Episode 7, The Snow Leopard. In Peter Matheson's beautiful book, The Snow Leopard, he is on a journey to the high Himalaya to discover the world's most secretive cat. He never finds the snow leopard, but the journey and days spent in the high clear mountains help facilitate his entrance into a profound mind state of pure zen. Towards the end of his trip, he writes, have you found the snow leopard? No Isn't that wonderful? How beautiful that some things are to remain a mystery. We leave our cold bungalows at dawn to make our way to the waterfall ravine in pursuit of a lion's trail. Before we alight from the vehicle, we catch sight of a brown hyena, this animal known as De Wolf in these parts, with its long, scraggly fur coat, gives off the vibes of a burning man raver making his way back to camp at dawn. Due to a navigation issue, we find ourselves exploring the wrong ravine. The tracks of jackals and hyena are fresh on the ground, but no sound of lion. For two and a half hours, we make our way down the ravine towards the coast, spread out at a great distance so we might cover the most ground. We can barely see each other. The desert feels silently haunting. In the vastness and the intense stillness, I realize that the desert has no meaning. The desert is meaning. These nights here with my my friends under the stars are a gift in and of themselves. And as I long for Li on, I must also face the truth here in this confronting nothingness. And this is the truth. My whole life I have been an addict. Yes, I have been an addict with a silent addiction. To sensation in my nervous system. I need something to happen, rather than face the spacious nothingness that feels like death. And this fear of stillness and space has set me on paths, always seeking, seeking adventure, seeking drama, seeking sex, seeking money, seeking cake, anything, for something to be happening. The endless wheel of need and consumption. So much of man's suffering comes from the inability to sit quietly in the self. And if you look for yourself in doing, you will only ever create from the level of ego. But here in the desert, I see that so much of me is driven by a fear of being. Because stillness to the scattered mind mistakenly feels like nothingness, like dying. And there's no hiding from it here. A silent step and then another. Nothing moves. The desert is an abyss and there are no lion tracks. But in this undistracted truth of the spacious desert, I begin to enter into the fullness of the moment. In the vast outer silence there is a path to inner silence. Wilderness is a door inward. And as I walk I find my heart and I am overcome by a profound gratitude for small things. The truth that somewhere here a lion is living its life. I am touched by the notion that there is water in my water bottle and I see glimpses of my adventurers bobbing on the ridgeline of the ravine. And the knowing that comes with it, with this gratitude, is colossal. We are here. We are here. We, all of us, all sentient life, we get to be here. And the desert stillness mirrors the spacious stillness of the moment. It is not empty. It pulses with fullness. The gifts of life so close to us in moments that they are almost impossible to see. How does the next breath come? And this thing I call my life is not my life at all. Everything is given. The paradox of deeply accepting the space of the self is that we are here to create, not because we need happen but out of pure joy and yet only when we can sit fully in the self can our actions arise not out of addiction or need but out of a profound inner alignment our being wanting to express itself not need not fear not addiction we are single points of consciousness staring at us. We walk the ravine and eventually as friends are reunited on the beach where a whale bone is washed up. And here we turn, still daunted, and make our way back towards our vehicle which by some desert illusion seems closer but never actually gets closer. And suddenly we find ourselves on the ridgeline of the correct ravine and then there in the canyon sand are lion tracks, beautiful pug marks after pug mark, living proof that our whole trip has not been in vain. A lion has been here. The tracks are beautiful in the soft sand and in places seem so fresh as if the lion just passed. We follow on its trail down to the waterfall, moving where the lion moved, knowing it was here, feeling the animal in our own bodies as we track And the tracks then turn away from the coast and walk back into the empty desert. We follow until they crest the sand dune and are suddenly gone, polished clean by the wind, etch-a-sketched, back to nothing. The trail ends here, and without saying a word, we all know the expedition is over. Did you find the lion? No Isn't that wonderful?