The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life

by Boyd Varty

If you were to zoom out from this first pugmark, you would see three men in a clearing framed by the ancient sculptured shapes of ten dead leadwoods. Zoom out still farther and you would see Londolozi Game Reserve. Pull the focus wider and Londolozi becomes a speck inside the 10 million acres of wilderness that make up the greater Limpopo Transfrontier Park, which unites the world-famous Kruger National Park in South Africa, Limpopo National Park in Mozambique, and Gonarezhou National Park in Zimbabwe. The first park to unite three nations.

The hazard of modern times is the danger of no danger.

There is an immediacy to life in the wilderness that makes so much of what most of us consider important fall away. In the bush I notice how my body falls into a wise rhythm set by light and heat and cold. I move in the dawn, rest through the day, and sleep at night. I eat when I’m hungry. I forget what I look like. I’m surprised to find that the world doesn’t end, and in fact I become happier and less lonely with each day. I transition from endless doing into a steady being. Occasionally, some task that I need to do will arise crisply out of nowhere. I notice it, attend to it, and then drop back into a gentle ease with myself. I understand only in the contrast that the mad momentum of endless doing and its symptomatic emptiness is not how we are meant to live.

In complete solitude, we are not a concept of ourselves; we are ourselves.

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.

“The restoration of the planet will come out of a profound shift in human consciousness,” she said. “And that journey begins in the healing of individuals. Nothing is more healing than the realization and expression of your gifts. That’s what I do. I help people find their gifts.”

There is no fat in nature. Everything exists on the limits of its necessary entropy.

Neurosis is a substitute for real suffering. Fearfulness is the most common state in a life that asks for no real courage.

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.

We didn’t go out and get these jobs; we created them out of following the inner trail.