About this episode
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
