The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life

by Boyd Varty

He has achieved one of the hardest things to achieve in our time: a freedom from judgment about how and who he should be.

In America, many men in the groups I have facilitated have told me that they feel like they are sleepwalking through their lives. Going through the same routines, falling asleep into social media or the news. They are experiencing a kind of disengagement that makes them feel older than they are. I suspect that part of being a man is that you will as a matter of course fall asleep in your own life. It will happen. Knowing this seems important to me.

reported amazing things when they turned their attention back on and started to tune in and listen for a path back to life. The ancients call this essential knowledge.

Nature doesn’t see status or wealth or social position. It cares only about presence, one’s ability to read the signs, navigate the terrain, and translate the language of the wilderness. Nature is the great equalizer.

On the ground, in the face of a leopard, one feels acutely alone. To be guided in a moment like that, with such extreme stakes, creates a bond that is rare in modern life.

What Alex was most struck by was that Renias never shamed or belittled him about falling over and dropping his rifle. The bush had been the teacher and there was nothing more to say.

“They like to feed now. Do you know why?” Ren turns to ask me. Before I can answer, he continues, “I think it’s because the branches have dew on them and so they like how juicy it is. That’s what I think.” It’s a question I have never even thought to ask, and it contains an insight into a weakness of mine: I tend to just accept what I see. Ren always looks closer, he always asks why. He has a gift for examining the wallpaper of life.

There’s a low-lying depression and anxiety plaguing modern life—a symptom of an undiagnosed homesickness to feel a belonging to the greater ecosystem and know ourselves in relation rather than isolation.

I would come to realize that becoming aware of such information and the feelings it evokes—the people who are important to you, the things that bring you to life, the arrival of something meaningful—is its own kind of consciousness: track awareness.

Track awareness is how attuned you are to what is around you. It is recognizing a track when it appears. It is teaching yourself how to see what is important to you.

Part of why this isn’t as simple as it sounds is that it’s not rational. You can’t think your way to a calling. Finding what is uniquely yours requires more than rationality. You have to learn how your body speaks. You have to learn how you know what you know. You have to follow the inner tracks of your feelings, sensations, and instincts, the integrity and truth that are deeper than ideas about what you should do. You have to learn to follow a deeper, wiser, wilder place inside yourself.

We are a part of nature, and inside each of us is a wild self that knows deeply what it is meant to do. Inside each of us is a natural innate knowledge of why we are here. Tracking is a function of directing attention, bringing our awareness back to this subtle inner trail of the wild self, and learning to see its path.

How do you know you love something? How do you feel when you are fully expressing yourself? Learn that feeling and then start looking, not for the thing, but for the feeling. It’s there if you can tune yourself to it, if you can learn to see how the field of life is always speaking to you. Attention shapes the direction of the tracker’s life. We must turn our attention back to the wild self.

The father washes onto the son. He lives inside you as an aspiration, a disappointment, or a fear. Afraid you will never be like him or afraid you will be; he is there in the bones of your emotions. In the voices in your head. In your expectations of yourself. In the shadows of your weakness or strength. No matter how good the relationship, there is a tension between father and son.

don’t try to be someone, rather find the thing that is so engaging that it makes you forget yourself.

The track of the father is to find him within you. To find what he gave you and what he didn’t give you. You must use both sides. The medicine of transformation is innately built into this relationship.

“I don’t know where we are going but I know exactly how to get there,”

In my own life, I have often struggled with the first track. Full of grand visions and the desire to do something great, I often couldn’t find the first small beginning and then the next small beginning. I couldn’t dial huge possibilities into small practical actions. I couldn’t trust that doing enough of what needed to be done today would, with time, render a path and an outcome that could be great. I had to learn to be in the process of transformation, not trying to be transformed. You can’t skip past creating to the creation.

We don’t realize the significance of the path of first tracks and how to be invested in a discovery rather than an outcome.

The journey to transformation is a series of first tracks. I don’t know where I’m going but I know exactly how to get there.

I think of all the angst I have felt between choices. I’ve been paralyzed by options and the idea that there is a single right way. Ren is more Zen; for him the only choice is the one he has made. He knows any choice will set something in motion. This is the magic of the bush and life. You use your intention, take action, and let go. The bush teaches us that the lesson is more about discovery than being correct. On the trail there is not one way; the only mistake is to not make any choice. As it is in life.

The wild self knows what you were meant to do. The wild self is whispering.

The task itself is generating energy.

“If you want to learn to track lions you must track barefoot,” Renias has said to me. He knows lions are inclined to walk on open thornless ground. He can anticipate where the lion will walk based on the foliage and the terrain ahead.

The past is coming to me now and I know it has something to do with this track we are on. If this moment in my life were the living line of a trail, could I track back to defining junctures? The track of this lion is informing the track of my life. My family’s past. This place. This day. I feel myself in the place that Renias touches where all things are happening simultaneously in the flat circle of time.

“Well, I will show you!” Ken shouted. And there by the fire, a track opened before I was even born that would deeply shape me. Who is the maker of these trails of life? Threads across generations, threads between people, threads that most people never realize the effect of.

My whole life I have been afflicted and blessed with a sense that there is a way in which life delivers us to a place ordered by some intelligence beyond our own. I have often wished I could track back to those moments and ask those men, “Why did you do it? How do we know our destiny when we see it? How do we learn to track our life path?” The wild self is wise in a different way. Surely this is the deepest truth of a tracker.

The men I admired made choices against all convention and rationale. They followed something deep within. They tracked what called and opened new trails of transformation.

To live in nature is to watch the genius of this living technology unfold on the tilt of earth called seasons and to ask yourself, If this intelligence runs through all things, why not me? Who would I be at my most natural? How does a body heal or a person fall in love or a soldier make a choice to give up his life to save another’s? In the moment with no social conditioning, who am I? If we are to become trackers, all of us need to ask ourselves: Trackers of what? New ways of living? A new set of metrics of what a successful life actually is? Can we, with the eyes of a tracker, see deeply into life and our own being and recognize a trail of intricately connected happenstance on which we know to move forward toward a new, more connected experience of life?

I decipher a code of instructions for when you lose the trail: Accept that losing the track is part of tracking. Go back to the last clear track. There is information there. Walk up ahead checking any open terrain and bare ground. Open your focus. Any place you don’t find a track is not wasted, but part of refining where to look. Flow for a while on your best guess, alert, listening, noticing.

The path of not here is part of the path of here.

A great coach asks you to question your deeply held beliefs and rules for yourself. You can go only as far into the experience of creating life as the limits of your personal belief system will allow.

Track what makes you feel good and bring more of it into your life. Notice what makes you feel lousy and do less of it.

If you have never left a place, you may never know how deeply it has gone into your cells. Only in its absence, a world away in another land, would you hear its song calling back to you, playing the music of your longing.

The deepest lessons must be lived.

Suddenly, I feel an old friend who has walked with me for years arise. Each one of us has these friends; mine is called self-doubt. I have learned rather than to resist him, to invite him in, welcoming him as a teacher of humility. Together, we continue. The first track, and then the next first track.

They have helped me remember the wild self that is alive in me—and in each of us—and called to a different way of being in the world. Every seemingly unconnected track has led here to this realization: my track is to send out the call to the tribe of forgotten trackers and ask them to remember.

Suddenly, the wild self that has whispered all day begins to speak boldly. You who have longed for and felt called to make a different world. You who have suffered the illnesses of society. You who have risen to the top and found it empty. You with a desire to serve. You who have felt called to nature and to the creatures of the earth. You are the tracker. We are now at an inflection point. We must leave the safety of the village and venture out onto the trail of something wild and uncertain and as yet undefined. We must live on that trail, propelled forward by a set of clues only you will recognize by the aliveness they bring out in you. You must teach yourself to see your track! You are here to live. Your life can be the beginning of a great change; and it must be.

Step off the superhighway of modern life and go quietly onto your own track. Go to a new trail where you can hear the whisper of your wild self in the echoes of the forest. Find the trail of something wild and dangerous and worthy of your fear and joy and focus. Live deeply on your own inner guidance. There is nothing more healing than finding your gifts and sharing them.

I emerge from the tunnels different from how I went in. More and more the message lands. We are a society that lives in denial of death and so we are a society that denies life. But out here, how flimsy we are, with no boundaries between us and nature. What a wonderful teacher of how to live. In the face of fear is also something like awe. Then after the awe, humility. Humility is the liberation from illusions of dominance, control, and power.

It feels short to me, almost anticlimactic. But Ren and Alex were never motivated by the outcome. They live on the trail. And now, so do I.

Remember to prepare for the call. Know the call when it comes by the fact that not doing it would feel profoundly wrong. Open yourself to the unknown. Develop your track awareness. Amidst all of the information that surrounds us, learn to see what is deeply important to you. Use the feelings in your body as a guide. Live on first tracks. Anything that puts you into your essence, no matter how small, is valuable. Even if you don’t know where it’s going, play with it. Find friends to track with, lose the track, keep trying things, get feedback. Find your flow and remember to see how many unexpected things come into your life by living this way. It will be scary at times. Let the fear bring you to life. I suspect that if you give yourself the room to live each day as a tracker, a deep calling to serve will emerge.