“I hold firmly to the conviction that tracking is what the human was organically born to do, and that contained within the tracks, and tracking, are many secrets. Things that are set apart, hidden, and concealed, and if followed, that become a guide to accepting something missing for us today — a mythic story.”

— Keith Badger

Last week I walked up into the mountains to forget the pandemic and everything for a while. A week-old old snow covered the ground.

This old trail I had hiked for years was re-routed some months ago. Now the path is winding and gentle, rather than straight up over rocks and eroding out more each year.

The day before, I’d read an article by tracker Keith Badger that had sparked my imagination:

“Tracking” he writes, “calls forth and enables all our senses, and comes closest to an experiential event that resonates fully with what it means to be human. It is a mirroring of full participation and involvement with the world.”

So on this day, I am off looking for tracks.

 * * *

 It’s been nearly a year since the strange presence of a new invisible virus began spreading around the globe. The most primitive of life forms, it rides in air that people breathe in and out. So far, it has killed 1.6 million of us. We don’t touch each other now. We don’t gather together.

And the civic landscape in the United States has inflamed like an old wound that will no longer stay scabbed over. A year of fear and fighting the other side has made us so weary.

We sit in alone front of our personal screens to gather our news; the bits and pieces of stories of what’s happening out there and what it means, each of us shaping a story of the reality that lies beyond our senses and our experience.

What is true?

The question itself becomes suspect.

* * * 

It’s a good time to take my body to walk out beyond screens and news, into the wild where things proceed according to their own intrinsic laws and principles, and to simply notice what I notice.

With traffic of the canyon road still in earshot, I come upon a line of small, sweet tracks just off to my right along the new trail. They are easy to miss, but because I am looking for them, they appear.

The little tracks look like mouse or some other pawed, light-bodied creature. They appear suddenly, out of a gash in the snow, and end at the trail I stand on. What made that deep gash? Why do these delicate prints start there? I don’t have the tracking acumen to piece together a reasonable story.

 * * *

Tracks are marks that life makes. I’m most able to detect them at ground level, where something has moved over earth. They are mostly animal, sometimes human.

In desert sand, I have seen tracks of long grass . . . sweeping circular strokes of tips whipping in wind.

From the ground, I build a story of what happened here, recently in this place — a story of some animal, based on the size and shape of the track, its depth and pattern. Trained trackers have eyes to see deeply into the story, and to imagine stories built on subtle but tangible evidence; great stories — of walking, eating, chasing, running, dying — where others see nothing.

Five steps beyond, I see entirely different tracks. Two human handprints and a four-fingered scoop. The hands look like a woman’s, with slender fingers. They were made cleanly, with an intent to leave a clear mark. And maybe she scooped up a small handful of snow . . . to taste? Or to throw at her hiking companion?

Pondering over these tracks, these hand marks, I feel an intimacy. Some being left them, and I received them by stopping and imagining the world that they pointed to.

The marks would be gone forever soon, perhaps in a day or two. Perhaps I would be the only other in the world to see them.

 Further up the mountain, at the point where I usually abandoned the designated trail to get to a favorite spot, I found another track: a drawing . . . some kind symbol. I could make no clear meaning of it, but found it beautiful. Who had drawn this symbol in the snow, and what did it mean to them?

 * * *

We are meaning-making creatures, in every situation. We make meaning consciously or unconsciously. We live by story, both in our daily lives of physical living, and in our hidden, mythic internal lives. The bits and pieces that make up our stories are tracks — traces, marks and impressions left by the movement (ancient and recent, physical and emotional) of others and of ourselves.

To make sense of our highly complex world today, it’s challenging to do better than track tracks of tracks where, as in the old game of ‘telephone’, the original message gets changed every time it is heard and passed to the next person.

A proficient tracker is one who has deeper experience and knowledge of what she is tracking, so that the judgments made are more likely to be true, to be real, to be in accordance with the true nature of what is being tracked. Importantly, a proficient tracker is in harmony with what he is tracking. He must put himself in the shoes (or hoofs or paws) of that which he tracks. He must be intimate with it.

Please make note: the world of meaning that is made from following tracks by ‘telephone’ is a very different reality than the intimate meaning-making of tracking in the wild.

 * * *

 After some time of tromping through snow, leaving my own trail of wandering, I arrived at a favorite spot. A large line of tracks of some larger, hoofed animal wove through this flat spot amongst large aspen and fir.

Deer? Moose?

Let’s see! I became Moose, hands pointing down like front legs, back legs picking up and dragging some, to step right exactly into the hole made by front legs. I felt large and gangly, ambling peacefully along, following these tracks.

I’ve never known that moose place back legs exactly in the spot where front legs had been when walking through snow.

This favorite spot was not mine alone. In milder seasons, campfires are built in the middle, and logs placed around to sit upon which now made a square, mostly covered in snow. I wished to make a circle that contained this square, and so I walked ‘round and ‘round and ‘round — three times around the hidden fire to make a strong circle around this special place.

 * * *

Returning down the trail in late afternoon, I felt renewed by my day of track hunting, of play and of intimacy. There was a greater coherency in my being; an alignment born from living in my own firsthand experience and communing with something vast, hidden in plain sight. I walked down the trail held in a Story of Belonging that extended backward and forward, outward and inward.

And now, I am telling my story to you. It will change in the telling, but because it is a wild story, the mythic quality, the timeless truth of it will not be lost. Perhaps it will inspire you to abandon ‘the news’ as the primary tracks of your meaning-making and go out to a wild place and listen for yourself to what is true.

• • •

Announcing The Four Directions of Connection — join our international cohort for a year of medicine walks and to track a new story in 2021.