Episode 5.mp4


Episode five, Daunted. In the morning, we drive north to the Hoanib River. Namibia is characterized by hours in the car. At the old German fort in Sesfontein, we stop to buy some local meat from a store called Manchester United Store that claims to be both a bar and a financial advisory. I don't know why I didn't think of that. I have a dark fantasy about filming Erewhon shoppers' faces as they walk into this type of grocery store. There is a dusty pool table and a single giant speaker hanging on the wall with music blaring. I feel like the average Westerner is profoundly fragile. And I wonder what we're going to do to help the anxious generation who grew up in a virtual world, in virtual relationships, having a virtual life. How will we help them re-embody in this realm where dogs bite and sometimes you need to run for your life. There is a horrible decline in general human capability for being in the world and I feel a new track in myself begin to open as I feel called to address this challenge for young people. The meat we buy is hunks of anything from goat to donkey.


And now that I'm here, I like the state of all of it.


I like the imperfection, the dust, and the general mission that is a camping trip. When I think about it, being a parent is like being on a permanent camping trip. There's always a tent to pitch or a pot to wash. Then once you've pitched it, it needs to come down. All campers need to pull their weight to avoid slacker vibe. Most of parenting, like camping, is rummaging in a bag for something. Most of parenting, like camping, is rummaging in a bag for something. Here's what I realized buying donkey meat in Sesfontein. It's that I never get excited about camping. It always seems in my mind like such a mission.


But I always love camping when I'm doing it.


I find myself present and engaged, pulling my weight. I like the constant attention it asks for.


And I realize I like being a parent. It's relieving to just do what you have to do.


As it turns out, I really like who I am when I show up. All of this has been a profound maturing for me. I see now how confused I was about what freedom I thought freedom was total autonomy, but for me, real freedom has been total commitment. Discovering the difference between what I think I want and what I actually want in life is hard and important. Chloe and Felt are my permanent camping trip. What follows on the trip is a day immersed in the scope of the desert. We fly down the Hoanib River, seeing only a single, scraggly springbok. The riverbed is the smoothest road in the area connecting the hinterland with the Skeleton Coast, where we see very, very few people. We have lunch under a huge tree in the riverbed and contemplate the quest for lion tracks.


In truth, since arriving, we have seen one set of lion tracks at an old reservoir we swam at, but those tracks many, many days old.


The terrain feels so inhospitable, so vast.


The only hope is tracks in the sand of a riverbed, and there are none.


And as we turn away from the river, I feel the energetic expedition tide turn against us. For hours we drive through a land of redstone.


Man, I feel like I could be on Mars.


Well, which year plants, 800 1,000 years old, lie like carcasses on the earth, paying tribute to desert time. On more than one occasion we crest our eyes and James and I laugh out loud at the intense bleakness and scopeness of the land. Bad, he says to me, this is brutal stony ground. Substrate to a tracker is like ocean conditions to a surfer. Hours are spent discussing the general substrate, like hours are spent discussing waves and waves and currents and winds.


Rocks are the hardest for a tracker.


And with the scope of the rock, the lions slip from our grip.


An ostrich rises up off the ground and sprints across the plains.


We drive on, dust floating inside the cab of the 4x4 like asteroids in space. Dust floating inside the cab like asteroids in space. A spaciousness that is frankly scary. And yet I am happy. In the afternoon we jettison the vehicle and set off down into a ravine following a game path.


 The trail has been walked by a rhino down into a secret canyon where a stream springs unexpectedly from the earth. I find the skull of a jackal and the tooth of a rhino.


The ground around the water is etched with tracks, mostly zebra have been to the secret desert spring.


But not a lion track in sight.


And more than that, even if we did get tracks here at the water's edge, we would soon lose the lion into the rocks. Shucks, I think to myself.


We need Pocky Bernardi to follow a lion here.


In 2016, a young lion escaped from the Karoo National Park in central South Africa when a fence was washed away It soon ate some sheep and then high-tailed it into the mountains. When helicopter teams and dogs could not find the lion, local master tracker Poki Bonardi was called in.


Bonardi had grown up in the Karoo Desert and showed his unique desert tracking skills by trailing the lion for three days and roughly 40 kilometers through grassy, rocky, mountainous terrain.


It was an astounding piece of tracking, mostly predicting the lion's movement occasionally getting a single track of confirmation.


He was seeing a trail no one else could see. He had a database of search images as well as understanding of line movement that allowed him to methodically see a path where others saw nothing. This might remain, to me, the most important aspect of tracking. The idea that there is a path if you develop the right eyes to see it, the right ways to sense it, and the right heart to feel it pulling you. Here we would need x-ray eyes to follow a lion.


There is a feeling suddenly of having the odds stacked against us.


So much has happened already on this trip.


Staying present to what is, when what is is that there are no tracks, is a big challenge


We wild camp against a small embankment as the wind whistles and the desert turns black.


We cook our donkey or goat or whatever gristle we bought at the Manchester shop on the fire and we're alone for miles in every direction and that alone is a spirit gift, not a distant light, not a sound, just a cold mist bank entering the desert from the far off ocean.


I like this. I'm happy in this adventure, even as the tide turns against us.


In my tent before I fall asleep, I reflect on how much my life has changed in a year.


And periodically in life, If you're really tracking, you should surprise yourself. With the practice of cultivating awareness, changes in identity need not come as forceful pushes, but more as seasonal shifts.


If my spirituality has led me anywhere nowadays, it is to the Tao, my life aligned with the I think of my guru in India who once told me, do you know why my master chose me to leave the Asanga before he passed? He asked.


I will tell you. It was because as a practitioner, I was the least amongst us.


So if I can do it, you can do it.


I am that person too.


My early life was characterized by a terrible anxiety and depression.


I struggled with a profoundly avoidant pattern in relationships.


But here I am, in some flow of grace.


D