Why this book;  I was on a zoom discussion session and this book was mentioned and I was intrigued – so I bought it and read it. 

Summary in 3 sentences:  In this short book (135 pages) the author describes his experience tracking a lion in one of the game preserves in South Africa with two other expert trackers – even more experienced than he.  He uses the tracking experience as a metaphor to relate to our relationship to nature, to the wild and natural world in which we as human beings evolved, and which he notes still lives inside of us.  He describes how finding and following the track of the lion becomes a metaphor for finding one’s path in life.

My Impressions:  I loved this book.   There are only three characters on a one day “adventure” tracking a lion in one of the game preserves of South Africa.  The author introduced us to his two mentors in the world of tracking, and then takes us along on the adventure.  And as we walked the trails, searched for, found, lost, then found again signs of the lion they had heard howling the night before, we learn about the “art” of not only tracking but living in and as part of nature, part of the food chain, as both predator as well as prey, alert, listening with one’s whole body, following one’s intuitions, while also keeping one’s rational mind engaged.  It is a process of constant learning, accepting, deciding and living with those decisions.  Kinda like life – but more natural and somehow more alive than how most of us live. 

“I don’t know where we are going, but I know exactly how to get there” This enigmatic statement he says might be the motto of the great tracker.  It might also be the primary theme of this book. His focus is on process, not outcomes. 

His two mentors with whom he shares this adventure are Alex and Renias.  Alex he describes as white, grew up initially in wealth, and then as a young boy he had to live by his wits in poverty, becoming “one of the best trackers in southern Africa, ten years older than me, close enough to get into trouble together, old enough to guide me out of it. p2

 Renias, a native African, he describes as “to the bushveld what Laird Hamilton is to the surf of Hawaii.  He has a skill and know-how that is beyond anything that can be taught, an innate sense of how the environment works, laid down in the fertile learning grounds of childhood, (who) grew up hunting and gathering, in tune with the old ways.”   Renias, he says, “has achieved one of the hardest things to achieve in our time:  a freedom from judgment about how and who he should be.” p 9-10

In The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life, Varty  follows the tracks of the lion with his mentors, and in the process, he teaches us that in order to become fully human again, we need to reconnect with nature, our natural wild selves, which are the truly authentic versions of who we were born to be, before the chisels of civilized culture shaped us into the people our cultures and societies want us to be.  Many of us have lost touch with our “wild” selves which are often at odds with what our social programming wants us to be – and consequently, we live in that tension, and struggle to find our way. 

Varty’s bottom line message in this book – after all the metaphors which connect lion tracking to living in the modern world.  “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.  Find the trail of something wild and dangerous and worthy of your fear and joy and focus.  Live deeply on your own inner guidance. There is nothing more healing than finding your gifts and sharing them. “ p 122

SOME GREAT QUOTES: Going back through this book and reviewing what I had highlighted re-inspired me.  So I include many of them in this review.  Scan them, get the gist of Varty’s message, and then read the book. And ask yourself –  What am I doing to stay in touch with my wild/natural self, and is it enough? 

-To 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. p 14 

-Nature does’t care about wealth or social position. It cares only about presence, one’s ability to read the signs, navigate the terrain, and translate the language of the wilderness. Nature is the great equalizer.p17

-No wild animal has ever participated in a “should.” p 18

-The art of the way the tracker sees is the way he can look at the thing he has seen a thousand times and always see something new. p 25

-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. p25

-(We were ) in a wild place where few people will ever venture; where the environment conveys a nature deep within your own being.  p26

-Alex sits quietly beside me in the easy silence of old friendship.  p 27

-You cant 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. p30

-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. p31

-We lose ourselves in shoulds. Shoulds are full of traps – traps laid by society and your limited rules for yourself.  No wild animal has ever participated in a should.. What you know to do is deeper than that.  p31

-Attention shapes the direction of the tracker’s life.  We must turn our attention back to the wild self. p32

-Tracking is very much like learning a foreign language. Singe tracks are words.  p 39

-The 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. p 41

-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.  p42

-Renias knows the instrument of the body as wild and natural and full of instinctual wisdom.  He knows to think but also to feel.  He uses the way this body feels moving on the track to feel the lion….we have been disconnected from our instincts.  Bringing attention back to the landscape of the body allows you to find the trail of the wild self.  p44

-Joseph Campbell said, “If you can see your whole life’s path laid out then it’s not your life’s path.” p47

-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.  p 48

-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.  p49

-Here the margins for error are small, and the way one behaves in a high-risk situation is critical.  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. p 51

-Seeing someone who simply doesn’t have the social programming you do is profound, because it forces you to see that a huge part of what you might think of as “this is how I am” or “this is what you do” is not you at all, but patterns of behavior and thinking you have adopted from the cultural story.  p54

-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.  Renias 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.  p59

-Renias isn’t trying to do anything. By being himself, free from roles, rules, obligations, he is in a state of complete naturalness. Lao Tzu said in his ancient text the Tao Te Ching, “when nothing is done, nothing is left undone.”  The mastery is that there is no trying.  p61 (reminds me of Mo Norman – professional golfer)

-As paradoxical as it sounds, going down a path and not finding a track is part of finding the track…. the path of not here is part of the path of here.  p 68

-There is an intelligence that runs through things.  To be a tracker is to be aligned with that intelligence.  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 space and time where your non-local spiritual self, vast and unhindered, meets your human self in a moment of meaning specific to you. p71

-If we are to become trackers, all of us need to ask ourselves: Trackers of what?  New ways of living?  A new set of metrics of what a successful life actually is?  Can we, with the eyes of a tracker, see deeply into life and our own being and recognize a trail of intricately connected happenstance on which we know to move forward toward a new, more connected experience of life?  p 72

-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 could move.  Trackers try things.. The tracker on a lost track enters a process of rediscovery that is fluid.  p75

-We have become so unnatural and patterned and socialized that some of us don’t even know what feels good or bad. We operate on autopilot. We are in our lives, but we are not alive.  p 75

-I have come to learn that losing the track is not the end of the trail, but rather a space of preparation….Prepare yourself to hear the call, invite the unknown, look for the first track, tune in to the instrument of the body, and learn to see the track amidst many that brings you to life. p77

-There is a wilderness in each person waiting to be brought back to life.  p 84

-As a safari guide I had been taught not to anthropomorphize.  The clinical eye of the scientific observer should not project human charctereistics onto the animals   What isolation not see our trickery in the jackal of the courage of a mother in a lioness around her cubs. As a tracker I wanted to take off the eyes of the superior impartial observer so the animals could inhabit me. I wanted to step toward kinship, not science. p 89

-The deepest lessons must be lived.. The wild self, the part that is in touch with instinct and needs and purpose, the part that can feel shades of emotion  and is natural, is lie that. It must be awakened, followed, listened for – tracked.  Men and women search for intimacy, but what they really need is wildness.  p 89-90

-In our encounters with the edges, we come to know ourselves more deeply. Neurosis is a substitute for real suffering.   Fearfulness is the most common state in a life that asks for no real courage.  p 103

-In truth, while a trail can flow under the eye of a master, it is often a process of nonlinear problem solving. The story never goes like you want it to.  p105

-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.  p108

-Joseph Campbell:  “People are not looking for the meaning of life, they are looking fore the feeling of being alive.” p113

-It is a kind of energy I have witnessed in people who have merged “work,” “mission,” and “meaning.”  These people don’t take holidays or need days off. They outwork everyone, not from some kind of gritty determination, but from a place of pure pleasure.  p115

-To live as a tracker is to know your track when it passes you.  p116

-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 t-eacher of humility. Together, we continue.  The first track, and then the next first track.  

-At high levels of any art form, the practical gives way to the mystical. p 122

-More and more, the message lands. 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 a wonderful teacher of how to live. In the face of fear is also something like awe. Then after awe,  humility.   Humility is the liberation from illusions of dominance, control, and power. I give up the importance of my life to instead become a part of life.  p 128

Great little book.  A great book for a discussion group.  Highly recommended.