The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life

by Boyd Varty

Coming from the South African bushveld, I felt pretty certain life did not need a coach. The unbroken stream of life that animates all things is supremely intelligent, and nothing in the wild needs a coach to help it discover what it truly is. If we had lost our way in the modern world—our sense of value, direction, and belonging—it was because we had lost contact with something more instinctual, more innate.

I know, as someone who has lived between worlds, how we have lost our connection to nature, to aliveness, to passion and freedom and joy. Modern men and women have fallen into the numbing lure of screens and social networks and poisoned food and jobs that are meaningless. We have forgotten that life holds a unique story for us all. A thread made up of faint signs that lead to the manifestation of something unique. What the native people call “your medicine way.” Something that only you can give to the world.

Inside you is the wild part of you that knows what your gift, purpose, and mission are. That part of you is wild and elusive. It cannot be captured, as it is always evolving. To live on its trail, you must become a tracker.

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. The journey out of that will begin not with the call but with the desire to hear the call.

the tracker’s instinct is always to go into the unknown. We live with an intense curiosity. It is the means by which life pulls us to a destiny bigger than what we could have imagined for ourselves.

the unknown is a discipline of wildness, and wildness is a relationship with aliveness. Too much uncertainty is chaos, but too little is death.

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.

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. You can easily miss this information if you don’t know how to see. 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.

“You must train yourself to see what you are looking for.” 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. Track awareness is the ability to read the field of life with discernment and yet also know your inner landscape.

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.

Shoulds are full of traps—traps laid by society and your limited rules for yourself. No wild animal has ever participated in a should. What you know to do is deeper than that. No one can tell you what your track will be or how to know what calls you and brings you to life. That’s your work to do. But a great tracker can ask: How do you know you love something?

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

I don’t know where we are going but I know exactly how to get there might be the motto of the great tracker.

Joseph Campbell said, “If you can see your whole life’s path laid out then it’s not your life’s path.”

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.

Obsessed with perfection and doing it right, we want to go straight to the “lion.” We don’t realize the significance of the path of first tracks and how to be invested in a discovery rather than an outcome.

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.

Prepare yourself to hear the call, invite the unknown, look for the first track, tune in to the instrument of the body, and learn to see the track amidst many that brings you to life.

Men and women search for intimacy, but what they really need is wildness. A person who is in touch with the wild self answers a partner’s questions in aliveness and presence—a different, more vital kind of conversation.

In our encounters with the edges, we come to know ourselves more deeply.

Joseph Campbell: “People are not looking for the meaning of life, they are looking for the feeling of being alive.”

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.