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My work has given me a front-row seat to the catalog of illnesses long associated with modern life. Over the years, in conversation after conversation, the themes were the same: abuse, isolation, anxiety, depression on the one hand, and on the other hand an innate creativity and desire to effect change. I saw a deep longing in people to give of themselves, to belong once more to each other and the natural world. So many people I spoke to were searching for a life that felt more meaningful.
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. A true friend and mentor.
There was inside him both a well-educated boy and a poacher. It was this paradox of his psychology that made him a successful tracker.
It’s hard to think of something more anciently enchanting and connected than having a wild bird as a guide. Unlike modern men who have been taught to live in competition, Renias lives in profound relation with his surroundings.
It seems like very few things actually worry him. The force of his lightheartedness makes for an intense aura, and I have, on more than one occasion, considered the idea that Renias is perhaps enlightened. Maybe through hours of the intense presence required from tracking, he has experienced a shift in mental consciousness that in the East would come from meditation, but here in Africa comes from the oneness of the trail. 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,
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. We thrive on it and know that every time we go, we invite a process that will put us into an encounter with life.
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.
The owl is a symbol that you are in a wild place where few people will ever venture; where the environment conveys a nature deep within your own being. 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.
Later in my life, I would come to realize that 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.
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.
most of us have so much of the social conditioning of modern life that the track of the wild self has been lost. We live with our attention directed outward. We focus on the social cues of our culture. We look to others to define our path and value and purpose. We lose ourselves in shoulds. 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
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in the world of coaching we call supportive self-talk. “I don’t know where we are going but I know exactly how to get there,” he says.
We don’t realize the significance of the path of first tracks and how to be invested in a discovery rather than an outcome.
Without saying it, we know that we are now entering into an unspoken agreement to keep each other safe. The bush is not a place of inevitable menace, as it is often portrayed in movies and on the endless shows about deadly creatures on the wildlife networks. The bush simply has its way. If we respect this and pay attention, we belong here as much as any other animal. But the margins for error are small, and the way one behaves in a high-risk situation is critical. Yet for all of us a life with no sharp edges would be worse. The hazard of modern times is the danger of no danger.
Renias lives outside the deceptions of modern life. Its structured psychological outlook has not affected him, and I know that he is a living clue to a different way of being. He doesn’t concern himself with the attainment of status or wealth. He doesn’t worry about his security in the future or his position within a social group. He doesn’t talk about politics or worry that he isn’t doing enough. To him, time is not money. Productivity is not a reflection of his value. He considers treadmills ridiculous. When it’s time to work, he works. When it’s time to rest, he rests.
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.
Renias moves into a deeper state of this power through presence. He isn’t trying to do anything. By being himself, free from roles, rules, obligations, he is in a state of complete naturalness. Lao Tzu said in his ancient text the Tao Te Ching, “When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.” I suspect he was pointing to this state of completeness, when one is absolutely present in life. The mastery is that there is no trying.
Jung referred to “synchronicity” as a simultaneous co-arising of something in the outer world with something deeply meaningful to your inner life. The place in space and time where your non-local spiritual self, vast and unhindered, meets your human self in a moment of meaning specific to you.
After hours of walking, we find the lion’s trail has suddenly run cold. 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.
The core of coaching does have a powerful central premise: your beliefs about life are not reality. A great coach asks you to question your deeply held beliefs and rules for yourself. You can go only as far into the experience of creating life as the limits of your personal belief system will allow.
That’s what I do. I help people find their gifts.”
I discovered my gift was to be with people in a way that could help them move toward a more authentic version of themselves. I was at the fringe, for sure, but I felt a tremendous fullness in what I was doing. It felt deeply fulfilling and important to me. To my surprise, compensation was coming with it. The more in tune I got with my calling, the more I found people willing to pay me to be with them.
If you have never left a place, you may never know how deeply it has gone into your cells. Only in its absence, a world away in another land, would you hear its song calling back to you, playing the music of your longing.
The restoration of the planet will come out of a profound shift in human consciousness.
It is a conditioning that comes out of a hard childhood. In the way that prizefighters don’t come from rich neighborhoods, trackers rarely come from cushy backgrounds. The whole enterprise has to be accompanied by resilience, focus, and the dynamics of motivation.
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.
“People are not looking for the meaning of life, they are looking for the feeling of being alive.”
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. Together, we continue. The first track, and then the next first track.
Flow is a psychological state defined as full engagement in a task. It
I have followed the lions not to a place, but to a state of being. The experience is spiritual.
A person who is living in the authentic wild self becomes a transformer. Not by what they do, but by the very realness of their life that asks others to switch on. In these times, an authentic life infused with meaning is a kind of activism.
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.
I emerge from the tunnels different from how I went in. More and more the message lands. We are a society that lives in denial of death and so we are a society that denies life. But out here, how flimsy we are, with no boundaries between us and nature. What a wonderful teacher of how to live. In the face of fear is also something like awe. Then after the awe, humility. Humility is the liberation from illusions of dominance, control, and power. I give up the importance of my life to instead become a part of life. Guided by the intelligence of the nature within me as it also unfolds all around
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It became obvious that it was time to combine my two main passions—the African bushveld at Londolozi and guiding people toward their own inner navigation. I decided to create retreats that would take people out into the bushveld, experiential learning adventures in which people begin to learn the process of tracking the wild self inside.
Living as trackers, we feel into the work that is most important to us, and find our way to it. Yours will be different. It may need to be created, but if you use the skills of the tracker you will be pulled toward the life that is calling.
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.
