The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life

by Boyd Varty

Most large cats—tigers, leopards, jaguars—are solitary and inclined to avoid fighting, since even a small injury can be fatal. Lions are different, with a mane to defend their head and neck. It is suggested that they have evolved to be inclined toward conflict.

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.

Alex is one of the best trackers in southern Africa, ten years older than me, close enough to get into trouble together, old enough to guide me out of it.

For Alex, the great-great-grandson of an Afrikaner who was one of the founders of the Afrikaans language, in a country torn apart by racism, his respect for the language and culture of the Shangaan has been an act of embodied healing.

The Shangaan are known for being the best trackers in southern Africa. They are a tribe of poets and rogues who abandoned the warring ways of the Zulu to go their own way. Averse to conflict because of their innate open nature, they are a tribe of storytelling observers.

Growing up living off the land as a hunter-gatherer has placed in him an immediacy with life that makes him incredibly present and wonderful to be around, yet gives him a terrible debt record.

I suspect that part of being a man is that you will as a matter of course fall asleep in your own life.

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

Too much uncertainty is chaos, but too little is death.

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. And when you follow an animal’s trail you are linked to every person who has ever read the earth, every ancient culture that has walked a trail. Tracking is a birthright for every person, a memory of how to converse with nature.

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.

Shoulds are full of traps—traps laid by society and your limited rules for yourself.

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.

My ability never seemed to match his expectations. This is common between the father and the son, the dynamic making for an innate tension. This is why in native traditions, the mentor to the young man is never the father but a close male relative.

In its purest form, the archetype of the father guides you to be your best.

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.

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

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.

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.

I discovered my gift was to be with people in a way that could help them move toward a more authentic version of themselves.

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.

Through the eyes of a tracker I saw a wilderness in each person waiting to be brought back to life.

The restoration of the planet will come out of a profound shift in human consciousness.

The wild self, the part that is in touch with instinct and needs and purpose, the part that can feel shades of emotion and is natural, is like that. It must be awakened, followed, listened for—tracked. 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.

From miles away, while examining the ground intently for the lost trail, Renias has managed to spot a falling eagle at an intense distance. So often we dichotomize between big-picture thinkers and details people. What Native Americans used to call “eagle vision” and “mouse vision.” Trackers embody both ways of seeing. They move seamlessly between these two states.

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

In our encounters with the edges, we come to know ourselves more deeply. Neurosis is a substitute for real suffering. Fearfulness is the most common state in a life that asks for no real courage.

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.

Humility is the liberation from illusions of dominance, control, and power.