The Lion Tracker's Guide To Life Quotes

“don’t try to be someone, rather find the thing that is so engaging that it makes you forget yourself.”
― Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life

“I hear Joseph Campbell: “People are not looking for the meaning of life, they are looking for the feeling of being alive.”
― Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker's Guide To Life

“Joseph Campbell said, “If you can see your whole life’s path laid out then it’s not your life’s path.” In the bush and in life, we don’t get trails fully laid out. We get tremendous unknowns and, if we are lucky, first tracks. Then next first tracks.”
― Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker's Guide To Life

“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. Flow for a while on your best guess, alert, listening, noticing.”
― Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker's Guide To Life

“In his presence the word “mastery” comes to mind. 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.”
― Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life

“We have forgotten that life holds a unique story for us all. A thread made up of faint signs that lead to the manifestation of something unique. What the native people call “your medicine way.” Something that only you can give to the world.”
― Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life

“Before that day, I had always thought that I needed to be somebody in the world. That rhino and the path he walked told me something different: don’t try to be someone, rather find the thing that is so engaging that it makes you forget yourself.”
― Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker's Guide To Life

“I think of all the people I have spoken to who have said, “When I know exactly what the next thing is, I will make a move.” I think of all the people whom I have taught to track who froze when they lost the track, wanting to be certain of the right path forward before they would move. Trackers try things. The tracker on a lost track enters a process of rediscovery that is fluid. He relies on a process of elimination, inquiry, confirmation; a process of discovery and feedback. He enters a ritual of focused attention. 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.”
― Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker's Guide To Life

“But a great tracker can ask: 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.”
― Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker's Guide To Life

“We lose ourselves in “shoulds”… No wild animal has ever participated in a should.”
― Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker's Guide To Life

“That’s how mentors should be made: not through titles or words but through actions. On the ground, in the face of a leopard, one feels acutely alone. To be guided in a moment like that, with such extreme stakes, creates a bond that is rare in modern life.”
― Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life

“Coming from the South African bushveld, I felt pretty certain life did not need a coach. The unbroken stream of life that animates all things is supremely intelligent, and nothing in the wild needs a coach to help it discover what it truly is. 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. All of this shuddered on its mooring in my own subconscious as the roar cut the night.”
― Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life

“I thought of all the people I had met who wanted a full vision for a new life and then to move from where they were straight into it. I thought of all the people who had told me that when they knew exactly what they wanted to do, they would leave the soul-destroying thing that they were currently involved with. 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.”
― Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life

“True giving gives in every direction.”
― Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life

“a life with no sharp edges would be worse. The hazard of modern times is the danger of no danger.”
― Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life

“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.”
― Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker's Guide To Life