What I've Been Reading

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.

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

What a book!! I never know Lion tracking is a profession leave alone that one can learn immensely from it. Talk about realities of life right under the nose but yet we aren't aware of it. 

Thank you Boyd Varty for penning your experiences in the beautiful book. 

• 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. 

• Unlike modern men who have been taught to live in competition, Renias lives in profound relation with his surroundings.  

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

• I transition from endless doing into a steady being.  

• 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, conformation; 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.  

• The core of coaching does have a powerful central premise: you beliefs about life are not a 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.  

• If you 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 tracker reimagines the hypothesis based on new evidence. He then does what scientists who have studied tracking call "speculative deductive tracking." 

• In truth I am done. I could go home now and be happy. 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 found it.  

• 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. Fin the trail of something wild and dangerous and worthy of your fear and joy and focus. Live deeply in your own inner guidance. There is nothing more healing than finding your gifts and sharing them. 

The miracle is not walking on water; the miracle is walking on the earth. The miracle is all around us as the awareness of life itself. 

- Thich Nhat Hahn

And the final thoughts from Boyd: 

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. 

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 the 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.