The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life

by Boyd Varty

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.

Renias was using his own steady energy to shape the outcome of the moment. He was using his own calm to keep Alex calm and to calm the leopard and show her their intention. To move fast and rush could have been misinterpreted as aggression, so in the tradition of the natural world and with his life as his guide, Renias spoke in the ancient language of the animal’s energy. He used his body language, his movement, and the tone of his voice to create and convey a feeling, not just to Alex, but to the leopard. In a situation in which things were happening incredibly fast, by being slow, Renias was able to create time.

The idea that life is full of information. “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.

Before that day, I had always thought that I needed to be somebody in the world. That rhino and the path he walked told me something different: don’t try to be someone, rather find the thing that is so engaging that it makes you forget yourself.

You can’t skip past creating to the creation.

thought of all the people I had met who wanted a full vision for a new life and then to move from where they were straight into it. I thought of all the people who had told me that when they knew exactly what they wanted to do, they would leave the soul-destroying thing that they were currently involved with. 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.

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.

Seeing someone who simply doesn’t have the social programming you do is profound because it forces you to see that a huge part of what you might think of as “this is how I am” or “this is what you do” is not you at all but patterns of behavior and thinking you have adopted from the cultural story. You have been told what to be and want. This realization is immense as it is the beginning of a much deeper question about what we actually want.

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.

mastery is that there is no trying.

There is no try only do

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.

Eliminate that which is not your path

and the key is to keep moving, readjusting, welcoming feedback. The path of not here is part of the path of here.

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.

saw this too in every ceremony I attended, how trauma keeps a person from connecting with what they most need.

If something is all you have ever known, you mistakenly believe that’s just how it is. Perhaps this is the greatest danger, that we don’t even recognize another way.

There was clearly some method to how he had cut off the road where he had, but he couldn’t articulate why. It was just the nature of his experience, and at some point this had become a sense beyond language. The only way to learn it was to be near him so that over time his approach might become your own.

It is a kind of energy I have witnessed in people who have merged “work,” “mission,” and “meaning.” These people don’t take holidays or need days off. They outwork everyone not from some kind of gritty determination, but from a place of pure pleasure.

As our first act of activism, we should track down outer lives that more closely reflect our inner values. We should reimagine our own lives into more meaningful expressions.

You must become a tracker and set out on the trail of your wild life. If you track your authentic life and uncover its meaning, it will catalyze other possibilities for living, and what’s important to you will immediately change. Meaning doesn’t want more; when you’re in deep touch with your wild self, you know you have enough and are enough. From that place of enough, you act in service, because that’s what feeds you. It’s a lot of individuals going on that journey of discovery that will create transformation.

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.