In one line: This is one of the 10 best books I’ve ever read; Boyd does a masterful job of weaving some of the richest bites of wisdom you’ll find in literature with incredibly skillful and fun story telling.
Rating: 10/10
Prologue:
- Weve lost our connection to nature. To aliveness, to passion, to freedom and joy. Modern men & women have fallen into the numbing lure of screens and social networks and poison food and jobs that are meaningless. We have forgotten that life holds a unique story for all of us. A thread made up of faint signs that lead to the manifestation of something unique. What the native people call “your medicine way.” Something that only you can give to the world. Inside you is a wild part of you that knows what your gifts, mission and purpose are. That part of you is wild and elusive, it cannot be captured as it is always evolving.
CHAPTER 1 – THE CALL:
- a master is someone who can always be himself at any time in all circumstances
- Many men feel like they are sleep walking through their lives, falling into social media or the news. A type of disengagement that makes them feel older than they are. Part of being a human, is that you will at some point fall asleep in your own life. It will happen. The journey out of it does not begin with the call, but the desire to hear the call. The desire itself has an energy. Part of waking yourself is made by paying attention. Most of us are looking, but not seeing. Tune in and start listening for the path back to life. The ancients call this essential knowledge.
- Live in an intense curiosity. Go into the unknown. This is the means that life can pull you into a destiny bigger than what you could Imagine. The unknown is a discipline of wildness. And wildness is a relationship with aliveness. Too much uncertainty is chaos. But too little is death.
CHAPTER 2 – Track Awareness
- Examine the wallpaper of life with new eyes every day, dare to ask why
- Walk and listen; we can act like an instrument, tuning ourselves to the information around us; becoming aware of such information and the feelings they evoke, the people who are important to you, the things that bring you to life, the arrival of something meaningful, is its own consciousness. You can easily miss this if you dont know how to see, track awareness; track awareness is teaching yourself how to see what is important to you
- Life is full of so much information, we must train ourselves to see what we’re looking for’ this isn’t as simple as it sounds bc its not rational, we can’t think ourselves to our calling; finding what is uniquely yours requires more than rationality; you have to learn how your body speaks, how you know what you know, follow inner tracks of your feelings, instincts, sensations, the integrity and truth that are deeper than ideas about what you should do; learn to follow a deeper, wiser, wilder place inside yourself; the ability to read the field of life with discernment
- Everything in the natural world knows how to be itself; inside each of us is a natural innate knowledge of why we are here
- Bring our awareness back to the inner trail of the self and learn to see its path, yet most of us have so much of the social conditioning of modern life that the track of the wild self has been lost. We live with our attention directed outward. We focus on the social cues of our culture. We look to others to define our path, value and purpose. We lose ourselves in shoulds. Shoulds are full of traps. Traps led by society and your limited rules for yourself. No wild animal has ever participated in a should. What you know to do is deeper than that. No one can tell you what your track will be or how to know what calls and brings you to life, thats your work to do. But ask yourself, “how do you know when you love something? how do you feel when youre fully expressing yourself?” Learn that feeling and then start looking, not for the thing, but the feeling. Its there if you can tune yourself to it.
CHAPTER 3 – The Tracks of the Father:
- The archetype of the father guides you to be your best
- Dont try to be someone. Find the thing that is so engaging it makes you forget yourself
- “You don’t know how to do something, work it out”, from our fathers when we are kids; our fathers often over estimate our capabilities but the scorn of this makes us feel like we should know even if we have never been taught; this leads to a terrible uncertainty and us believing we are inadequate as kids and not able to trust ourselves; our ability never seems to match our fathers expectations, this is common between a father and son, making for an innate tension; this is why in Native tribes the mentor of young men was never the father but a close male relative
- Trauma can travel, but so can healing
- Mentorship in men is often a result of physical proximity, learned through osmosis, teaching each other by being together and facing the unknown together, learning the more primal part of their own psyche and body
- The track of the father is to find him within you. To find what he gave you and what he didnt give you. You must use both sides. The medicine of the transformation is innately built into this relationship.
CHAPTER 4 – The First Track:
- “If you can see your whole lifes path laid out, then its not your lifes path.” – Joseph Campbell
- Learn to be in the process of transformation, not trying to be transformed. You cant skip the creating to the creation
- The instrument of the body is wild, and natural and full of instinctual wisdom; we must think but also feel; we have become so disconnected from our bodies, obsessed with thinking, modern culture has forgotten the innate knowledge of the body, how its signals are a guide, how it knows what it needs to be healthy, how it can tell you if something is right or not for you by the way it feels. We must learn to read the subtle tracks of the body. The way it relaxes and opens when something feels right. The contraction and tightness when we are not where we are meant to be.
- Sometimes the body has to get sick before we will listen to it. For men, feelings have long been outlawed. They’ve been disconnected from our instincts. Bringing attention back to the landscape of the body allows you to find the trail of the wild self.
- Think about all the people we have met who want a full vision for a new life and then to move from where they were straight into it. Think about all the people who say, that when they find exactly what they want to do they would leave the soul-destroying thing they were currently involved in. OBsessed with perfection and doing it right, we tend to want to go straight to the end result. We dont realize the significance of the path of first tracks and how to be invested in a discovery rather than an outcome.
- “I need to be alone for a while. I need some time completely alone. But then what. Dont jump to then want.” Dont jump beyond the first track. If you get some of what you need, you might get a second first track. The journey to transformation is a series of discovering first tracks over and over
- Our quality of consciousness will change as we spend more time in the wilderness. When we see someone who doesnt have the same social programming as most of us, it forces us to see that a huge part of what you think of “of this is how I am”, or “this is what you do”, is not you at all, but patterns of behavior and thinking you have adopted from the cultural story. You have been told what to be and want. This realization is the beginning of a much deeper question about what we actually want. We are our outlook. That outlook is not universal. It was given to you.
- We are a species that belongs within story. We are meaning-making animals.
CHAPTER 5 – Restoration:
- DECISIONS – its hard to know when the lesson is to persist or the lesson is to let go; we experience angst and paralysis by too many options; the only choice is the one we make and that will set something in motion; set your intention, make your choice, and let go; the lesson is more about discovery than being right; the only mistake is doing nothing
- I dont know where Im going but I know exactly how to get there; the wild self knows exactly what youre meant to do
- “When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.” – Lao Tzu (pointing to the state of completeness when we are fully present in life, there is no trying)
- Do our tasks in life feed us energy or extract it?
CHAPTER 6 – Losing the Track:
- Your beliefs about life are not reality
- Question your beliefs; you can only go as far as your belief system allows you to in creating life
- The restoration of the planet will come with a profound shift in human consciousness and that starts with healing ourselves first
- Healing perpetuates itself
- Trauma prevents us from connecting to what we most need
- “The Path of Notya” – going down a path and not finding the track, is part of finding the track—no action is considered a waste—the key is to keep moving; think of all the people who say, “when I know exactly what the next thing is, I’ll make a move”; when we lose our track, we want to be certain of the right path forward before we move; we need to try things, enter a process of discovery that’s fluid, a process of elimination, inquiry, confirmation, and feedback—a ritual of focused attention;
CHAPTER 7 – Babaleur in the Sky:
- “Darashan” – student absorbs the teachers spiritual energy and embodies in themselves; a way of being, thinking, and moving; can only happen with time and presence
- The deepest lessons must be lived
- Men & women search for intimacy but they need is wildness; a person whos in touch w the wild self answers questions alive and presence
- We cant afford to lose the old ways; in them live clues to a forgotten harmony and wholeness, they help us remember how to be human
- Bataleur eagle named for french word for acrobat because it appears to balance on a rope as it flies
- There is no fat in nature, everything exists as a natural entropy
- War Tactic – Shockazoolu – horns of the bull – attack full on from one direction while having another battalion come from the othersides after the battle has begun, smashing them with the horns of the bull from all directions
CHAPTER 8 – Remains of the Feast:
- One of the great dangers of life is to live without danger; neuroses are a substitute for real suffering; fearfulness is the most common state in a life that asks for no real courage
- Finding the trail is often a process of non-linear problem solving, the story never goes the way you want it to
- Deep inside, we all just want to belong, but modern society isolates us more than ever
- Live it into reality
- “The miracle is not walking on water. The miracle is walking on the Earth. The miracle is all around us as the awareness of life itself.” – Thich Nhat Hahn
- “People are not looking for the meaning of life. They are looking for the feeling of being alive.” – Joseph Campbell
CHAPTER 9 – Entering the Zone:
- Befriend your neuroses, self doubt and welcome them in, it teaches us humility
- There is nothing more healing than finding your gifts and sharing them You who have longed for and felt called to make a different world You who have suffered the illnesses of society You who have risen to the top and found it empty You with a desire to serve You who have felt called to nature and to the creatures of the Earth You are the tracker
CHAPTER 10 – The Hippo Tunnels:
- We are society that lives in denial of death, and so we are a society that denies life.
EPILOGUE:
- I dont know where I’m going but I know exactly how to get there. This is the elegant intelligence of life
- Reimagine our own lives into more meaningful expressions
- When we follow the inner tracks life has made for us, we never know where they might lead
- Prepare for the call; know the call when it comes by the fact that not doing it would feel profoundly wrong, open yourself to the unknown, develop your track awareness; learn to see whats deeply important to you; use the feelings in your body as a guide
- Let fear bring you to life
Philoso-Feed 