The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life

by Boyd Varty

Last, I thank all life trackers the world over. The tracker finds a path where there isn’t one, and we need that more than ever.

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.

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.

Still, I knew deeply that I—that we—needed a different direction. Yet there are no processes in modern society through which to transform. We are a world desperate for change and yet saddled with an outdated momentum. Deep down we all know something else is possible, but how to get there? I came

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. In some ways, this book is a mythology. It is the story of the day I found my track. It is my story, but I hope it will be the beginning of a new story for you, and for all of us who want to make a new world. The roar again. Calling to something deep inside me. 1 The Call I get out of bed at 4 a.m.

To me a master is anyone who can be themselves in any situation. Renias lives this definition. He has achieved one of the hardest things to achieve in our time: a freedom from judgment about how and who he should be.

This is what we do. We wait for lions to roar. It is what we have always done. We are waiting for the call. Ready, awake long before anyone else, listening.

The desire itself has an energy. Part of waking yourself, it seems to me, is made by paying attention. Most of us are looking but not seeing. The

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

her described as “steel cables wrapped in velvet.”

I am a person who likes secrets, and I am a person who has felt that I can only truly know myself in forgotten places.

I felt the gratitude of being taught. When someone shares with you, you become someone who wants to share.

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 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.

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.

You are your outlook, and that outlook is not universal.

In complete solitude, I stop objectifying myself. In the bush I don’t think of myself on some social hierarchy. I don’t define my value as a comparison with others.

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

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.

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;

Carl 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

I don’t know where I’m going, but I know exactly how to get there, whispers the wild self. Learn to be natural.

Accept that losing the track is part of tracking. Go back to the last clear track. There is information there.

“Hi ta swi kuma.” We will get.

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.

“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.

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

for. If you could track a trauma pattern you could help a person find the self beneath the pattern. And there was a way of being with people who were scarred or flighty or aggressive that was like being with an animal. A

For ten years I worked intensely between ceremonial spaces and traditional coaching. Everywhere I went, I had a simple intention: help people heal in order to find their way back to their own guidance. And during this time, I was changing too. A

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

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.

watching the flight path of the plane. Upon landing ten hours later, he turned to Alex and, supremely content, declared, “Alex, if we need to walk home, I know the way.”

True giving gives in every direction.

“The miracle is not walking on the water; the miracle is walking on the earth,” said the teacher Thích Nhất Hanh. “The miracle is all around us as the awareness of life itself.”

I hear Joseph Campbell: “People are not looking for the meaning of life, they are looking for the feeling of being alive.” If that was it, I had found it.

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.

You who have longed for and felt called to make a different world. You who have suffered the illnesses of society. You who have risen to the top and found it empty. You

There is nothing more healing than finding your gifts and sharing them.

I feel the closeness in the center of my chest. If they are my friends, then I must be okay. If they are my brothers, then there is nowhere I can’t go.

It is the magic hour. The light is now “the light that makes everything beautiful,” as the Shangaan call it.

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

I remain deeply convinced that a person who tracks down an authentic life opens up possibilities for themselves, their family, and

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.

Remember to prepare for the call. Know the call when it comes by the fact that not doing it would feel profoundly wrong. Open yourself to the unknown.