The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life

by Boyd Varty

The renowned writer of the African wilderness Laurens van der Post said of the lion’s roar that “it is to silence what the shooting star is to the night sky.” It is like waking from a dream and having the sensation of being pulled back into my body, as if my soul were being pulled from its endless seeking back into myself by the beauty and power and violence of that ancient sound.

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.

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.

The roar again. Calling to something deep inside me.

Alex is a paradox. He grew up first in wealth and then in poverty.

In his presence the word “mastery” comes to mind. To me a master is anyone who can be themselves in any situation.

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

Tracking begins with wanting to track.

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

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.

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.

Ancient people would have watched their animal kin move, and those early imitations became the first dances. It’s easy to see the foundations of human culture when one is in the wild.

Tracking shaped our evolving intelligence. Tracking was the first story our species ever told.

Tracking is a birthright for every person, a memory of how to converse with nature.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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,”

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.” In the bush and in life, we don’t get trails fully laid out. We get tremendous unknowns and, if we are lucky, first tracks. Then next first tracks.

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.

“Don’t jump to then what,” I replied. “You have a first track. If you go and get some of what you need, you might get a second first track.” 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.

You are your outlook, and that outlook is not universal. It was given to you. The aboriginals used to say of modern life, “It’s three days deep.” In three days in wilderness, you learn what’s important and your mind changes. Your way of being shifts.

It was St. Francis who said, “Wherever you go, preach the gospel; when necessary use words.”

I’m surprised that the call is so close and yet Renias is not distracted by it. It’s hard to know when to stay on a trail and when to divert. It’s hard to know when the lesson is to persist and when the lesson is to let it go.

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.

“I don’t know where I’m going but I know exactly how to get there.”

So many things had to happen for me to be here today. What compelled my great-grandfather to buy this land? What had made my father start a safari business against all sense? How had Ken come to that fire? 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.

Carl Jung referred to “synchronicity” as a simultaneous co-arising of something in the outer world with something deeply meaningful to your inner life.

I don’t know where I’m going, but I know exactly how to get there, whispers

There is a last track and then it’s gone. Trails can be like life in that way. One minute you are clear on a path and the next instant, it is gone. You get fired, you lose a loved one, the company fails, you retire, she dumps you, you get divorced. Where you thought you were going vanishes. Who you thought you were is lost.

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.

I think of all the people I have spoken to who have said, “When I know exactly what the next thing is, I will make a move.” I think of all the people whom I have taught to track who froze when they lost the track, wanting to be certain of the right path forward before they would move. Trackers try things. The tracker on a lost track enters a process of rediscovery that is fluid. He relies on a process of elimination, inquiry, confirmation; a process of discovery and feedback. He enters a ritual of focused attention. As paradoxical as it sounds, going down a path and not finding a track is part of finding the track. Alex and Renias call this “the path of not here.” No action is considered a waste, 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.

I have come to learn that losing the track is not the end of the trail, but rather a space of preparation. The whole process is contained here as a pure potentiality. 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. All of these dynamics must lie latent in you as you look for the next track.

Dr. Martha Beck,

Nothing is more healing than the realization and expression of your gifts. That’s what I do. I help people find their gifts.”

The restoration of the planet begins in people, the restoration of the planet begins in you, whispered the wild self.

Back when Ken Tinley arrived on the scene, most of the land was eye-high scrub. The animals were scarce, and if you did see them, they were trying to get away from you, conditioned by years of hunting to escape the death that humans represented. A landscape, like a person or a psyche, learns to defend itself. With hundreds of cattle on the land, the grass had been overgrazed, leaving bare soil. When the rain came, the water would run off and cut deep erosive furrows into the earth. The arid landscape could not receive the nourishment it needed. I saw this too in every ceremony I attended, how trauma keeps a person from connecting with what they most need. And I recognized it in myself.

It gives of its abundance freely, like a person who has learned to be himself.

I don’t know where I’m going but I know exactly how to get there.

as an extension of one another. Over the years, Alex has tapped into Renias’s humor and mannerisms. He often conveys a story to me that Renias has told him, complete with imitations of Renias’s imitations. In the East there is a term for the way one can merge with a teacher, called “darshan.” It refers to absorbing the teacher’s spiritual energy and embodying it for yourself.

I am walking in a vision. I am walking in a dream. I am tracking. I am awake.

To this day I wonder about the courage I found underneath the fear. I wonder if I could find it again. I wonder if it is wrong to look for it. I know that one of the great dangers of my life would be to live without danger. In our encounters with the edges, we come to know ourselves more deeply.

“Any pain, you can fix with walking. Just walk, you can be fine.”