Track Your Life with Boyd Varty

https://boydvarty.com/world-village/

Find the track of a more purpose driven life: https://boydvarty.com/course-listing/track-your-life-online-guided-retreat/
Enroll in Boyd's Online Course Here: https://boydvarty.com/courses/track-your-life-online-retreat/

https://boydvarty.com/world-village/

Find the track of a more purpose driven life: https://boydvarty.com/course-listing/track-your-life-online-guided-retreat/
Enroll in Boyd's Online Course Here: https://boydvarty.com/courses/track-your-life-online-retreat/

https://boydvarty.com/world-village/

Find the track of a more purpose driven life: https://boydvarty.com/course-listing/track-your-life-online-guided-retreat/
Enroll in Boyd's Online Course Here: https://boydvarty.com/courses/track-your-life-online-retreat/

https://boydvarty.com/world-village/

Find the track of a more purpose driven life: https://boydvarty.com/course-listing/track-your-life-online-guided-retreat/
Enroll in Boyd's Online Course Here: https://boydvarty.com/courses/track-your-life-online-retreat/

Find the track of a more purpose driven life: https://boydvarty.com/course-listing/track-your-life-online-guided-retreat/
Enroll in Boyd's Online Course Here: https://boydvarty.com/courses/track-your-life-online-retreat/

Once in the far north of Kruger national park's pafuri area I found a clear pool of spring water rising out the earth.
The pool was surrounded by three huge ebony trees and a giant eagle owl flew out from under the deeply shaded branches as I approached. The presence of the owl adding some intangible sense of spirit to the place.
The water was crystal clear and bubbling happily out the earth. As I knelt to put my lips to the water I felt like I was being let into some great secret.
My body took on the shape of an animal drinking lips to the water……and an archetypal connection millions of years old ran like a current through me. I like the wild animals of that wild place I was drinking from the secret source.

I think to know wild water in these times is the kind of thing we have forgotten to even know we want. The way it runs into you full of the codes of the minerals and plants of that place……wild water is full of information that attunes your body with its energy.
Unbottled, untreated…….having never known a pipe or a cistern wild water is full of spirit.

I'm going to talk in a very shamanic way about how to get to know a river.
I'm going to talk from inside the mythological way to share the way I make meaning of the world around me.

I might say it like this
Once upon a time a man lived in a tree by a river. Far off to the west he could see the high mountains in which the river rose.
The man longed to know the spirit of the river for it gave so much life on its journey.
He knew that he must go to those mountains to know from where the water of that river was born.
Only then could he truly know the river.

This was running through my head as the pickup swung through the foothills and climbed the escarpment. As the crow flies the mountains were only 90 km from where I had lived in the tree but by car it was a circuitous 180 km winding drive that took you from 300 meters lowlands up to about 1600 m on the edge of south africa's high plateau.
In historical times there had been a natural flow of native people who lived away from malaria on the highlands and descended the escarpment via hundreds of foot paths to hunt in the lowlands when the winter came.

My destination was my friend's bungalow, a beautiful mountain cabin with no lights and streams full of trout that flowed past it .The landscape around the house is a rugged kind of african Scottish highlands. High ridged terrain with deep vegetative gorges. Unusual birds, eland and mountain reedbuck….and a silence in which a leopard that was never seen slipped past.

That first night in the bungalow the man did not sleep. He was between this world and the next.
All night he tossed and turned in the darkness and dreamed that the mountains had a message for him.

Eventually I rose well before dawn, drank a cup of coffee and set off with my friend through the freezing dark for the highest peak.
Mount Anderson is the watershed…..from which all the rivers that run east to the kruger national park flow
Through a trailess darkness we walked for the summit…..the stars giving way to a crisp dawn.
We were fit and walked fast… cold air burning our lungs. Learning the mountain in some intrinsic way you can only achieve by being on it

The summit at dawn was icy with a whipping wind and a thick fog so that one could not see how the land fell to the east calling to the water.
But Up there on the peak I left an imprint of my body ……so I could always suddenly be back there.
So I could always send a greeting upstream to the mountain from my home in the lowlands.
What I could now say is that I had been to where the rivers rise.
The source…….but not the source of the source…….water is too free for that and one can never really say where water begins or ends. If you know water somewhere you know water everywhere.

The man came down from that communion with the high peak with stiff legs found a cold mountain pool to swim in.
The water was freezing with aliveness and he drank and drank. Saturating himself. Baptizing his body with that kind of purity.

I tell you these things in these ways as a remedy. I don’t mean to be flowery or poetic but in my time with native people I started to think of the relationship with all things as an exchange of an unseen aliveness. A connected story….like the story of all water… in which you weave yourself into the web of other currents of life. A river, a mountain, a friend.
You can interact with the experience of living on so many levels and for me there is always a story within the story. The way of meaning making is the way we make the story of our life.

I could tell you that on the night of the day we submitted we drove up a steep hill with a bag full of beers to watch the sunset.
The light cut the cold mountain air in clear blazing holy gold.
I looked to the peak of the mountain now as a place I knew and that knew me. The place where the river begins. A source of life and personal relationship.
The remedy for this strange time to remember the story of the great relationship. We have to be soft enough and wild enough to tell it.
To remember how to be friends with the earth in personal ways again.
Personal. personal relationships with rivers and mountains and trees. Till it's normal again. To be married to a volcano.
And related to a bear.
And for a leopard to come to you to remind you that there is magic.

Leaving that hillside at dusk the man saw a flash of eyes in the headlights.
Then as if materializing slowly into form in the half light the shape of a leopard.
A huge male with a thick neck sunk low to the ground and stepped off the road but did not run. For a time they all watched each other.
The man knew this was the keeper of the catchment. The guardian of the river
This is the most secretive of cats.
And forever on when he looked west from his home beside the river…….he would know the source, the mountain, that cold pool and think of the silence in which up in those mountains a leopard moved.

4-0 out.

Boyd Varty Sacred Sites
https://boydvarty.com/sacred-sites/

Connect with Boyd Varty:
Website | https://boydvarty.com/
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/boyd_varty/
Twitter | https://twitter.com/BoydVarty

Find out more about Londolozi
Website | https://www.londolozi.com/en/
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Followed a rhino bull, but he led me in circles. I couldn’t shake the distinct feeling that a rhino was trying to shake me off his tail. To add to the confusion there were also tracks of a female rhino from the night before.

If the rhino was my nemesis then he was my sacred enemy. The difficulty he was providing was causing untold growth in my tracking ability.

Boyd Varty Sacred Sites
https://boydvarty.com/sacred-sites/

Connect with Boyd Varty:
Website | https://boydvarty.com/
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/boyd_varty/
Twitter | https://twitter.com/BoydVarty

Find out more about Londolozi
Website | https://www.londolozi.com/en/
Impact | https://londolozi.africa
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/londolozi/
Twitter | https://twitter.com/londolozi
Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/londolozigamereserve/

Journal entry.

The best time to be in the leadwood forest is in the creamy light of a full moon.
All around the trees peg a scale of time beyond human comprehension to the earth.
It can be a strange thing to watch people from all over the world walk into the dappled light of the trees and fall silent.

In my days as a safari guide I would wait for the third or fourth day of a safari. I would wait for the hysteria to see animals to subside and then take people to the forest.
You see the forest can be experienced on many levels and I have come to believe that it will meet you where you are ….it will take you to the level of stillness, wildness or reverence that you have cultivated in yourself and then some. The deeper you are the deeper the magic of the forest.

The poet david whyte talks about the conversational nature of life. The idea that your life will never be exactly how you planned it to be but equally it will never be exactly the way life wanted it. for all our living days we are in a co-created experience with living…..some of our agency….mixed with life or god, or whatever you call its plan.
Inside of this we have action when we know to take it and surrender when we have reached the end of what we can do…. another dance.
We have the development of a contemplative mind ……the cultivation of a mind in which many things in the world can be true at the same time.
Being in nature takes you naturally into this kind of inner exploration. If your eyes are open in a place life the leadwood forrest you can't help but notice the relational nature of nature,

As dawn breaks in the forest a dark bull nyala lifts his head out of long brown winter grass to look at me.
Franklins begin to chatter into the dawn.
In the stereo all around me hyena started to call.

A hyena is the perfect embodiment of opportunism.
As he moves craftily through the bush he seems to have a single thought running through his head…… “what's in it for me?” ‘how could this situation beeeeee good for me”
If you have ever battled to put your own needs on the table……hyena is your guy. He's gonna show you how.

Im developing a strange technique for this podcast. What I do is go to a place like the leadwood forest.
I move through the terrain at different times of day. I take a big sniff of the Amazonian snuff called hapi which is a mix of tobacco and ashes of herbs. Then with my head empty of thoughts I open myself and move through the space.

Opening myself to a different way of knowing. It's like I'm trawling through the feeling of the place and each feeling is full of invisible codes that later when I sit down with my notebook will start to come out as memories, encounters, stories and insights.

You see like those hyena calls in the forest this morning took me to an image of the hyena. In my mind's eye I saw his slanted body loping away with the leg of a giraffe held across his jaws and a look of glee on his face.
Imagine your dog walking proudly around with a weed wacker in his jaws and you have a sense of how much this hyena had bitten off more than he could chew.
This little encounter in my imagination takes me to the clarity of knowing that a hyena has.
A hyena wants what he wants.

This idea makes me think of the hundreds of people I coached who have started having huge transformations when they started to ask clearly without agenda or attachment for what they want.

I think of how early on in my own journey this idea was totally foreighn to me.
I remember a whole night in a ceremony where I lay half hanging off the edge of a mattress and it never occurred to me to ask people to move over.
I had grown up in a world where resilience was the most needed skill…..you didn’t need what you didn’t have so get on with it.
I'm very grateful for that place in myself but I remember also releasing that one of the ways to create more of the life you want is to want and ask…..

“Will you move over for me? I need more space” could not sound more silly to me now but at the time it was the silly beginning to much big wants and asks that I was going to allow myself. It was a breakthrough to something new. A first step I could build on

What will keep you out of asking for what you want?
You limit what you think you deserve.
The desire to not be too much trouble.
The fear of needing things from other people
Your fear of being rejected.
Your assumptions about what other people will think of you asking.

If you think i'm being trite well then try it.
Take the next week and wherever you go……in your work……family……out for a walk. Start asking people around you honestly, clearly and without justification for what you want.
Start with will you………rather than can you.

Will you walk with me
Will you go out with me?
Will you upgrade me?
Will you promote me?
Will you hug me?

Pay attention to where you can just ask……..notice where you cant…….notice where you don’t because you assume you know what the answer will be.
Pay attention to where you hide from asking. Where you use shyness to be a victim
Now all of that comes from a hyena in the wild.
And this is where it gets mystical to me……

Track this like a tracker Something calls me to the forest as a sacred site……im there at dawn on a particular day to hear a hyena call……..this sets me thinking about how my life changed when I just started asking clearly …….transmitted via this podcast to you…….now you pick up the thread and see where it takes you this week.
Who is creating the way life is unfolding itself through a notion,…..into a leadwood forrest……via the call of a hyena…..into my ears……through imagination …….into memory…….back into voice…….into your ears…….into action.
Oh what great telepathy in a single field of interconnected consciousness we are playing in.
What could be more sacred.

Take action…….ask clearly for what you want and please report back.

4-0 out.

Boyd Varty Sacred Sites
https://boydvarty.com/sacred-sites/

Connect with Boyd Varty:
Website | https://boydvarty.com/
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/boyd_varty/
Twitter | https://twitter.com/BoydVarty

Find out more about Londolozi
Website | https://www.londolozi.com/en/
Impact | https://londolozi.africa
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/londolozi/
Twitter | https://twitter.com/londolozi
Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/londolozigamereserve/

Journal entry.

Tracks of huge pride of lions cut off a beautiful white sandy road onto a game path.
Here the pride walks in single file laying a perfect trail.
The path opens into a small clearing next to the crusted mud of a dried up waterhole.
Next to a huge termite mound with a giant brown ivory growing out of it the tracks tell the story of a giant lion love ball. They have lain down here… lying up against each other…..cubs climbing on mothers heads and biting each other's ears. The flat grass and imprints of tails tell me that they slept here some time yesterday afternoon.
They probably moved as the sun went down so they have a whole night ahead of me.

I was not planning on tracking but this is life in the wild. This is life as a tracker you must let yourself create with the moment.
It’s a large pride and to a tracker this magnetism is too strong.
I walk a half circle around where they lay to find the direction they set off on …… quickly I am onto their trail as they head into a deep thicket.
Through the night a herd of elephants have moved through the area covering over many of the tracks.

Then a herd of zebras followed the elephants cutting the hard ground on top of where lions padded past.
Quickly the majority of the tracks are gone.
This can be very common in tracking. You can go from this is going to be easy to this is impossible in a few steps. Like life. Like any time you set out on a new path.

Now I must follow as a shadow tracker…..to follow these lions I must become a student of vagaries, a follower of faint impulses and weak imprints…..i must drift through the terrain every reactive… ever alert…..moving on invisible lines that those tawny creators may have taken through the thick terrain. Anticipating

If I want to see each track or be sure I'm on their trail I will make myself crazy.
Here quite suddenly the need for certainty is an impediment.

The shadow trackers energy is that of drifting….as if in a world between worlds…..noticing…..moving with attention…..but with the world in a soft focus around you.
Somehow letting go of thinking about how lions move and being empty enough to move like a lion.
It is a lost kind of attention in modern life.
It’s the skill of riding a tide like a jellyfish.
Or catching a thermal like a migrating bird……it’s the skill of being in the right place to be shown and taken.

I tell you this now awakeners because that unexpected lion trail was teaching me how to follow the trail of my own shadow.
The shadow is the part of you that has never been allowed. It's your dark twin, a narcissistic, bad, even evil part of you that got stuffed away so you could belong.

It's your most unsocialized primal desires. There is biting and talking without asking.
It’s the back side of years of being good to get a cookie.

But your shadow denied will run parts of you with unconscious force until you can meet it as a friend. I say this now cause we are in the time of shadow….and we must work in ourselves to work in the world.
Your shadow given a seat at the fire becomes more self….. strong boundaries, unfuckwithable personal power. a person with a well integrated shadow is not interested in being nice or liked they are interested in being true.
There is a grace to a person who has found the dark in themselves. A compassion that can look at a tyrant or a weakling and know that is in me too. But strangely a person who has met their shadow stands up to tyrants and is able to ask for help where they are weak

Shadow tracking… is for if you want to get to know yourself more deeply.
It will liberate so much primal energy if you get to know that dark part of yourself.
To find the shadow you must give up certainty and need to know it and drift with an open awareness.

Notice the people who make you most mad and uncomfortable. They are holding your shadow.
Pay attention to your restments.
See what you fantasise about.
Notice where you are compulsive.

That which we repress bursts out at strange times or runs our lives without us knowing.

Do not try to understand the shadow. Do not try to identify it outright. Not like a shadow tracker drift in the half land where it lives. Become aware of it.

Ask yourself……that person I can't bear why ?……they are narcissistic, loud, self centred. What are they holding so you don’t have to.

That’s the part of you that is repressed.
Ask that resentment…… resentment what are you asking for?
Rage what do you want. ?
Disgust what you need?
Let the answers be truly uncensored and ugly.

As you drift towards the guarded outlines of your shadow with this soft eyed attention you will find themes.
You may be annoyed at someone who always puts themselves first cause you never do. Until you explode and leave so you can do what you want.
You will get to know what your anger is asking for.
You will come to understand how your patheticness is a place where you couldn’t get the help you needed so you acted like you never needed anything.

Oh shadow tracking is not an exact science it’s a kind of background attention on actions and intentions and thoughts and reactions.

Maybe you just had a conversations with your boss….or your partner…….you find yourself after the account running an enraged conversation in your head with them…..about how they don’t fucking get it.
Ask that voice what it needs, what it wants, why it's mad…..that's shadow tracking.
Your shadow integrated becomes more presence in which you can show up with no need to be liked. It’s a power through self knowledge and understanding of the truth of you.
It’s the part of you that tells someone clearly what they are not getting in the moment with no fear.

Work is the shadow is to balance yourself in real goodness. The awareness of what lives in you and the choice in how to consciously be with that all.

I exit the thick terraine after about thirty minutes of shadow tracking…..below me is a dry river bed where thick riversand covers the ground….i use the sand to cut back onto the tracks….the entire pride crossing the dry water course and suddenly I am back on their trail with absolute clarity. Now I follow the imprint of toes and lobed pads across beautiful terrain.
I follow at pace the energy of the shadow tracker is gone. I move with purpose and clarity.
Alone for miles in any direction.
In the beautiful clear light of the morning.
In a ravine I hear the lions growling. These are the sounds of feeding. The lions have killed a kudu
The pride feeds with brutal intensity. Biting and clawing at each other as they ingest chunks of bloody meat. I watch through binoculars from a distance the savagery of the feeding each man must fight for its place at the kill.
After they feed quit suddenly all aggression is gone. They lie around and groom each other with gentle care totally in tune with the full range of being a lion.

Every day the wild is my teacher.
It takes me on adventures. It takes me inward.

Slowly I walk back to my land rover watching my shadow beside me

4-0 out.

Boyd Varty Sacred Sites
https://boydvarty.com/sacred-sites/

Connect with Boyd Varty:
Website | https://boydvarty.com/
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/boyd_varty/
Twitter | https://twitter.com/BoydVarty

Find out more about Londolozi
Website | https://www.londolozi.com/en/
Impact | https://londolozi.africa
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/londolozi/
Twitter | https://twitter.com/londolozi
Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/londolozigamereserve/

Journal entry.
Intuitive is defined as: using or based on what one feels to be true even without conscious reasoning; instinctive
I think this is why I have always liked sacred sites because when you are at one “you are beyond conscious reasoning” you sense something in the air.
and I like it there because for me there has always been more life beyond conscious reasoning.
You only need to fall in love to understand the truth in that.
There are different ways of knowing.
On native medicine wheels there was always body, mind , heart , spirit.
It was understood the mind was only one way of relating to or experiencing life.

Plaque rock is a beautiful dome of granite that sits logged deep into the river bank.
You can walk up onto it easily from the bank and then it falls in perfect smooth rock down to a pool below with a few young crocodiles and a lazy terrapin that live in it.
Beyond that is a second band of rock and then the thick green phragmites reeds of the river.
As a child when I would go there it may as well have been another planet.
Running and playing on the large dome we could have landed on mars.

The rock is warm in the late evening having absorbed the sun's heat and if you lay with your back on it will share that warmth with you. the whole rock feels alive. Like it has its own intelligence. Like the rock itself is a living presence.

As I sit there on a winter's day I am the centre of a small universe that spins around it.
Creatures slowly appear.
A kudu in the midst of the far bank.
A herd of nyala
Herons kingfishers flying past. A lizard scuttles out from under a rock to bask.

There's something you don’t do enough of….basking

My grandfather who I never met used to sit on this rock.
When I am there I can intuit his ancestral presence.
I am a part of what came before, I am a part of what will come after. I am not self made. I do not think of myself as a life apart. I am a part of life.
Inside of this understanding I see a bigger picture. For a moment I am set free from the innate narcissism that my life is in some way the most important thing that’s happening.
I am part of a chain of unfolding life.

My grandfather flew planes in the second world war. From north africa him and a rogue captain called hayward would fly to warsaw to drop supplies for the polish resistance.
Hayward knew that if they flew high over the city they would be a slow moving target for the anti aircraft guns. so when he saw the city which was on fire he would fly low down the river, dodging bridges moving too fast for gunners then drop his cargo and go. flying home with barely enough fuel.

After the war my grandfather took up lion hunting as a way to keep himself feeling alive.

Only later when I came to understand trauma did it occur to me that the lion hunting was a common behaviour for someone with severe combat experience and ptsd. The need to seek out dangerous extremes to try and get the sound back on in your life.

When my grandfather died suddenly at 54 the war was long over. Hayward loaded my 15 year old father in a plane and flew him from Johannesburg to the place where I now sat in the wild . flying over the rock hayward ever the renegade opened the window and tipped my grandfather's ashes out into the river.
That’s how plague rock became an ancestral place for my family.

When I was born my mother named me craig…..I cried and cried until the shangaans people told my mother I was crying for my ancestral name. they started calling me body and I became a quiet child.

As I sit here this morning I can look down across the pool at the base of the rock to the second ridge where a plague with my grandfather's name on it….a name that is also my name. boyd varty it reads he loved the bushveld.

I'm telling you this because your ancestry makes you close to your infinity and your mortality.

When I am here I intuit some deep transformation in my own life that seems to be happening on a grander scale in the world.
“the restoration of the planet will come out if shift in human consciousness” is my cry

My grandfather was a lion hunter. I am a lion tracker..
My grandfather had severe ptsd……I have worked intensely with how to heal extreme trauma.

We were both in love with the wild.

As a hunter he was intictual as a healer so am i.

In the men in my family for so long there was steel with no feeling .I am coming to respect both.

Why am I saying all this from some forgotten rock in south africa …..and what does it have to do with you.
Okay here goes.
If you have bothered to listen to these podcasts and they moved you or interested you then something in you is intuiting what's under the words.
You know that like me you are here for the mystery, you are here to live differently, you are here for nature, you are here to find your track.
Your whole life a part of you deep down has known the way we are living is not the way. maybe you couldn’t say it for fear of sounding crazy but a part of you knows.
A part of you has whispered I'm here for a different world……..I'm here to make that world by waking up to my life.

For starters you are the chain in ancestral life…..whatever you came from you can be the start of a transformation for generations to come.

Who knows the power of one authentic life. Life is full of platformless heros.
For all we know Nelson Mandela's grandmother may have been the person who gave him the fortitude to be who he was.
If you heal you heal the past…..if you heal you heal the future.
Just ask yourself truly do I intuit “something beyond conscious reasoning for my life”

I'm on this expedition on pure intuition.
On one level Who cares if I go on these expeditions to the places that call me.
Yet I'm called to this story in a way I realise I don’t have to understand.

Imagine we were planted here… those of us with that intuition to awakening like sleeper seeds waiting to bloom.
All your life you have felt it just beyond your amnesia ……you have been reaching for it like it just slipped your mind.
The faith it has taken.
The faith it will still take to say I will give up the rational and follow that other way of knowing.

If you're listening to this you are either stone cold right now… in which case i'm probably just going to annoy you over time and congrats you made it this far ……or you're on fire. something in you is saying yes.

I don’t mean to sound wafty….but im okay with it for a moment because I know that certainly the intuition has to lead to action.
But for now from a huge ancestral domed rock by a river in Africa hear a voice reaching out to you wherever you are right now.
Think of all the things that had to happen for these words to come to your ears.
Trust yourself. Trust what you know deep down. Learn to live beyond conscious reasoning.

That’s what i'm trying to do.

4-0 out.

Boyd Varty Sacred Sites
https://boydvarty.com/sacred-sites/

Connect with Boyd Varty:
Website | https://boydvarty.com/
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/boyd_varty/
Twitter | https://twitter.com/BoydVarty

Find out more about Londolozi
Website | https://www.londolozi.com/en/
Impact | https://londolozi.africa
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/londolozi/
Twitter | https://twitter.com/londolozi
Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/londolozigamereserve/

Journal entry
It all begins with sketchy reports of a very rare black rhino that was seen in the far north of the reserve. I drive out with my gear motivated by some deep tracking lore…. If there is a rare animal out there I must go and look for it.
The inclination to seek out and find what is rare is fundamental to the tracker.

In this case this results in an entire afternoon alone in heat and burning midday light scouting. It’s not romantic…..it's solo trudging…..self motivated. No one to make a show for. It comes out of a place in me.
I walk through dry winter terrain in search of the track. I sweat and stare at the earth for any scuff or mark. Any sign of the beautiful creature
Attuning to the way the ground speaks in some fundamental way. Nothing

I'm tracking but I'm not tracking….

At certain levels of any practice or artform …..what you are doing gives way to who you are being.
In martial arts fighting is a door to presence and discipline and devotion.
In yoga the stretching is the front side for a life of compassion and service.

I feel this now as I trudge around with no sign of a rhino.
The tracking…..is becoming about a certain tenacity I am developing.
It's about living the kind of life where lessons can find me.
It's about practicing.

Martha Beck, my mentor, used to say to me “how you do one thing you do everything.”
With this in mind tracking shows me where I can be lackadaisical, where I give up too easily, it has shown me how I can lack concentration.
My practice has handed me my shortfalls so that I may face them with tenacity.
And I know what I develop in my practice becomes who I am in my life.

I am developing my capacity for symphony……

My ability to allow seemingly unrelated parts of life come together.

This quest for the sacred is of course more than that….. It's about living towards the track of my life.
Today It's about hours alone in the heat on bad information. And who that makes you.
It's about being willing to be inside of what calls me with the understanding that that’s how you become authentic.
As you know my life has been defined by guiding.
I worked first as a safari guide and then when my path pivoted I became a guide in ceremonial spaces.
In both cases taking people into the wild or their own psyche the key was to know the terrain. You needed to have been there to those unknown places yourself.
You needed to have been lost and found your way out.
You needed to have scared yourself and become humble.
You needed to make edges your new normals
That’s how you became a guide.

This understanding is what motivates me when after four hours I have not seen one fresh track.
I walk past a beautiful impala lilly flowing in Miami pink against the dark bushveld.

The koppie where I planned to sleep is off limits as someone has just sighted a leopard with a cub on it.

I change my plan and drive south to another old platform in a tree called tingwe camp.

The camp is set in a beautiful dry river bed…….dense with tamboti trees.
As I arrive at dusk a family of bushbabies is leaping through the trees around the camp.
Stop now and google bushbaby to meet a truly cool creature.

Night is falling fast and the sky turns pink while the second the sun drops behind the horizon it gets cold.

Up the river from me a pack of wild dogs has made a den in an old termite mound. Occasionally I hear the young pups squealing at their parents for meat.

The night rushes in and with it cold.
As I make the fire I feel terribly lonely.
Solitude is both a gift and a trial.
alone in the bush it can rattle your bones with its relentless presence.

Before you ask yourself questions of spirit like.
“am I on my mission” “am I living my purpose”
you might ask how long you can be truly alone for with nothing to distract you.i don’t mean the thirty mins you schedule for your meditation. I mean hours and hours, no books, no journal, no podcast, nothing.

The answer to that question may be an indication of if you are really ready for the other two.

Around me the birds roost it clicks and tsks

The fire starts and the night crashes onto me. Black.

In the shadows of the fire there are ghosts of other nights I spent here.

A July winter when I was 15 with my best friend.
We had heard that beer was a taste you grew to like so we choked down beers every day in the hopes of becoming cool beer drinkers rather than the fruit cooler losers we were.
Then We spent a lot of time trying to talk my older sisters friends into coming to sleep in our tree house so we could drink beers in front of them.

In my twenties as safari guides on nights off we would come and sleep attingwe camp. by now we were beer drinking pros and I remember a night when a kind of wild fire dance culminated in about 20 of us covering ourselves in mud stealing back to the main lodge camp like special forces and abducting all other staff out their rooms to come and party with us. To be fair they didn’t resist much. In fact I recall a Land Rover full of muddy rangers, beautiful hostesses and other hostages packed to the brim. In the confusion of the raid someone had put a standing exercise bike on the bonnet of the land rover and now a ranger was pedaling it as it drove everyone back to the tree house

The camp had been a place where many young guides in training had slept out in the wild for the first time. It was the place many young men and women under the stars for the first time had heard a lion roar at midnight.

I tell you all of this because as I sat around that small fire last night…. I understood that part of why this spot is sacred to me is that it was dense with memory.
It has held me through so many phases.
In my immaturity it had held me and it had seen me grow from wayward to disciplined.
And as I look back on it I don’t want to exclude that skullduggery from the sacred.

I had been engaged to be married once….and after that fell apart I had come back to this spot fundamentally confused by the dilemmas of love and compatibility.

If the arrow of time is not linear. If time is in fact a flat circle where everything is actually occurring simultaneously then as I sat by that fire I sat with versions of myself in time just a veil of perception away.
And of course the insight that that produced was that the place had always been sacred…but only now from an inner awareness of what that may even begin to mean could I begin to perceive it.
I tell you a silence fell as I felt the truth of this that was so intense it was like a force.
The night held its breath.
I sat in that intensity.
Aware of a new quality in my own presence. I was aware that I was aware.
The past gave way. the future froze.

Was the sacred coming into me from the place or finally coming out me to make the place.

All through the night that almost oppressive stillness remained. The star's crystal with cold above me. oppressive is the wrong word…..but never have i felt a calm of that intensity.
Only once was the silence broken when a white faced owl called out.
At times in the night I lay awake but without a single thought in my mind. the branches of the tree above me against the dark dimension of the sky looked like fronds of flat fan corral.

At dawn a three legged hyena slunk eerily through the camp.

I share this.
And these recollections are a true part of the journey.
And there is magic to being alone in the wild.

But understand also that there is so much space between the magic.. where I am operating alone and self reliant. There is always the potential for danger and it is not so much romantic as it requires attention and the discomfort that comes with growth.
I am pushing myself to seek the natural insights that come with time in unusual terrain.
This is the work of making a symphony of wildness and solitude into growth and wisdom. I understand my own routines can also be ruts. I have to get outside of the bounds of normal life and see what I learn there if I ever want to comment on what it means to live.

Wow i'm really not sure how to say this.

Let me try this.

When I was facilitating a lot of ceremony work……the schedule would be intense. A different group every night in a different city.
Deep emotional process. Ptsd, abuse, visioning, rebirthing, deconstruction. Every night we sat for people and we held that space for healing and human making.
I used to notice before the group I could be a total wreck. My girlfriend could have left me.
I could have lost my bag.
My own issues could be paramount but when I walked in that group the presence would come and no matter what was going on in my life a steady clear godforce was holding space.
Man, that kind of experience leaves you wondering about the validity of your own problems.
That they could plaque you all day and be gone instantly in the face of another's suffering or process.

That work…..
Like this work calls me forth in a way that makes me bigger than the smallest parts of myself.

So yes I am searching for the sacred in wild places.

But more than that I am trying to find what calls me forth. Because I feel like living towards that with motivation and discipline might be the sacred that is not a place.

40- out

Boyd Varty Sacred Sites
https://boydvarty.com/sacred-sites/

Connect with Boyd Varty:
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The original purpose of religion was to bring sacredness to life. Imagine a time (whether prehistorical or transhistorical) when human beings lived moment-to-moment in the presence of the sacred. Religion was unnecessary. There was no separation between spirituality and life, no distinction between the sacred and the mundane, no division of the Godly and the worldly. When we lost the ongoing and immediate sense of sacredness, then we needed religion to bring us back to it. "Religion," after all, means "that which renews our connection."

Then suddenly it was the day of the first expedition.

I had dragged my feet enough…it was time to gear up and go.
Taking my lessons from the tree I knew the key was just to start. Cut the crap and start.
Get my sleeping bag and bed roll into the back of Wilfred (the willys jeep)…..grab my rifle, gas cooker, coffee pot and go.

I was done planning……

Its time for action.

But it was raining

Boyd Varty Sacred Sites
https://boydvarty.com/sacred-sites/

Connect with Boyd Varty:
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Anthony Bourdain once said “I know theres a guy inside me who wants to lay in bed all day and eat donuts. My life is a series or strategems to avoid and outwit that guy”.

If you’re an artist you know this place.

I wake up at 4 30 every day and meditate for an Hour.
I track every day to practice my craft
I do breathwork and work out.
I diligently attend to what I need to do to keep my company going….
I maintain routines because I know my nature is profoundly ungrounded. I can
be a drifter.
I like to think I have made myself solid with disciplined routine.
But despite all of this, as an artist on the brink of creating something beautiful…..’man that
donut eater just shows up”

The dragon of resistance.

In truth resistance is its own powerful force.
No artist goes untouched by its energy in your life.
Its armed with all your past fears and doubts.
It’s the worry that the muse has left you.
It will tell you that you have nothing to share. that you’re a fake and a fraud.
It remains… even as time and time again you learn that it has no ground to stand on.

Boyd Varty Sacred Sites
https://boydvarty.com/sacred-sites/

Connect with Boyd Varty:
Website | https://boydvarty.com/
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In a setting with almost no connotation for me to the Sacred.
The Sacred is not just places but what happens in places.

I will start with what I can. I will work with the track I have.
I will go to the Sacred sites of this land to explore the sacred. I think the Sacred is archetypal….it's an energy of life.

I will walk alone to specific places on the land……. Sleep on the ground…… meditate….and ask those places to help me understand. I will go unnassisted on my own two feet to the places that call me.

You have to understand I am not a beaded necklaces kind of guy. I am open to the mystry but I am not a hippy. Its not all good vibrations with me. In fact I tend to be turned off by to much heart clutching incence burning. I'm allergic to anything that feels like we are contriving our way to a show of depth

But I want to remember life in that way.
If I could awaken that…..how far could I walk that sacred nature it into the world.

I want to know it when I see it.
I want to be able to feel it.
I want to learn to make it.

I want to understand the secret of the Sacred.

I might not find anything

As I sit here I can think of five places that are calling me.

I could go to them.
I could see what the ground says.
The opposite of the sacred is the profane…. Must I go there too?
The light and the dark.

The whole ying yang.

Boyd Varty Sacred Sites
https://boydvarty.com/sacred-sites/

Connect with Boyd Varty:
Website | https://boydvarty.com/
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Boyd Varty decides to walk around the full boundary of Londolozi (no mean feet), and shares with us his adventure as he takes on this mission with Londolozi’s General Manager, Duncan MacLarty, Digital Storyteller and Ranger James Tyrrell and Head Ranger, James Souchon.

The reason for walking, describes Boyd, was the classic intention of masculinity, and a desire to challenge yourself. Boyd who is used to walking 25km, was a bit anxious about doing double that on this particular boundary walk (equating to 31 miles). This group of four men, were both good walkers and good talkers and so many stories were shared over this time period. It is said that talking while walking leads to much deeper conservations and this was true for these four. It was the groups job to lift the individuals no matter how sore you felt. There is something wild and both mentally restful about being on your feet, describes Boyd.

Listen as Boyd walks through different sceneries and passes various wildlife, including the Nstevu Pride of lions… Their day had been about walking, but in truth their day had been about so much more, listen below for some classic African storytelling:

Connect with Boyd Varty:
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Notes on Re-entry

Bedrooms are strange. I look at the thatch roof with gratitude and a touch of contempt. Before I get to that I would like to tell you something that happened on the last evening. I was on a crest, the land fell away and 3 rhino we feeding in a clearing. It was beautifully serene and I felt so still. I was ready to leave the tree. Far away from me a lion roared and I had to go and look.

Quickly the clearing gave way to a sandveld bush. I let myself stop thinking about where that lion may be and let my body go where it wanted. Purposeful action towards and unknown purpose. The lion was my purpose. Purposeful navigation towards and unknown destination. I don’t know where I’m going but I know exactly how to get there.

It takes so doing to walk in a straight Line through a thicket but it takes some doing. One quickly gets subtly off course. Eventually the bush gave way ti riverine vegetation. A little bit before sunset I suddenly broke out of the thicket. IN front of me was a thickly reeded marsh that gave way to golden grassland. My body stopped and my mind felt incredibly quiet. Something inside of me said this is the place. For a time there was nothing but stillness. I thought I had gone mad but then across the reed bed a dark maned lion rose across the golden grass.

I was taken by joy, the presence. For six weeks in the tree everything I was searching for was there in a moment. The mystic, the tracker, the lion and me.

I tell you this because everything is astoundingly different. It’s really hard to describe how to walk back into your life with more awareness.

Lockdown is a state of mind.

The truth is we can’t really plan. We don’t know where this thing lands or ends. There is so much uncertainty as to how to proceed. The art of re-entry from what a tree teaches us is to go slowly.
Track moment to moment. Make everything in your day an event, mindfully tending to it.

Connect with Boyd Varty:
Website | https://boydvarty.com/
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And then all of sudden we were there. The face of the people I love. Saying goodbye with immense gratitude to the tree and this beautiful place on the river. The last dawn from inside this experience on the river. I know this is not the end but the beginning. You will be hearing from me. There is so much life for us all to live. I’m not going to try and summarize of sign off well. I have said what I need to say. I will leave you with an anthem by the late great South Africa Johnny Clegg. Volume up, listen to the words:

The world is full of strange behavior
Every man has to be his own savior
I know I can make it on my own if I try
But I'm searching for a great heart to stand me by
Underneath the African sky
A great heart to stand me by

I'm searching for the spirit of the great heart
To hold and keep me by
I'm searching for the spirit of the great heart
Under African sky
Sometimes I feel that you really know me
Sometimes there's so much you can show me

There's a highway of stars across the heavens
There's whispering song of the wind in the grass
There's the rolling thunder across the savanna
A hope and dream at the edge of the sky
And your life is a story like the wind
Your life is a story like the wind

I'm searching for the spirit of the great heart
To hold and stand me by
I'm searching for the spirit of the great heart
Under African sky
I'm searching for the spirit of the great heart
I see the fire in your eyes
I'm searching for the spirit of the great heart
That beats my name inside
Sometimes I feel that you really know me
Sometimes there's so much you can show me

I'm searching for the spirit of the great heart
(Guka 'mzimba, sala 'nhliziyo)
I'm searching for the spirit of the great heart
(Guka 'mzimba, sala 'nhliziyo)
I'm searching for the spirit of the great heart
To hold and stand me by
I'm searching for the spirit of the great heart
Under African sky

I'm searching for the spirit of the great heart
(Guka 'mzimba, sala 'nhliziyo)
I'm searching for the spirit of the great heart
(Guka 'mzimba, sala 'nhliziyo)
I'm searching for the spirit of the great heart
(Guka 'mzimba, sala 'nhliziyo)
I'm searching for the spirit of the great heart

Songwriters: Jonathan Paul Clegg
Great Heart lyrics © Rhythm Safari Pty Ltd
https://www.johnnyclegg.com

Connect with Boyd Varty:
Website | https://boydvarty.com/
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A ceremony is a place to remember to remember. As I walk through my last 39 days I have a lot to reflect on. I remember the resistance that arose before leaving home. I remember the anxiety of the first few days when six weeks seemed like an eternity. I must remember to sit with anxiety with compassion. I remember the feeling of a shell being taken off after one week. How do I work with this after I return back? Optimization for me comes out of consistency. I must remember to sometimes just start.

All through the day I intend to reflect on all these moments. In my experience re-entry is its own journey and art form. You have to remember that in change processes we spiral forward. We sometimes go back but on a different rung on the spiral.
The key is to notice yourself, watch yourself and pay attention without judgement. That will create the awareness to shift from.

Our inner world shapes our outer world. Imagination, creativity, enchantment, tracking, storytelling and pattern interruption. Nature is the deepest teacher.

The gratitude I feel for the land here is impossible to put into words. Beauty to the point where I feel overwhelmed. Elephants, rhinos, leopards, starry skies, storms. I will miss the elephants mid-morning arrival at the river. And of course the tree is a love story all of its own. I have been a part of its ecosystem all on my own. This tree has taught me so much. It has been the host of one of the most transformational experiences of my life. In native cultures everything is alive, it is a being and I understand that now. This tree has been a true friend and will continue to be.

In gratitude I also turn to all of you who came along for the ride and sent me notes of support. To be able to do this alone and with you was perfect. We are all connected. We know why we are here. To learn to heal to bring back the new old ways. To have fun and reach out and not let it all be too serious and to remember what living actually is.

What if what we made here is the real world. The most natural scape is the real world. Its just a deep sense of the sacred which makes me reflective. Jesus is often depicted with his eyes open. Buddha is often shown with his eyes closed. In truth we need contemplation in action. No enlightenment has any power unless it is lived.

I am also full of a very simple desire to do the best work I can do towards the transformation of consciousness. Today I am going to run as far as I can. Slowly relishing the feeling of the land under me. I am going to swim in the river and sit by the fire. There is a time to reflect on our reflections and PS its probably good I’m close to the end as I have a tooth that is killing me.

I guess the lasting question is that in a matter of time, all of our lives will go back to normal. What do we want that normal to be? The treehouse is like a nest, my books tarpaulin, clothes and yoga mat is all around me. It’s quiet in the way of nature where the sounds make the silence rather than break it.

Covid has been so hard for so many people but it also gave me a glimpse back in time. This reserve has been an empty Eden and I am Adam. What will it mean in 30 years to have lived with wild animals? Will it all be gone or will be wake up? Would you find it very hard to understand if I said that I’m learning to be at peace with both? Wherever we land, it will be there.

Connect with Boyd Varty:
Website | https://boydvarty.com/
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Find out more about Londolozi
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If you think 6 weeks is long you should try two days. The moon rises here have been truly epic. Last night as it rose a small pearl spotted owl was perched on a Marula tree silhouetted for a moment. An astounding truth that the moon controls the tides and fertility in its cycle. The night was so bright I didn’t even need a torch.

You know you are so hungry when everything looks like food. A huge pancake, a wheel of French cheese and a ripe peach. It’s not that I’m tired but rather how you would feel at the end of a long experience. It’s a head space. I really want to shower, I really want to talk to my friends. Drink pints at the taps and get cut mercilessly before they turn on each other.

It’s the things that play on your mind like warm anticipation. You can’t do that early on as it would just derail your whole sense of presence. It makes me think of Renias and how any tracker worth his salt is just wired this way.

On a prior retreat the tracks had been tricky but were fresh. Part of the art of guiding is being able to read where people are and know where to push and when to let them go. Renias, however couldn’t leave the tracks. It offended something in his nature to let the lion tracks go.

A few days ago I left the trail of the lion when the sun climbed high in the sky and the light grew flat and white. I needed to go back on the track and be certain the trail was lost over the border which it was. Courage is knowing when the hold on and knowing when to let go. I need to be here all the way until the end.

Connect with Boyd Varty:
Website | https://boydvarty.com/
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Wow we made it to day 37. In so many mythological stories there is an idea that when you were born a twin was born with you. It was thrown out the cot and becomes your wild twin. It’s a scallywag, an outlaw, a rogue. IT slips chocolates to your nieces and nephews before supper. It’s willing to act outside the bounds of the rational. It doesn’t give a hoot about what anyone else thinks and can be relied upon to do something totally essential. It knows how to grieve, it does not control the longings of the heart.

Jung had this idea of there being two paths. The right path and the left path. The right path is the one of society. A structured path forward that is laid outside and with its pursuit comes a position in the world with pursuit and structure. The right path is beautiful. The left path is different. It is the path of creation. You look into the world and you don’t see anything that is for you. It’s like living towards a feeling of aliveness. It requires a lot of reaching for the wild twin. Joseph Campbell says of the left path, it’s a challenge because you will not be respected by society by you will be in our own authenticity.

Right pathers do very well until the age of 46. Then they start to wonder if its what they really wanted. They come to a place where they feel they are missing something of themselves.
Left pathers struggle to ground themselves in the world, the options are paralyzing, the money is tight. Some can’t get through the drift of constantly drifting. But those who learn their process emerge around 46, after a harrowing run, fully alive and autonomous.

I’ve always wondered if there is a path between? Where both pathers got in touch with the other somewhere in between. The only way a central path becomes available is through mentorship.
Rates of download can be incredibly high between people who have integrated aspects of the other path.

Mentorship is truly magical when it spontaneously occurs. Often in true mentorship there is no explicit instruction. Real mentorship is a shared presence. I was lucky to be mentored by Alex and Renias until I would go out tracking a lion thinking about what Alex and Renias would be doing in that particular situation. To be either a Mentor or a Mentee takes inner work. We can cultivate the ground in ourselves to create more sharing in our work and community. To be a mentor you need excellence, confidence and a map of having done it. You need to have a passion for what you do that is beyond you. A love for the art form itself. This requires a personal sense of abundance as you will give away some of what you have. This can be a challenge but when I have been shared with like that I knew something sacred was happening. The source never needs to really claim its the source.

The Mentee needs humility, to be real with themselves as to where they are at and respect of what has been given. The role of a true Mentee is to learn it and evolve it. That is the responsibility bigger of you.

So what does it mean to be wild. It certainly doesn’t mean doing whatever you want and asking to nobody. Dimensions of self come from attention. You have unconsciously found and expressed your talents and gifts. You have met your wild twin and are friends. It means your nature is not clouded by layers of other peoples rules. You have to pay attention and listen to what is being asked of you by life. The more you do your inner work the easier it gets.

Connect with Boyd Varty:
Website | https://boydvarty.com/
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/boyd_varty/
Twitter | https://twitter.com/BoydVarty

Find out more about Londolozi
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In the silence by the fire I suddenly heard growling. It was so constant I thought it was a generator on the breeze. It was the sounds of cats mating but without the specific sound that leopards make at the end of copulation. Lions mating.

In line with my family tradition I walked in the moonlight down the road to the camp. The moon was so bright I cast a shadow. I knew if the lions were mating I only need wait a bit and I would hear them again. I stood in silence listening to the Scops owls call all around. Then the sound again. I moved fast towards the lions as I knew they would not hear me. Then I saw them. The air was very cool and the cats stood and began to walk away from me on a hippo path towards the river. Watching them in the night and to be alone was something astonishingly private. No one would every understand how close I felt to them that night. I went back to the fire and just sat there for sometime.

As I do this I become aware of how distracted I was before. This kind of empty fire sitting is a way of being with your own being. Afterwards I went up to the tree and the branches were shadowed on the tree.

I have been reading Bourdain’s books. Little did Bourdain and I know what lay ahead of us that night. At 2am I was awakened by something landing on the deck. A flat thump then a spray starting hitting my face and I got out of bed shouting.

You never know when you will get pissed on by a monkey.

The things you worry about never happen, it’s the things you never thought about that actually happen.

Finally when dawn broke I made a cup of tea and got on the trail of following the mating lions which went on for ages. I lost the tracks but kept persisting until I found their tracks crossing the border eventually.

Technically Im entering a phase now of this ceremony which you might think of as dismount. I need to integrate the ceremony and make sense of it to share with the world.

Connect with Boyd Varty:
Website | https://boydvarty.com/
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/boyd_varty/
Twitter | https://twitter.com/BoydVarty

Find out more about Londolozi
Website | https://www.londolozi.com/en/
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I think of this experience as the slow removal as a shell. As the days went by I felt more myself. I felt the creativity coming back in, co-creating the story with nature. My energy levels return to new highs. My relationship with beauty was revived. I feel like so much of what I was trying to do before was trying to tune out, now I am trying to tune back in.

I felt I was absorbing tons of information but my minds own capacity for dynamic movement was slowing. It’s like a fasted state, you know you are much much leaner. Things I used to eat I can no longer touch. When I eat something that I shouldn’t I get an instant no. After a long run I will crave exactly the kind of salt I need. I feel that with my mind. I relish the stillness and the silence now. Don’t get me wrong, I’m watching myself and sometimes I get into bursts of frustration and rage.

In some way what I’m learning is that mystics went to nature as a set of bars. In nature you reset the bars of harmony, stillness and present. It shows you where you were, it shows you where you could be. It plants a flag. Stillness produces right action. Solitude teaches you about connection. Simplicity gives you more. Everything you want with the world is inward.

How often do you meet someone who is enchanted with life? Its pretty rare isn’t it. Out here I feel like I’m touching that at moments. Utter enchantment.

The bateleur is a long standing totem of my family. The spirit of guidance. The ways we naturally make meaning when we stand close to nature sustains us. Our relationship with life itself comes to life. That’s enchanting.

I climbed high onto a single large boulder on a hillside and watched the land below me. My mind was empty of thoughts and watched with empty perception. All I could do was take it all in. I was actually there. That’s what it takes to be enchanted…to actually be there.

Eckhart Tolle says that there are 3 levels of enlightenment.
1. Acceptance
2. Enthusiasm
3. And I forgot the third one

I spent five weeks thinking about how long it was to be alone and now I have five days left wishing it was longer.

Here is some homework, free write for at least a page on the following. Where do I see beauty? Where in life am I enchanted? What makes me feel the most alive? When was the last time I was totally on track? Who really sees me? What’s my mission? What do I complain about? Who do I complain about? What am I doing out of a sense of duty?

If you bring back to life enchantment in yourself you can awaken it within other people in your community. Enchantment is a type of activism.

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At dawn I awaken breathing misty breath up into the branches of the tree. At midday a dust devil skids across the water spreading a rainbow across the sky. At night I am still visited by a lone firefly.

In Jungian dream analysis, everything in the dream is a symbol of the self. The way to interpret the dream is to speak as it. I imagine everything I encounter is a symbol that I talk with and let it answer. Who are you I ask? I am the wind on the water. Describe yourself with three adjectives. What is your purpose? How are you trying to help Boyd?
I always find the language strangely particular as you answer as the symbol. In this way your own subconscious feeds the information to you.

I decided to walk in the afternoon with a water container. Immediately I realized it was much hotter than expected. When I was friends with the soldier Irwin, we would go on a 40km march with Irwin just sucking on a stone to keep the saliva in his lips.

There were many elephants which required a certain type of bushcraft. What had meant to be a stroll through open clearings had turned into a tactical maneuver. In the outdoors dangerous situations often happen long before the danger. They happen through unexpected sliding variables. Assumptions you had made no longer fit the moment. Experience in some ways is the ability to arrest the preconceived ideas and assumptions to make new decisions out of those assumptions.

My post lunch stroll had once again educated me about any post lapses of concentration.

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A lonely day missing people. In a week I will be complete and its starting to stir up the mind. It feels close and creates a bout of anxious immaturity. I want to talk to them now but also I don’t want to leave this tree. I have come to ride the ups and downs of how the mind uses time.

I sit in my chair and listen to the sounds of nature. A kingfisher hitting the water, elephants flapping and nyala browsing. Time to have time, who has that?

Johnny Clegg:
The world is full of strange behavior
And every man has to be his own savior
I know I can make it on my own if I try
But I’m searching for the great heart to stand me by
Underneath the African sky
A great hear to stand me by
I’m searching for the spirit of the great heart.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g48_fqX7KJc
https://www.johnnyclegg.com/

Searching for the spirit of the great heart I certainly am. And here when I end up singing to myself I may have found it for a moment.

The river has cleared and I splash for a moment. I don’t hang out too long on account of the many leathery sleeping bags I have seen. On my run I glance to the right and see a herd of giraffes running next to me. Elephants cross the river almost continuously.
How do I go back now? How has what I learnt here shape my life moving forward?

I’m learning to sink in. The tree is teaching me how to put down a root into myself and into this place. This is what I have learnt. I do want to connect people with this. I do want to live with this mind.

In the afternoon I take my bag of rubbish to be collected. Its an absurd looking pile of packaging, coming from the necessity to store and sell food. It was the Egyptians who put food against lock and key. I once read a study about Chimps who got given food which was shared and distributed. They then removed the food and introduced tokens which could be traded and all hell broke loose.

At the most primary psychological level, when you take away food you change everything.

Ghandi was a huge believer in the village because he understood that in shared production of food you could produce enough to be free from colonial rules of survival. I don’t think small food gardens can be underestimated. And surely as markets continue to globalize in a world of radically accelerating uncertainty, you couldn’t do better than a back to basics insurance plan than small decentralized food gardens. Put the gardens at the center of your pocket of light.

The respect I have for natures efficiency has grown exponentially.

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The days are shortening and there is a distinct chill on the air when I open my eyes onto the branches of trees in the morning. I feel saturated with natural beauty. Winter is the time my ancestors used to come to this land back in the hunting days. It is the time when many tribes would sweep off the escarpment.

I cross the river just after dawn moving on instinct to where I though the sound of the lions roaring is. I would need time to crack this code as the tracks go in all direction. But up on the crest of the clearing, impala are alarming. Then a lion roars. I walk up to Ximpalapala koppie and then see a big black maned lion up on the hillside. The plains below them are full of zebra and wildebeest.

In front of me steam is billowing out of a chimney spout like breath on the morning air. Underground the work of thousands of termite is causing the termite mound to release energy and heat.

Every elephant’s foot is cracked like a fingerprint. But it’s too difficult in a mess of tracks. The key with elephants right now is freshness. If you get onto a bull and the tracks are less than an hour or two old and you may have a chance. Sometimes I just speculate on a direction, full of doubt but going for it nonetheless. Today I am right, a bull feeds in the clearing on a termite mound. He walks through the ground and then lopes through the grass. He feeds almost continuously, sleeps standing during midday in the shade.

He will live to about sixty, chew his way through multiple sets of teeth, cover thousands of miles, pollenate plants, cause awe and fear and still there is a different between what something does and what it means. What an elephant’s presence means in our world is utterly impossible to say.

In the late afternoon another herd comes through camp, close to the fire pit. It’s like they expect me here. Two young bulls wrestle with each other. I walk out with my cup of tea in my hand, they look at me and move forward but with no intent.

In late January I tracked a small elephant bull with a group of close friends. We tracked the bull for a few hours, seeing his huge tracks and into the dry riverbed. At different times a different person tracked. Each of them acquainted themselves with the elephant. As each member of the group trailed that elephant we became harmonized in perfect unfolding. We feel into intimacy with the elephant and each other. Where he had rested in the shade so did we. As we followed we started to know each other. Whatever happened after that day, there was an elephant we knew. We found him at sunset and not a word was said.

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There was once a BBC report, maybe before the second world war. This is the BBC on the hour, there is no news on the hour. Day 31, there are no new stories at this time. That’s not true, its just that I’m going to a place underneath stories. I see friends across the world, around the fire. Friends in Canberra, California, Charleston, Bath.

In stillness I know the exact moment of when a friendship would change me. Friendship is a dialogue in silence.

As I write this the herd of elephants have arrived to drink at the river. They are standing in the shining reflection of the sun. They suck up water in their trunks, they fling coarse river sand over their backs. To me there is a geometry as to how they stand. The water that touched them is already gone on its journey east into the Kruger National Park.

A river is how life befriends itself. Yesterday I walked down the banks of the river at midday. Africa’s witching hour. I walked through a stillness that was sensual in its depth. In a Rockpool of rain water I took my clothes off and slipped into another place. Floating in the silence on the surface. I was wrapped in stillness. Nothing was happening, but finally everything was happening. Not a place in the sky, not a Landrover, not a voice, yet there was a dialogue with the silence. I am friend it said.

In ceremony I see men and women weep for something they didnt even know they had lost. And when the weeping stopped, something deep down says I am friend.

Our presence here is ruining the great mountainsides and we are falling out with the rivers. I a ma person complicit without choosing in the way of the world. You are of the same silence, made in the same love. Its breaking my heart when it will be too hot to go outside. All death is the beginngon of something new, love what is dying because I am friend it said.

I see you there on all sides of life. A friend in infinity can withstand an industrial blink of ignorance.
This is why we are here, I have become certain of it. We are here to befriend ourselves as the people of nature. Wake up where you are. Nothing else is the worth the time. When the mind finally embraces itself in that deepening compassion, you will see that awakening was all that we are doing anyway and not even that was happening in the stillness.

Each day I have sit in stillness with the absolute certainty I will die. The ones I love will leave me or I will leave them. I will not hide from that last veil to love. You can hurt me love or teach me the truth. Trust this life that made this river. Trust that I will find this river. Take me to those shores of grace I ask, I have so far to go and I am afraid of storms and loss. Take me to the peace that passeth. I don’t know the way but I sense it there from beyond the edges.

I cannot report entertainingly from this place, I can only pray in a way that I never before understood. It is a prayer that does not come from me. There is no news except that I am on that current brushing against the legs of elephants and reed beds. I wonder if I will lose you here. I hope I don’t even though someone else’s devotion can leave us cold. Still with all that’s holding us, if I did I trust that would be right too. I am friend it said.

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I made an oatmeal breakfast that was Instagram worthy. The brand of oats out here is called Jungle Oats with a strong image of the Bengal Tiger on the front.

There is a Chinese saying that the best time to plant a tree is ten years ago or now. I love this idea and feel it here as time warps. I don’t know where time has gone. I think our relationship with time shapes some of our relationship with life and self. In a natural rhythms your consciousness changes as your notion of time shifts. Time seems to make life rather than count it down.

One thing that I am struck by in the quote about planting a tree is how, even with this experience, there is something incredibly powerful about just starting. It will be the value of starting ten years ago in the blink of an eye. The company, the piano, French. Cut the crap and start.

Trackers talk a lot about the first track. You have no idea how the path of the tracks will play out and you don’t need to. All you need is the first track and then the next first track.
In the coaching world I sat with so many people who have said to me that when I have the whole plan then they will start. The people who experience the most transformation are the people who make little changes all the time.

Carl Jung had an idea of circumambulation where you exist in your fullest potential in your future self. You achieve this future self by paying attention to what truly grabs you with the feeling of aliveness now. You move towards and also around your future self. As you do this you will see patterns and themes about what is core and essential to yourself. If you look back over your life you will see that there are themes that continually emerge on your Venn diagram. You see all of this as you spiral through time towards your future potential.

I remember I once spent a week watching Anthony Bourdain shows one after the other. To me he was an incredibly original storyteller. It shaped my own tracks of the style and types of stories I wanted to tell. Anytime I’m walking through the world I feel Bourdain there drinking Scotch irreverently and saying to me ‘Go for the character, not the facade.’

When you really look at death, it teaches you to live. And when you look deep into the eyes of regret you start now.

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Wonderful encounters continue around the camp. Two young rhino bulls made their way past camp and after a short while I got on the tracks for some fun. They led me on the southern bank of the river. Past a Sausage tree and Apple leaf when I heard growling from 50 meters back from where I had come. The growling escalated and I immediately knew it was the mating leopards from the other day. My gratitude for this spot and the experiences it has given me is impossible to state. I love this tree.

I was feeling pretty good when the dark clouds began to build and a mini trauma pattern played out. Introjection followed by projection. Psychologically I returned back to the other night and I felt like I was in the storm already. Bad decisions were made and trauma starts to create itself leaving me feeling isolated and anxious fearing the worst. It played out for about 15 minutes before I was able to interrupt it.

Part of dealing with trauma is understanding the physiology of trauma. Notice my adrenals are activated. Ask myself what is actually happening now. Move to some kind of self care - what do I need right now? Radio for a weather report. Create a different outcome for yourself - this involved getting everything covered in tarps and then watching the dark shapes in the mountains move in.

Learning to map and interrupt trauma patterns creates totally different branches of lives. In hundreds of ceremonies this has become my art form. To map and interrupt patterns to create different outcomes for people.

Patterns can become more intricate and complex as the scope of the trauma becomes deeper. Anger turned inward becomes self loathing which becomes depression. Interrupt the anger to restore boundaries and re-establish value. It requires looking at suffering in a much more interconnected way much like an ecosystem.

Map your pattern, play with learning to create new outcomes for yourself.

1. What past is in this moment
2. Notice what your body is doing
3. Ask yourself What do you need?
4. Reach out for support. It’s hard to see a pattern from inside it.

I get excited about it as a tracker as its all about how the pattern is laid down. We can learn with attention and all become pattern trackers. I’ve been thinking about how all the mystics found a way of living and then shared the peace and joy of that way. The doctrine often came after their lives. I have found a way to live here that is simple and peaceful. I have made a home in it, but is it making a home in me?

Purposeful action towards and unknown purpose. I don’t know where I’m going but I know exactly how to get there.

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You would be amazed at how far crocodiles move at night. I found myself following the distinctive track for about 2 kilometers. I’ve spent a lot of time in the bush veld, but in this experience by nature of the experience I have been taken deeper. I have the will and the mindset to find out where crocodiles go. To be immersed in patterns that otherwise seem random.

This is an understanding of a certain individuality to each creature. Of course even deeper is the fact that naming anything takes you a little bit further away from it.

Zen Koan. A glass of water on the table. The teacher asks what is that? The students give linear answers. The master picks up the glass and drinks, making the point of pure experience.

From a spiritual point of view, the other truth is that mind changes out here. The thought load of future and past is replaced by an immediacy of attention. Mind recruits the body, it is in a creative response to the body. I say that because I honestly tend to run pretty anxious. This is how we used to be for many thousands of years.

While we can’t obviously live in trees in the wild, its worth noting that if we could most of us would be closer to enlightenment. There are really opportunities to questioning how we get off the progress train with nuance. We have to face the truth that not all progress is progress. Modern life ain’t it all cracked up to be. It’s certainly worth some of your capacity to innovate before you have kids and they become teenagers. Life architecture as an activism is a very engaging way to spend the blink of an eye we all get.

Right now I’m reading two of the most beautiful books. Braiding Sweetgrass and Overstory.
https://www.amazon.com/Braiding-Sweetgrass-Indigenous-Scientific-Knowledge/dp/1571313567
https://www.amazon.com/Overstory-Novel-Richard-Powers/dp/039363552X
Both talk about the intelligence of plants. In Overstory, the trees start to call a total discordant group of people together. It shows how a forest is not a collection of trees but a living thing.

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New addition to the list of animals seen from the camp, but I will get to that. One thing about living outside is that it makes you’re more hardy. You get scrapes and bites and sometimes if can feel like a slow attrition.

I decided to run to the edge of the reserve where there is an anti-poaching camp. I ran out through high terrain, through dark soils and wet grass. I saw herds of zebra and even ostriches.
At the halfway pointing I was bonking as athletes call it. I felt like I could lie down next to the road and just fall asleep. I was going to pay the price for fasting the day before. What followed was 6 kilometers of run/walking mind games. The animals must have been perplexed watching this man staggering by himself back towards his camp.

Back at camp I immediately sensed something was wrong. Two hyenas were by the fire pit, one with my wash-up sponge in his mouth. There was a feeling that something was going down. On the far banks of the river there were five more hyenas snarling at a pack of wild dogs.

I don’t know if you have ever seen a dog fight, but imagine a hyena and a pack of wild dogs and you would get the energy of what had broken out next to my camp. A hyena got isolated and got bitten from all sides. Blood spattered into the water. Suddenly the pack turned and ran across the river.

Not waning to miss anything I turned and ran after the dogs into the clearing. They brought down a scrub hare and played a game with a zebra. A hyena tried to teal the scrub hare and got set upon by all the dogs. The dogs tore up the clearing and killed an impala where the hyena moved in on the meat. Nothing plays the survival percentages like the skill of the hyena.

Byron Katie (https://thework.com/) always asks, who would you be without your story. In this moment without it, who would you be? Usually without the story you find yourself sitting in a chair somewhere or run/walking down the road. Everyone has a story about being a victim or not having enough. The person who you try to help but won’t let go of their story they have to do it all alone.

Clean pain is when we bang our leg and rub it ouch. Dirty pain is when we tell the story of being a clumsy idiot for the next ten years. Mostly we live in the story of what’s happening rather than what’s happening.

There is a weird metaphysical component to how life follows our stories. The key is to pay attention to the ones that cause suffering. What I’m sayin is that you have two options to become more aware:

1. Ask yourself what story you are telling about yourself when you re suffering
2. Or you can get into a hyena wild dog pack fight.

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There is a line in the Book of Mormon where a Ugandan women is singing about the Utopia that can be found in Salt Lake City. At first it seems like another comedic line, but it’s actually profound. The women is imagining utopia from her point of reference. We all imagine inside our own frames of reference. The question is what are your friendly warlords?

What is abundance? What is wealth?
Real wealth is not being rushed, stillness, enjoying your food, having places you are excited to explore, a river to swim in, being creatively engaged, quality presence with yourself and others, rest when you want to, freedom from crushing obligations, simplicity, being able to feel, connection to beauty, naps, high levels of energy, health, time, silliness, passion, the opportunity to serve, choices.

I need to think about how I can live towards this truest abundance.

There is a strange thing with success that what is built into it, but with it there is something to lose.

I never met the entrepreneur who said “I think we are big enough now”. We all want to be successful, we all want to get by.

What do you want to provide? House, education food on the table. Then it deepens into presence, time, a joyful life, aliveness and understanding what is really important. How is the way you are living your life teaching those things?

Kids don’t learn what you say, they learn how you are. I guess I’m examining the idea that just because we can we should. What I think I want versus what I actually want.

The real pillars of abundance are stillness, nature and community. I understand that none of this might be making any sense.

What else happens when you get still is that you become aware there are many places in your life where you have not showered yourself in glory. You have to face up to a certain amount of shame in your own behavior that frankly if you keep busy you can hide away. To be still means that you can really revisit those moments. Even if you don’t want to it will come up.

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I am missing all my friends. In my mind I find myself composing long legends of the fall type letters on a typewriter. Dear friends….the nights grow colder, I think of you often.

There is something deep about missing people and staying in the feeling of missing people rather than turning to WhatsApp.

The daily presence of elephants has become something I look forward to. I went up into the tree and had a kettle shower and in between the late afternoon light and endorphins from the run I had a moment of elation.
I still usually eat one meal a day and then around that eat fruit, avocados and raisins.

Barring a few noticeable days when I have been tired I have a steady stream of energy. I only mention that because its noteworthy.
The feeling you have when you open your eyes in the morning is the marker of your balance.

My clothes have to have reached a truly feral point until I wash them. I go to sleep early and wake up early. I watch the movements of the stars across the skies.

I keep thinking about how St Frances was a renunciate yet he is still the primary driver of the economy. Who knows life has its very unexpected plan to us.

The news of the day is that a mating pair of leopards was sighted. The female was very agitated at the males interest. She would saunter over to the male and lash his face with her tail. Once she even clawed him on the head.
On two occasions the male actually made it onto his feet but ran out of energy and flopped down again. Once mating commences they will mate every few minutes for a number of days.

There is a distinctive growl that is made when mating actually commences.

If the mating is successful, in about 110 days the mother will find a secluded space and give birth to her cubs.

My quest to track a big bull elephant has still not happened. It keeps getting interrupted by lion tracks and pegasus rhino. Still this is a mission that remains high on my priority list. An animal like that has presence who has walked the ancient paths of his ancestors. There are myths of elephants who used to frequent the eastern seaboards of Southern Africa and commune with whales. These animals exist in a conscious that is beyond the verbal mind. There is no future and no past.

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My decision to suspend all river bathing has been vindicated. Last night I shone my torch into the river and saw not one but two crocodiles in the water.

I will tell you now about the curious incident of the rhino in the day. I went out for elephants but cut across the track of a rhino bull. A beautiful dinosaur three leaf clover tracker. The bull had left an impressive size of dung. I am a very good rhino tracker, if anything happens in life I always have rhino tracking total back on.
But in this case I lost the rhino track and could not find it. Now I began to unleash my considerable skill set. Yet still nothing.

Rhinos are routine creatures, you can almost see the moment one of their daily routines appear in their mind before them./ I was certain this bull was making his round so I though to just walk ahead and easily cut his track on the road ahead. I checked every patch of open ground but nothing. I walked zig zag lines on game paths but still nothing.

Eventually I went back to the dung and made sure I set off on the right course. I saw the same tracks and then the vanishing. Its pretty frustrating to lose a 2 ton animals in open sandy terrain.

I started to lose my cool a bit. Just recently I was a lion tracking, river crossing savant now this crap.
Eventually I went back to the pile of dung and put my small pack down. I would now go very slowly and redo everything I had just done.

Moving in slow motion I crouched down to study the earth.
I remember running a workshop on retreat about how looking for a rhino could be like looking for your mission and purpose in life.

Losing tracks is part of tracking. Losing yourself is part of life. I consoled myself with knowing that some of Londolozi’s elite trackers lose the tracks from time to time. St Frances said wherever you go preach the gospel but only where absolutely necessary use words.

Connect with Boyd Varty:
Website | https://boydvarty.com/
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Find out more about Londolozi
Website | https://www.londolozi.com/en/
Impact | https://londolozi.africa
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/londolozi/
Twitter | https://twitter.com/londolozi
Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/londolozigamereserve/

Fresh tracks of a pride of lions in the predawn light behind the camp. Its been strangely cool, almost like a cold winter has been knocking on the door. Tracks cut down into the river and onto a beautiful sandbank. The sand allows you to see very clearly how the pride plays with each other. The tracks then cut up onto a hippo path. I’m nervous to follow but do so anyway.

The path opens into a small beach near the rivers edge. The cats pace from side to side not wanting to go in. With the water so brown and many crocodiles I try to find a better crossing point. Eventually I find my way across and move up river. Its think and grass and suddenly all the trees look similar. I find my tree and go down to the waters edge to beautiful pug marks of the tracks in the sand.

Why are these tracks beautiful? Its the perfect outline of this formidable predators large foot. Its the feeling that you are walking where the lions walk. Like you can almost feel the animals up ahead. It’s the spirit of the moment.

A short while later I find them, a lioness sitting in the golden morning light. My day is set, its 8:45am and I have find lions already.

I think of the Chief Seattle quote, when all the animals are gone humans will find a loneliness of spirit.

This is of a loneliness or bankruptcy of the spirit of life seems important. Have you ever walked into a soulless building - like a new mall. Well that at more subtle levels seem to be what we are losing and do not know that we are losing it. The very essence of family, community, work and play is losing its spirit.

I remember walking in a wilderness that had lost its animals in a war. It was strangely eerie.

How do we get back to the spirit of life?

Ubuntu - I am because of you, you are because of me.
Your presence helps me be a person.
It seems to run deeper than that. Deeper than people, the animals, plants, rivers.

Get quiet enough to really hear the voice inside you. Follow that and I suspect it will take you back instantly to the spirit of life.

Last night I had a dream. I was walking around the premises of the boarding school I went to when I was ten. I could see the dull linoleum floors and the fluorescent light hallways. There I would feel more alone than I have ever felt before.

Through a strange quirk of the system the school would retain students for an extra year before they went to high school. It was my first encounter with dysfunctional hierarchy. Only when I got older did I begin to understand that unless you show a young boy he is strong with guidance he keeps acting tough out of fear that he isn’t.

All of my work has been to get that young boy out of there. But now I’ve change my mine and me and the boy has decided not to run but to overcome it with wildness.

If you would like to understand your own darkness ask yourself how you have hurt people in the past. If you want to understand trauma look for where you feel helpless, frozen and isolated.
If you want to understand shame ask what you are afraid to share.
If you want to understand how to truly heal find out what your gifts are and share them.

Out here nature is teaching me innocence and by extension I feel my capacity for intimacy returning.
Healing is in need of a community that is not confused.

In the end in this tree with solitude what I find is compassion for all the creatures of that place and gratitude for that time for the archetypal breaking out of which all restoration must come. Is that not where we all stand right now?

Connect with Boyd Varty:
Website | https://boydvarty.com/
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Twitter | https://twitter.com/BoydVarty

Find out more about Londolozi
Website | https://www.londolozi.com/en/
Impact | https://londolozi.africa
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/londolozi/
Twitter | https://twitter.com/londolozi
Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/londolozigamereserve/

Waking up I felt no motivation to get out of bed. So I just lay there.
I thought of all the years I suffered from depression when I woke with the dreaded weight on me.

Connect with Boyd Varty:
Website | https://boydvarty.com/
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Twitter | https://twitter.com/BoydVarty

Find out more about Londolozi
Website | https://www.londolozi.com/en/
Impact | https://londolozi.africa
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/londolozi/
Twitter | https://twitter.com/londolozi
Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/londolozigamereserve/

This morning at Dawn a spur fowl flew over me in sheer terror. A second after a goshawk came past, silent with its wings tucked.

Thinking a lot about how information is transferred. Want to follow an elephant bull for a whole day. Following one took me into a grove of green grass and trees. I followed signs of crushed foliage and chewed branches.

I have been alone for twenty days and have a profound relationship with the stillness.

The 3 elephant bulls were in a mud wallow. I could feel them pulling me into their frequency as if in treacle. As they moved there was clearly a silent code between them. Silently without touching a sensing would occur and one bull would give way to another.

I just stayed there on that termite mound. Somewhere below me termites were farming fungi.
What do we know of experiencing life when we reduce it to only what we can explain. Felt experiences are a frontier. I am sleeping at the frequency of the wilderness. What information is happening at my cellular levels? How much code can pass between you and another? What worlds of information are there in a glance?

If I had a conclusion for twenty days in, I would say this. A very smart team of people are working very hard at keeping your attention.
Felt experience and our relationship with its creation is where the foundations of meaning constellate.
Nature is a network of infinite interlocking intelligences emitting frequencies that you can tune into at levels way beyond knowing the names of birds and trees.

If you do your capacity for imagination, innovation and feeling return naturally. Life comes back to life.
Simplicity is a lost art form and its radically different to making things easier to do. Firelight is essential to the wellbeing of spirit.

The most sought after art form of the future is will be the creation of gatherings where people are guided out of pretence and perspex enclosed lives into deeper encounters with others and all lives.

A strange phenomenon of memories playing out to me. I can see the difference between what is happening and what I believe is happening.

I don’t know, thank God. I surrender.

Connect with Boyd Varty:
Website | https://boydvarty.com/
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Twitter | https://twitter.com/BoydVarty

Find out more about Londolozi
Website | https://www.londolozi.com/en/
Impact | https://londolozi.africa
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/londolozi/
Twitter | https://twitter.com/londolozi
Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/londolozigamereserve/

One day before the halfway mark and I’m in a rage. In a clear blue sky a benign cloud floated over my camp and dumped everything it had on me. Everything was wet. Wet blankets, cloths, shoes which set in a whole process of drying and cleaning.

The rage culminated on my run when a swarm of biting flies bit me and I exploded. I broke a branch off the tree and started to whip myself in a clearing. That is a powerful image metaphorically and in reality.

After wandering for a while I found tracks of the incredibly rare ant bear. They are incredibly rare and I have never seen one in the area.

There is an idea in tracking called track awareness. Without track awareness you could walk past that ant bear and have no idea that he is around. It’s a wonderful idea that there is information but you must tune yourself to see it.

In my early twenties I started turning my track awareness to the tracks of my career. I started looking for other models. I was physically moved by David Rattray talking at an event. I was also moved by my mentor Martha make $20 000 sitting in her pajamas in her cupboard do a live event to hundreds of online participants.

I was developing my track awareness for my career. I got a CD of the poet David Whyte. You could not study this in university but they came if you developed your track awareness and followed the callings inside of you.

There are worlds are information in our worlds that we don’t even know about. As I was walking past the ant bear hole a miraculous thing happened. A honeyguide came and invited me on an adventure. The bird hovered near me chattering with intense excitement. I was deeply moved by the collaboration between man and nature. I stood alone really feeling it, my own ties to the hunter gatherers. Unfortunately it was late and I could not go with the bird.

A few years into my career quest I met a different type of guide. Rodrigo was the strangest Venn diagram you could imagine. A storyteller, chemist, healer and shaman. His system involved creating ceremonial spaces where people could feel the past coming up and release their trauma. I apprenticed with him for 7 years following him around the USA. I couldn’t have planned that this was going to be my path but by paying attention this is where the tracks led me. I must attune, there is a path for me I cannot see yet.

One of the easiest ways for you to develop track awareness is to come out of the mind and into the body. Notice people, images events, daydreams, clothes and anything that makes you feel expansive in your body. Let is show you what energies it. Notice what makes you feel constricted and low energy. See what track awareness if helps you develop. Your body is a wild animal it will show you your most essential self.

Connect with Boyd Varty:
Website | https://boydvarty.com/
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Find out more about Londolozi
Website | https://www.londolozi.com/en/
Impact | https://londolozi.africa
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/londolozi/
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Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/londolozigamereserve/

Day 18 - Golden

People have a saying in South Africa, we are looking golden. Well if this experience has its own ebbs of fortune, emotionality and joy then we are looking golden.

The lions have returned to Londolozi and I could see the tracks of the pride heading further west into the bush. They cut off the road and I scratched around a bit on their line o movement. The light was beautiful and the smell of a fresh morning was invigorating. I was feeling totally in tune with their movement.

Tracking in these moments is a beautiful combination of skill, concentrations and even somatic intelligence as your body feels the terrain.

I though of that tracking saying “I don’t know where I’m going but I know how to get there.:

Here on this beautiful morning I am trying to keep this dying art form alive inside of myself. What a strange thing, an art that does not live on a wall, an art that lives inside a person. If you keep tracking alive you keep a thread to a way we used to be, to another time.

The track cut further north and I’m flying along now in total flow. No trying, no mind just flow state.
I come across the land manager who is following a male leopard in his vehicle. I see his vehicle through the bushes and crouch down in the long grass and watch them go by me no more than 20 meters away. They do not notice me and when they are gone I continue on the tracks of the lions.

The lions cut through a dry water course. Two other guides arrive by chance and are also looking for lions. They want to join the tracking. The 3 of us set off and only 60 meters later we hear a squirrel alarm. James behind me starts to click. My eyes come up off the ground and there is a big male lion and a lioness looking at us. Gold cats in golden lights….Golden. The male snarls without any real intention and we move back. The rest of the pride is in the long grass all around them. There is something so satisfying about finding something in a huge wilderness using just your skills.

I had been waiting for this morning of tracking. What else do I feel? What do you want from life? What is life asking of you? What would you hear if you listened? It Is 7:30 am and I have lived the aliveness of 10 years. More presence is more life. Not doing more. Something so tangible.

I would like to write a book called the dynamics of satisfaction. Scene of man in the wild making himself water to bathe with.

I’m also aware of how I have objectified myself. We think of ourselves as an object on a scale. We should be much further ahead or I’m not where I should be. I’m talking about a continuous comparative dynamic that is structured into a culture where everything is automated and commodities until your own psyche makes you a thing and judges that thing comparatively. Just think about how you drive yourself when you are exhausted. Just watch what you do to yourself when you start duding yourself.

Inside that mind all the dimension of person gives way to something terribly binary. Good bad, failing winning or losing.

All I want you to know from me out here is that it is not you. It is structured into the psyche in the modern life.

Buffalo Story

Connect with Boyd Varty:
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Find out more about Londolozi
Website | https://www.londolozi.com/en/
Impact | https://londolozi.africa
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Yesterday I walked out onto the clearing at sunset. On the hill there is the most ancient hope of a horizon. The scene was so soft with the graceful movements of the giraffe. At dusk a hyena slink past looking guilty. Hidden in everything is the unseen masculinity but held together by the feminine energy of nature.

Animals talk with body language. A good tracker must be attuned to this.

What does it mean to be a man? It was often a question that seemed to be asked out of profound sense of something that had not been attained or out of the question is this it?
That question is only ever asked in modern culture where all our definitions are from outside of us. Society makes us but what does it make if society is flawed.

Why so many men I speak to who have attained all of the above are still asking this question?
The awakening of the wild man can’t happen without a capacity for making. I’m not looking for images but to people.

I have two artist friends who I deeply admire: Simon Bannister (https://www.simonmaxbannister.com/) and Emily Lamb (https://www.emilylamb.co.uk/). True Artists. In them I have seen a ferocity of commitment who I deeply admire. They have the courage to live as artists. It’s like a certain type of wildness is inbuilt into their calling.

As artists they are bringing the as yet unimagined into being. They first have to imagine that goal and then bring it into being. Not only set goals but imagine something new and then make that your goal.

To imagine with intention is a lost art form

This type of creation is between you and the spirit of that making. I understand there are many ways to go but for me the way of the artist, the ability go inward to the as yet undefined and the outwards spirit of life and alchemize those both is what its about.

The men I most admire built their lives, they made it up.
I don’t want to remake the world, I want to remake myself inside of it.

Instead of asking what does it mean to be a map, ask what does it mean to be myself? This is modern day activism.

Story of my father.

Connect with Boyd Varty:
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Find out more about Londolozi
Website | https://www.londolozi.com/en/
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/londolozi/
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Somethings are quite easy to talk about and it feels good to tell you what happened. Making notes help me to look deeply and sense how I am feeling.
Experiences that are characterize by what’s not happening. The finger pointing to the moon are not the moon.

Yesterday after the sun came out briefly, I shed my layers like a moth emerging from the cocoon. The storm was still in the forefront of my mind. I was lying in the deck staring out in the beautiful dark branches. I was tired after the night before and I felt myself relaxing. An absolute stillness came over me. I was gone, pure awareness. No time. The scene was dancing for a second inside the real truth.

What you are looking for is what you are looking. I would like to abide there. In Zen there are all these levels of mystical experience in meditation that the Rōshi's (老師) have mapped. The highest level is ordinariness. Miraculously I perceived the ordinariness.

David Whyte Reading.

If I had a wish for us today I would wish for us to learn how to village build. Binge on solitude to come home to binge on family/ My solitude has taught me to identify the difference between loneliness and longing. I like it here where I finally stopped.

The Ordinariness it Totally Miraculous

Connect with Boyd Varty:
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Website | https://www.londolozi.com/en/
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If I thought I was getting into cruise mode, Day 15 took care of that. I was out of the camp early looking for tracks of lions which I followed. The confidence to make choices that stretch your flexibility
My body felt weak like it needed fuel. When the lions turned off the road the trouble began. I couldn’t get onto the line of their movement. The lions moved erratically, I moved erratically. Tracking is about rhythm and flow and there was none of that today.

Byron Katie says the only things that’s ever happening is what you are thinking and believing and I was definitely in a storm of thinking.
(https://thework.com/)

In truth I couldn’t find some tracks in a beautiful wilderness. I was lost but it wasn’t like life and death.
I was in old thoughts and judgements brought to this moment: “This is total waste of time. You’re no good at this.” I went from zero to irrationally judgmental fast.

My sister believes that certain existential crisis can be solved with a sandwich and a nap.

Wen tracking a few hours later and cut the track of two rhinos. They were huffing and puffing in a magic guar thicket. The wind was in my favor as they moved towards me. I climbed into the tree and sat quiet and still in the branches as they meandered below me blissfully unaware of my presence.
In these moments I feel a tremendous amount of gratitude. The game is so abundant after being protected all these years now.

Then the world fell on my head. At 11pm I sat bolt upright and smelt the storm on the breeze and felt it in my body. It was windy instinctual but I got up and erected the tarp. I’ve watched myself learn fast how to handle the rain. My body had a current of energy running through it, it was like I could feel the future. Then came the mother and father of a thunderstorm. The volume was turned up to holy shit!

I sat in a totally clean fear for four hours. I thought about the hymn ‘How Great Thou Art’.
I was truly scared as a grown man. It makes you feel so human to experience that fear.
It was so wet water was coming from underneath me.

Day 15, you showed me who is boss. That’s my report. I’m still afraid of dying and being burnt. This mystic has not put those puppies to bed, but I’m wilder for sure.

With thanks to Chris Rice for the Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cc0QVWzCv9k

Connect with Boyd Varty:
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Website | https://www.londolozi.com/en/
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One month of solitude to go…until what? The idea I could finish this experience is becoming somewhat absurd to me.

Touch wood my camp has not yet been ransacked by baboons. Everyday I bathe in this gratitude and I would like you all to put this all on your gratitude at the top.

After washing a pot in the river I came face to face with a teenage elephant.
Communication has been well established. An amazing cast of characters lives out here.]

Harmony is when, by being yourself, you form part of the greater whole. A Shaman once told me that what we are trying to do as we live is balance our harmony with the intelligence of life. We stop trying to live well and we are lived. Our path and purpose comes through us by being who we most naturally are. And to look at any of the animals it just takes you there. I am in this tree to find my harmony.

Inner work has two movements, the first is a clearing out and becoming aware of all the things that are not really you. Patterns that come from trauma, social conditioning, how you needed to be to be liked, to belong, your ideas about what made you valuable. Ideas from your culture. What you discover is a lot of who you thought you are is just conditioned response.

So if I aint that then what…who am I? There are no signposts here.
You have to let your essence express itself, become a tracker, find your medicine way. But this is a deep challenge.

Carl Jung has this idea that the unconscious will play out in your life until it’s made conscious. That’s why certain patterns repeat over and over in people lives until they gain awareness around what’s driving it.

It seems to me that you choose to do inner work or life will choose for you. If life chooses for you it will be much harder.

My work today is on the tracks of a leopard which cut across a sandy patch of ground.

I’m alone at sunset. Into the Wild Journal Entry: Happiness only real when shared. I don’t know if I believe it but I understand the sentiment now. On his path the leopard suddenly calls. I’m asking myself what is my work? What can I learn from Londolozi and the leopards. Certainly my work is to let myself be seen, completely, maybe not by everyone but by someone. That is a true challenge.

Connect with Boyd Varty:
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Find out more about Londolozi
Website | https://www.londolozi.com/en/
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/londolozi/
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Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/londolozigamereserve/

I’m gonna give this one a bit of a go but it is a bit of a tongue twister….Those who bagged their game and made their camp snug and secure bedded down with contentment.
The adventurer contentedly thought that the hard life was well worth it.

The snakes are out in the post rain heat as I see their tracks crossing the roads.
The patterns of movement are stored in me that way.

I’m becoming very good at pinpointing sounds. The trick is to gauge a distance to a sound across a woodland. I imagine throwing a pebble across the terrain and trying the land it where the sound came from.

I keep thinking of the idea of the difference between how something works and what I means. Surely we are so good at the first and losing the second.

Story of Harry Kirkman.

This experience could turn me into something of a luddite.

Story of Ian Player who understood what wilderness meant to the wellbeing of the world. Founder of the Wilderness Leadership institute.
There are profound unintended consequences to a lantern.

Right I just need to personally redefine progress.

Once when I was driving along with Renias we came to a waterhole. A small herd of impala was just arriving at the waters edge.

I’m asking myself, what actually creates satisfaction and how do I cultivate it daily. Not more, but more of what I actually want.

Have you ever had a memory of your future? Preremebering is an art form. It’s imagining out of a deep knowing what your life ought to be.
I’m interested what the future of human life could be and how we can create it.
We are poised for a great premembering.

Back to a mindful relationship with nature if certainly underway. If you are listening to this you are already part of it.

Connect with Boyd Varty:
Website | https://boydvarty.com/
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Find out more about Londolozi
Website | https://www.londolozi.com/en/
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/londolozi/
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Modem life is built on a truth and a lie.
Excerpt from Braiding Sweet Grass, a beautiful book about indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teaching of plant. The land is the real teacher all we need is mindfulness.

It is surprising to me how much time giraffes spend down by the river. Like an artist I’m trying to see things differently. I look beyond them walking to a geometry.

The trick to transformational processes is how to interrupt and shape patterns, in order to do this you must look at the spaces between things. How everything is touching everything else in relation.

Down in the river the leopards continue their passions. I have not felt compelled to go and find them.
To go and seek them out now seems kind of impolite.

I’m developing a theory on why mystics went to nature. Imagine you are two people: a fanatic city dweller and a wild person. When the mystic goes to nature they find that wild person who knows a different rhythm. The one that gets attention becomes abiding.

Today my body was tired and I ebbed into a lower level of frequency.

In my masculine excitement I’m drawn to activity, but right now its the meditation that is calling me.

A side note on tracking. Right now it seems that all four of the prides of lions that frequent the Londolozi are on neighboring properties. There is an air of excitement about this at it means that they will be sure to return in a couple of days.

Learning to See: A many called Ken Tinley once tuaght my father how to see a tree. There is a difference between how something works and what it means.

“When you look at a tree, see the soil that holds it. Understand that soil feeds it and the tree also enriches the soil. It’s shade invites shade grass and its stem alkalizes fruit which bring in monkeys which cause leave to fall which cause antelope to browse below.

Wouldn’t it be interesting iff we all spent some time looking at nature this way. Or at your relationships or garden.

In native culture, ceremonies are a time to remember what we remember.
How something works and what it means are different things.

Connect with Boyd Varty:
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Find out more about Londolozi
Website | https://www.londolozi.com/en/
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/londolozi/
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Day 11 - Paradise Lost

I suspect things get a little wierder from here. Or a little mysterious depending on how you look at it. The leopards are still mating up and down the river, as if living next door to a noisy couple.

I know I must resist to fall all the way into the poetic, but its difficult, everything is so beautiful.

Lourens van der Post- Story after the war. Van Der Post came to camp alone in this wild Eastern region.

In the heat of the day I was cooking my pap by the base of the tree with two dish towels drying on the branch. For a moment the site of them took me into a state of absolute clarity.
When was the last time you had that feeling?

Memories of growing up in a Shangaan village. Looking at the two dish towels I swear I was innocent again. The loss of innocence occurs the moment you become self-conscious.

One of the biggest differences between people and animals is that people behave differently in private whilst animals don’t. Shame happens when your feelings are not safe. Here though there is no one to judge or compare.

Clean Anger and Dirty Anger

Where your attention goes your life goes. After last 11 days I have been returning my attention back to nature, curiosity and being. I have changed and I so want this for you. To the felt presence of something great unfolding.

When we wake up in our lives, what do we wake up out of? The challenge is to discover your own limitations and belief. People attune to new possibilities.

Unless we keep reimagining the possibility of life we will keep teaching our children to do the wrong things.

Tonight I want you to turn off all the lights and light a fire. Ask yourself when did I feel most alive? How did I find the limit and go beyond it.

Connect with Boyd Varty:
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Find out more about Londolozi
Website | https://www.londolozi.com/en/
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/londolozi/
Twitter | https://twitter.com/londolozi
Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/londolozigamereserve/

Journal entry,
Thinking of loved ones across the world. This morning I walked down to the river and a cloud of orange butterflies encircled me. Above them an aura of dragonflies and then higher a martial eagle circling. For a moment I was enclosed in a concentric interlocking sequences
I was a world inside a world. Interdimensional and I was walking in nature.

Iron John: An adventurer goes out to find out why people disappear when they go into a forest. He finds a pool and at the bottom of it he finds a wild man. He captures the wild man and puts him in a cage. Our job is to break him out. With his freedom comes more vitality, more life.

I am involved now in purposeful action towards an unknown purpose. Maybe there is an island out there. The Polynesian Wayfinders would sit on the front of a canoe and without any navigational tools would feel for an island of water. Homing. Ultimately you must captain your own canoe towards it intuitively must be.

Sometimes you meet people who help you on the way. There was Ian Thomas who was Intense, disciplined and fit. He is a brilliant tracker, a natural teacher, formidable but open. It is within shared endeavor that we can go beyond ourselves. I like adventures where you can learn many things at once. It was as if you were at the doorway beyond comprehension.

The wild man inside of us is not a savage. So that we may understand the spirit of our gifts and our wounding so that we may bring them to the world with more light.

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If you have ever wondered what’s it like living in a tree during 36 hours of rain…its pretty lousy. But truth be told I don’t mind. I feel closer to the animals and respect their resilience.

Neurosis is a substitute for suffering. Out here I feel alive, I feel like life is making me.
I have noticed that I spend a lot of time just sitting. Being is the frequency of nature. So in my world all is calm.

The Franciscan consciousness. A mystic deeply connected to nature. The contemplation of nature is to see that there is an intelligence running through all things. Letting it all be. The day just unfolds without my to do list.

Reverence cannot happen at high speed. It seems impossible to be both reverent and in a rush. The speed of modern life keeps us from deeply respecting it.

People think that rhinos may have been the birth of the mythology of the unicorn.

The feeling of being in another time has persisted. I guess I am 9 days away from modern life. I will not preach but prefer to speak to myself and the community is still to come.

We have forgotten how to live. Your phone is not making your life more convenient. Delete Netflix. Stop watching the news. Turn off your wifi. Go to places where there is no power. Focus on nature and community. Have ceremonies. Explore. Induce reverence for life.

Find the others who really want to live. Don’t fight the system, just abandon it.

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My troubles all began with a frog. Actually it started when a grasshopper head butted me whilst using the toilet. I understand why people who live close to the earth belief in the changing moods of nature.

The elephant cow was unnerved by me, but I saw that she had run into a musty bull which was causing her agitation. At the last minute they crashed down the river bank instead of into me.

The temperature rose so much that it felt like I was at the devil’s for a barbecue. Then the wind came up and the temperature went from devil’s barbecue to Narnia within 6 hours. I felt like I was at sea in a storm.

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Journal Entry: Discovered a perfect white fluff ball of feathers. My roommate, a chinspot basis. I got to bed to roost.
Living in a tree you don’t look up at birds, you are eye level.
African Hawk Eagles, Chinspot Batis, Tracks, Lions, Roost, Presence, Richard Siwela, Manyelethi

Why am I Here?
Why have I always known I would live in a tree?
Why do I track solo?
Why do you know you must do that you have not rational reason to?

Out here I do one thing at a time. If you are into being present, I would give it a try.

I found a pride of lion in the Manyelethi.
Decoded the pattern of the tracks. Some young, some old. With young cub present I must be especially aware. The tracks had no night traffic. I began to follow. There is a unique feeling to following a pride of lions alone.

When tracking solo your tracking should be sufficiently good that you are not trying to track.
Now you are self reliant. If you encounter danger from the lions, the outcome will be dictated by the quality of your reactions. React slowly, do not run, do not panic. Condition yourself in advance for presence.

You are in a conversation that is communicated primarily with energy and body language. Stand your ground and then move backwards.
The general rule is to have respect and be humble.
The goal should be to see the lion before they see you.

I don’t know why I must follow but I want to follow. A tracker must follow as a form of self expression.
On a track alone, there can be a purity of self expression.

I think of my childhood hero, Richard Siwela. He was an incredible solo tracker. He was a leopard specialist. He was meticulous, judgmental and aloof by nature. He carried himself with the superiority of the superior.

Today I have been beaten by the boundary but I have enjoyed my art form.
The ability to let more life into my heart is surely a trail worth following.

Eugene Marais - Purposeful action towards an unknown purpose. Homing towards something towards their is no …..
Homing instinct in young pygmy boy.

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Let me tell you an ancient story I just made up. Try and listen with the wild part of you. Listen close and push your rational mind away, a myth is a lie about the truth.
This is a myth about Lalela, the Wildebeest and the Man.

All of this because yesterday a wildebeest crossed the river.
I did with great trepidation cross the river and walk the other side of the river. I cut across his tracks and I suspect he risked crossing the area because he may have had a fight with another bull. As a tracker I could see how the hunter gatherers understanding of his place grew infinitely.

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Journal Entry:
Wildebeest crosses river? Why did the wildebeest cross the river?
Tree looks like Robinson Crusoe has taken residence. River sings songs to me. Its tune change with the breeze.

I haven’t felt this still in years. I feel so much more connected to my life through this simplicity. I feel present and grateful. My days are simple. The joy of being in your own energy.

So many people feel like they are living their life behind a pain of perspex. I’m certain this is related to complexity and convenience. If you want more life: simplify, simplify, simplify.

All over Africa where there tends to be less stuff I feel more generosity.

The stillness is however confronting. Without the news of the world insights arise.
Somewhere inside I’m still trying to grow up and overcome the ten year old.

When the tied is turning I must teach myself to use the most simple words.

It seems simple here to feel without running.

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Journal Entry - Elephant, Buffalo, Bushbuck, Nyala, Giraffe, Rhino, Monkey
Status Report - Very damp with plenty of spiders weaving their webs around camp. I wonder if they are weaving me in? What order of emergent order weaves webs through spiders?

Today I will run through the bush like people have always done. There are tricks to running in the African bush.
Its good to run when its how and animals are less active. There are three phases to being safe when running in the wilderness.

• Phase 1: Mindset and awareness you live in that is forward thinking, route planning, route assessment, knowing the terrain, local knowledge
• Phase 2: How you handle the dangerous situation
• Phase 3: The safety itself as a result of the first two phases.

I think of the idea that we live inside the mind of God?
Safety in the wilderness, has been a place where I have practiced mindfulness for years without knowing it. Slow deliberate awareness.
The highest form of martial arts if the avoidance of conflict and in this way animals are black belt.
Returning to camp means that I have to keep my presence and awareness up. Safety is a mindset. We need to find out how to go beyond safe spaces with more awareness.
The wild has a way and I need to transfer this into other parts of my life. Not needing to be safe but willing to go with open alertness and guidance where life happens safely.

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Safety check
Sat by the fire listening to night sounds
Think of all the ones you love
Book: Mike Boon - Zambezi. Arriving with humility to the greater rhythms of nature
Rhino bull tracks: notice follow listen decipher. Level the scores with the rhino.

Buffalo bulls sleep in the river, genet cat investigating, mouse at the fire pit, kingfishers up and down the river. Flock of doves drinking at the same time in the evening. These are the rhythms and patterns of behavior.
Developing an intimacy with my family place

Then things went south...An unexpected encounter with an animal.

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Sounds of silence and stillness.
Wind comes up, coffee undrinkable.
Hyenas arrive, sunrise meditation.
Giant baboon flood debris (Raymond).
Minimalise my emanation of physical output is the ground from which deeper changes can emerge.
Understanding and attuning to the frequencies of the animals days.
Emergence of anxiety - what are those old stories and how am I making sense of them.
Looking at my own patterns and how they keep me from deeper levels of presence.
Being alone is profoundly different to doing anything even with one other person.
Scope of this time where anxiety rises.
Thich Nhat Hanh book - FEAR.
Going on the experience to have the experience without trying to control.
Understanding the Bhudda beset by demons under the groves. Could this just be a mind not allowed to rest in itself?
Surrender is asking for more courage than action.

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Boyd reflects on Day 1 of his 40 day, 40 night journey into the wilderness. He sets up camp at the Treehouse and takes us through his daily routine

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Boyd begins preparing for his immersion into the wilderness by spending the morning tracking a pride of lions which ends in an unusual encounter. Together with the increase in temperature at the end of the summer season Boyd contemplates the impact of the weather (hot and cold, dry and wet) on his time in the wilderness.

Boyd discusses books that he is considering taking out to the treehosue with him. Some titles include:

• The Call of the Wild - Jack London
• The Ivory Trail - Cecil Barnard and T. V. Bulpin
• West with the Night - Beryl Markham
• The Overstory - Richard Powers
• St Francis of Assisi - Richard Rohr

Boyd tells the story of Shangaan tracker Winnis Mathebula and some of his ingenious bushcraft borne from a life of simplicity.

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What happens to your consciousness and being stripped away from modern life.
Why did all the mystics return to nature for extended periods?
What does the exploration of spirit look like in a completely natural environment?
What am I and What do I become?

Connect with Boyd Varty:
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