Track Your Life with Boyd Varty

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?

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.

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.

Connect with Boyd Varty:

Find out more about Londolozi

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.

Barring a few noticeable days when I have been tired I have a steady stream of energy. I only mention that because its noteworthy.

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.

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.

Connect with Boyd Varty:

Find out more about Londolozi

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.

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.

Moving in slow motion I crouched down to study the earth.

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:

Find out more about Londolozi

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.

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.

Out here nature is teaching me innocence and by extension I feel my capacity for intimacy returning.

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:

Find out more about Londolozi

Waking up I felt no motivation to get out of bed. So I just lay there.

Connect with Boyd Varty:

Find out more about Londolozi

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.

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.

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:

Find out more about Londolozi

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:

Find out more about Londolozi

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.

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.

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:

Find out more about Londolozi

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?

Why so many men I speak to who have attained all of the above are still asking this question?

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.

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:

Find out more about Londolozi