The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life

by Boyd Varty

If we had lost our way in the modern world—our sense of value, direction, and belonging—it was because we had lost contact with something more instinctual, more innate.

To track is to discover that nature is alive and speaks a language all its own. To track is to travel the trail of an animal and weave yourself into the tapestry of its story. It is an art that lives inside us, a way of being in union with the natural world.

Part of waking yourself, it seems to me, is made by paying attention. Most of us are looking but not seeing.

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

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.

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.”

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.

I realized the whole purpose of my life was manifest not as some distant outcome but here, inside an infinite state of enoughness.

“I don’t know where we are going but I know exactly how to get there,”

Joseph Campbell said, “If you can see your whole life’s path laid out then it’s not your life’s path.”

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.

Obsessed with perfection and doing it right, we want to go straight to the “lion.” We don’t realize the significance of the path of first tracks and how to be invested in a discovery rather than an outcome.

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

the only mistake is to not make any choice.

Perhaps this is always the highest pursuit of the trail: aliveness itself.

I suspect the wild part of you is at one with nature by being at one with the nature inside you.

To live in nature is to watch the genius of this living technology unfold on the tilt of earth called seasons and to ask yourself, If this intelligence runs through all things, why not me? Who would I be at my most natural?

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.

“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.”

trauma keeps a person from connecting with what they most need.

Perhaps this is the greatest danger, that we don’t even recognize another way.

I know that one of the great dangers of my life would be to live without danger.

“People are not looking for the meaning of life, they are looking for the feeling of being alive.”

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.

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

As our first act of activism, we should track down outer lives that more closely reflect our inner values.