The Tao of Tracking

A dimly-lit rainforest.... The voices of a dozen birds cascading to the forest floor where the tiny landscape of a coyote track offers its subtle clues... telling a story of the maker's passing as she ran her nightly hunt, through cricketsong, along this hidden trail. Raindrops ever-so-slowly wearing the peaks and ridges of the muddy impression back into the earth. A dance between land and animal. A record of which is, for a time, held in the soil - a story, revealing the "pulse" of the woods. 

An animal's trail is a narrative holding the animal's energy in the very flesh of the Earth. A string of compressions imprinted upon every surface like the letters and words on the pages of an open book. 
The world's first science - tracking is an artform unto itself, a philosophy that encompasses a vast realm of knowledge reaching back to the dawn of time. Early humans needed to understand their surroundings in order to survive its inherent dangers, which included staying fed. From these needs came the ability to read the ground - to ask the Earth questions about the movements of others. Of the movements of animals, both predator and prey.

Modern intellect evolved alongside tracking. Tracking has played a major role in the evolution of our modern model of perception. The art of tracking develops a cohesive bond, a combination of logic and intuition - a restructuring in the human brain, using an advanced pattern recognition based on sensory awareness immersion combined with natural history training. Tracking enables its practitioners to uncover the secrets of Mother Nature - through the eyes and ears of the animals themselves. The tracker becomes the animal that he or she is tracking, reaching with highly-attuned awareness out across the landscape, deep into the animal's soul. 

Tracking is picking up a piece of a puzzle, which is itself a piece of a larger puzzle, and so on..., fitting them together to gain a grand view of the world around us, affording the tracker a new perception vocabulary. The Tracker moves within the tracks, and the tracks move within the Tracker. Tracking opens one's senses to the song of the cosmos.... 

coyote tracks

                                         
                                                       copyright kellan scath 2016