourself to, overtime, brings back what has been lost in the domestication and “advancement” to a sedentary lifestyle.

Did you know that our eyes can actually discern more nuances of green than any other color in the world. It’s an adaptation that kept us alive by noticing hidden predators, by allowing to distinguish what is edible and ripe and what will make us sick. Our peripheral vision is a high quality one because we need to see what is happening at the sides and we’re excellent at noticing patterns of movement and those that don’t fit in the usual movements of leaves and grass that signal something is approaching or hiding there. You were built for the wild. “Forest bathing” is just a fancy name for walking through nature, spending time in an environment with clean air and no artificial sounds, soaking in the calming and balancing surfaces of green all around. We’ve evolved among trees, plant and animal bacteria which are symbiotic to our own and in forest bathing, we take in all of the bacteria and microbiome to once more become a part of us and balance us out – it becomes a part of our gut, nasal mucus it gets into our lungs, like a repair mechanism and a free gift of the woods. So the first chance you get bring the spark in your wild eye back. Get of the concrete and go walking through untouched nature – forest, meadow, secluded beach… A few hours of this will reverse and annul the damage you did to your system by being a caged animal of the culture. You’re free, you’re wild – never forget it.