This book explores how, far from being limited to deviation from known pathways or desirable plans of action, wandering is an abundant source of meaning - a force as intimately involved in the history of our universe as it will be in the future of our planet. In ancient Australian Aboriginal cosmology, in works about the origins of democracy and surviving disasters in ancient Greece, in Eurasian steppe nomadic culture, in the lifeways of the Roma, in the movements of today's refugees and in our attempts to preserve spaces of untracked online freedom, wandering is the means by which creativity and skills of adaptation are preserved in the interests of ongoing life. Astray is an enthralling look at belonging, and at notions of alienation and hope.