Why has the mystic and the natural world been intertwined with symbolic meaning and the path of awakening to a different way of perceiving life since the beginning of human experience?

From the 1st of April 2020, Boyd Varty from Londolozi Game Reserve in South Africa realizes a life long dream as he goes into the wilderness alone for 40 days and 40 nights to try and answer that question from inside that experience.

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Episode 37: Day 35 "Enchantment"

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.

Why has the mystic and the natural world been intertwined with symbolic meaning and the path of awakening to a different way of perceiving life since the beginning of human experience?

From the 1st of April 2020, Boyd Varty from Londolozi Game Reserve in South Africa realizes a life long dream as he goes into the wilderness alone for 40 days and 40 nights to try and answer that question from inside that experience.

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Episode 36: Day 34 "So Many More Elephants"

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.

Comment réagissent les grands chefs face aux événements? En cette période de confinement ils pensent, bouillonnent, réfléchissent à l'après. Le chroniqueur gastronomique François Simon recueille leurs mots et leurs sentiments.

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Épisode 7: Julien Dumas, Lucas Carton, Paris

Why has the mystic and the natural world been intertwined with symbolic meaning and the path of awakening to a different way of perceiving life since the beginning of human experience?

From the 1st of April 2020, Boyd Varty from Londolozi Game Reserve in South Africa realizes a life long dream as he goes into the wilderness alone for 40 days and 40 nights to try and answer that question from inside that experience.

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Episode 35: Day 33 "Sinking In"

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.

Why has the mystic and the natural world been intertwined with symbolic meaning and the path of awakening to a different way of perceiving life since the beginning of human experience?

From the 1st of April 2020, Boyd Varty from Londolozi Game Reserve in South Africa realizes a life long dream as he goes into the wilderness alone for 40 days and 40 nights to try and answer that question from inside that experience.

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Episode 34: Day 32 "Being Elephant"

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.

Why has the mystic and the natural world been intertwined with symbolic meaning and the path of awakening to a different way of perceiving life since the beginning of human experience?

From the 1st of April 2020, Boyd Varty from Londolozi Game Reserve in South Africa realizes a life long dream as he goes into the wilderness alone for 40 days and 40 nights to try and answer that question from inside that experience.

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Episode 33: Day 31 "Dialogue with Silence"

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 beginning on 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.

Why has the mystic and the natural world been intertwined with symbolic meaning and the path of awakening to a different way of perceiving life since the beginning of human experience?

From the 1st of April 2020, Boyd Varty from Londolozi Game Reserve in South Africa realizes a life long dream as he goes into the wilderness alone for 40 days and 40 nights to try and answer that question from inside that experience.

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Episode 32: Day 30 "The First Track"

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.

Why has the mystic and the natural world been intertwined with symbolic meaning and the path of awakening to a different way of perceiving life since the beginning of human experience?

From the 1st of April 2020, Boyd Varty from Londolozi Game Reserve in South Africa realizes a life long dream as he goes into the wilderness alone for 40 days and 40 nights to try and answer that question from inside that experience.

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Episode 31: Day 29 "Pattern Tracking"

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.

What past is in this moment

Notice what your body is doing.

Ask yourself: "What do you need?"

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.

Why has the mystic and the natural world been intertwined with symbolic meaning and the path of awakening to a different way of perceiving life since the beginning of human experience?

From the 1st of April 2020, Boyd Varty from Londolozi Game Reserve in South Africa realizes a life long dream as he goes into the wilderness alone for 40 days and 40 nights to try and answer that question from inside that experience.

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Episode 30: Day 28 "Call me Crazy"

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.

Why has the mystic and the natural world been intertwined with symbolic meaning and the path of awakening to a different way of perceiving life since the beginning of human experience?

From the 1st of April 2020, Boyd Varty from Londolozi Game Reserve in South Africa realizes a life long dream as he goes into the wilderness alone for 40 days and 40 nights to try and answer that question from inside that experience.

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Episode 29: Day 27 "Who Would You Be Without Your Story"

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:

Ask yourself what story you are telling about yourself when you re-suffering.

Or you can get into a hyena wild dog pack fight.