The Lion Tracker's Guide To Life - by Boyd Varty

Date read: 2022-04-15
How strongly I recommend it: 8/10
(See my list of 150+ books, for more.)

Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.

Based on real-life experiences, a very short book (~100 pages) that relates tracking lions with finding your way through this world. I also recommend listening to Boyd's interview with Tim Ferriss where he goes into more detail on tracking and his life living in South Africa.

My Notes

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.

In America, many men in the groups I have facilitated have told me that they feel like they are sleepwalking through their lives. Going through the same routines, falling asleep into social media or the news. They are experiencing a kind of disengagement that makes them feel older than they are. I suspect that part of being a man is that you will as a matter of course fall asleep in your own life. It will happen. Knowing this seems important to me. 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. Part of waking yourself, it seems to me, is made by paying attention. Most of us are looking but not seeing. The same men who had told me about falling asleep in their lives reported amazing things when they turned their attention back on and started to tune in and listen for a path back to life. The ancients call this essential knowledge. As trackers our part is to be awake. Our part is to listen. We want to hear the call. Tracking begins with wanting to track.

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.” 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.

We are a part of nature, and inside each of us is a wild self that knows deeply what it is meant to do. Inside each of us is a natural innate knowledge of why we are here. 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.

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.

Don’t try to be someone, rather find the thing that is so engaging that it makes you forget yourself.

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.

The journey to transformation is a series of first tracks. I don’t know where I’m going but I know exactly how to get there.

There is an immediacy to life in the wilderness that makes so much of what most of us consider important fall away. In the bush I notice how my body falls into a wise rhythm set by light and heat and cold. I move in the dawn, rest through the day, and sleep at night. I eat when I’m hungry. I forget what I look like. I’m surprised to find that the world doesn’t end, and in fact I become happier and less lonely with each day. I transition from endless doing into a steady being. Occasionally, some task that I need to do will arise crisply out of nowhere. I notice it, attend to it, and then drop back into a gentle ease with myself. I understand only in the contrast that the mad momentum of endless doing and its symptomatic emptiness is not how we are meant to live.

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.

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.

Track what makes you feel good and bring more of it into your life. Notice what makes you feel lousy and do less of it.

For thousands of years, to be outside the dominant cultural story spelled death. To be outside the band of hunter-gatherers meant you had been shunned by the village. Deep inside, we want to belong. This remains true today, but maybe for the first time in human history, modern society—the dominant culture—has become the thing that isolates us. If you could track your way out of the burdens of modern life and create an existence that is much more an expression of who you are, then your own life could become a living mythology. One that could inspire others.

I hear Joseph Campbell: “People are not looking for the meaning of life, they are looking for the feeling of being alive.”

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. Develop your track awareness. Amidst all of the information that surrounds us, learn to see what is deeply important to you. Use the feelings in your body as a guide. Live on first tracks. Anything that puts you into your essence, no matter how small, is valuable. Even if you don’t know where it’s going, play with it. Find friends to track with, lose the track, keep trying things, get feedback. Find your flow and remember to see how many unexpected things come into your life by living this way. It will be scary at times. Let the fear bring you to life. I suspect that if you give yourself the room to live each day as a tracker, a deep calling to serve will emerge.