Once in the far north of Kruger national park's pafuri area I found a clear pool of spring water rising out the earth.
The pool was surrounded by three huge ebony trees and a giant eagle owl flew out from under the deeply shaded branches as I approached. The presence of the owl adding some intangible sense of spirit to the place.
The water was crystal clear and bubbling happily out the earth. As I knelt to put my lips to the water I felt like I was being let into some great secret.
My body took on the shape of an animal drinking lips to the water……and an archetypal connection millions of years old ran like a current through me. I like the wild animals of that wild place I was drinking from the secret source.

I think to know wild water in these times is the kind of thing we have forgotten to even know we want. The way it runs into you full of the codes of the minerals and plants of that place……wild water is full of information that attunes your body with its energy.
Unbottled, untreated…….having never known a pipe or a cistern wild water is full of spirit.

I'm going to talk in a very shamanic way about how to get to know a river.
I'm going to talk from inside the mythological way to share the way I make meaning of the world around me.

I might say it like this
Once upon a time a man lived in a tree by a river. Far off to the west he could see the high mountains in which the river rose.
The man longed to know the spirit of the river for it gave so much life on its journey.
He knew that he must go to those mountains to know from where the water of that river was born.
Only then could he truly know the river.

This was running through my head as the pickup swung through the foothills and climbed the escarpment. As the crow flies the mountains were only 90 km from where I had lived in the tree but by car it was a circuitous 180 km winding drive that took you from 300 meters lowlands up to about 1600 m on the edge of south africa's high plateau.
In historical times there had been a natural flow of native people who lived away from malaria on the highlands and descended the escarpment via hundreds of foot paths to hunt in the lowlands when the winter came.

My destination was my friend's bungalow, a beautiful mountain cabin with no lights and streams full of trout that flowed past it .The landscape around the house is a rugged kind of african Scottish highlands. High ridged terrain with deep vegetative gorges. Unusual birds, eland and mountain reedbuck….and a silence in which a leopard that was never seen slipped past.

That first night in the bungalow the man did not sleep. He was between this world and the next.
All night he tossed and turned in the darkness and dreamed that the mountains had a message for him.

Eventually I rose well before dawn, drank a cup of coffee and set off with my friend through the freezing dark for the highest peak.
Mount Anderson is the watershed…..from which all the rivers that run east to the kruger national park flow
Through a trailess darkness we walked for the summit…..the stars giving way to a crisp dawn.
We were fit and walked fast… cold air burning our lungs. Learning the mountain in some intrinsic way you can only achieve by being on it

The summit at dawn was icy with a whipping wind and a thick fog so that one could not see how the land fell to the east calling to the water.
But Up there on the peak I left an imprint of my body ……so I could always suddenly be back there.
So I could always send a greeting upstream to the mountain from my home in the lowlands.
What I could now say is that I had been to where the rivers rise.
The source…….but not the source of the source…….water is too free for that and one can never really say where water begins or ends. If you know water somewhere you know water everywhere.

The man came down from that communion with the high peak with stiff legs found a cold mountain pool to swim in.
The water was freezing with aliveness and he drank and drank. Saturating himself. Baptizing his body with that kind of purity.

I tell you these things in these ways as a remedy. I don’t mean to be flowery or poetic but in my time with native people I started to think of the relationship with all things as an exchange of an unseen aliveness. A connected story….like the story of all water… in which you weave yourself into the web of other currents of life. A river, a mountain, a friend.
You can interact with the experience of living on so many levels and for me there is always a story within the story. The way of meaning making is the way we make the story of our life.

I could tell you that on the night of the day we submitted we drove up a steep hill with a bag full of beers to watch the sunset.
The light cut the cold mountain air in clear blazing holy gold.
I looked to the peak of the mountain now as a place I knew and that knew me. The place where the river begins. A source of life and personal relationship.
The remedy for this strange time to remember the story of the great relationship. We have to be soft enough and wild enough to tell it.
To remember how to be friends with the earth in personal ways again.
Personal. personal relationships with rivers and mountains and trees. Till it's normal again. To be married to a volcano.
And related to a bear.
And for a leopard to come to you to remind you that there is magic.

Leaving that hillside at dusk the man saw a flash of eyes in the headlights.
Then as if materializing slowly into form in the half light the shape of a leopard.
A huge male with a thick neck sunk low to the ground and stepped off the road but did not run. For a time they all watched each other.
The man knew this was the keeper of the catchment. The guardian of the river
This is the most secretive of cats.
And forever on when he looked west from his home beside the river…….he would know the source, the mountain, that cold pool and think of the silence in which up in those mountains a leopard moved.

4-0 out.

Boyd Varty Sacred Sites
https://boydvarty.com/sacred-sites/

Connect with Boyd Varty:
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Find out more about Londolozi
Website | https://www.londolozi.com/en/
Impact | https://londolozi.africa
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Connect with Boyd Varty:
Website | https://boydvarty.com/
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/boyd_varty/
Twitter | https://twitter.com/BoydVarty

Find out more about Londolozi
Website | https://www.londolozi.com/en/
Impact | https://londolozi.africa
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/londolozi/
Twitter | https://twitter.com/londolozi
Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/londolozigamereserve/

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.
I come across the land manager who is following a male leopard in his vehicle. I see his vehicle through the bushes and crouch down in the long grass and watch them go by me no more than 20 meters away. They do not notice me and when they are gone I continue on the tracks of the lions.

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.

Inside that mind all the dimension of person gives way to something terribly binary. Good bad, failing winning or losing.

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:
Website | https://boydvarty.com/
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/boyd_varty/
Twitter | https://twitter.com/BoydVarty

Find out more about Londolozi
Website | https://www.londolozi.com/en/
Impact | https://londolozi.africa
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/londolozi/
Twitter | https://twitter.com/londolozi
Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/londolozigamereserve/

Touch wood my camp has not yet been ransacked by baboons. Everyday I bathe in this gratitude and I would like you all to put this all on your gratitude at the top.

After washing a pot in the river I came face to face with a teenage elephant.
Communication has been well established. An amazing cast of characters lives out here.]

Harmony is when, by being yourself, you form part of the greater whole. A Shaman once told me that what we are trying to do as we live is balance our harmony with the intelligence of life. We stop trying to live well and we are lived. Our path and purpose comes through us by being who we most naturally are. And to look at any of the animals it just takes you there. I am in this tree to find my harmony.

Inner work has two movements, the first is a clearing out and becoming aware of all the things that are not really you. Patterns that come from trauma, social conditioning, how you needed to be to be liked, to belong, your ideas about what made you valuable. Ideas from your culture. What you discover is a lot of who you thought you are is just conditioned response.

So if I aint that then what…who am I? There are no signposts here.
You have to let your essence express itself, become a tracker, find your medicine way. But this is a deep challenge.

Carl Jung has this idea that the unconscious will play out in your life until it’s made conscious. That’s why certain patterns repeat over and over in people lives until they gain awareness around what’s driving it.

It seems to me that you choose to do inner work or life will choose for you. If life chooses for you it will be much harder.

My work today is on the tracks of a leopard which cut across a sandy patch of ground.

I’m alone at sunset. Into the Wild Journal Entry: Happiness only real when shared. I don’t know if I believe it but I understand the sentiment now. On his path the leopard suddenly calls. I’m asking myself what is my work? What can I learn from Londolozi and the leopards. Certainly my work is to let myself be seen, completely, maybe not by everyone but by someone. That is a true challenge.

Connect with Boyd Varty:
Website | https://boydvarty.com/
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/boyd_varty/
Twitter | https://twitter.com/BoydVarty

Find out more about Londolozi
Website | https://www.londolozi.com/en/
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/londolozi/
Twitter | https://twitter.com/londolozi
Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/londolozigamereserve/