A veteran tracker and teacher, Jim Sullivan has introduced me and hundreds of others to a new way of seeing and being in the natural world. This is an excerpt from his new book on animal tracking and bird language as spiritual practice: Dirt Time: Finding Meaning in Nature.
by Jim Sullivan
The first thing most new trackers hear is “slow down.” Trackers will occasionally drive 50 miles to a good tracking spot and spend an intense half-day of tracking—and at the end of the session realize they have covered maybe 300 yards.
This can feel hilariously funny in the moment. But it is a measure of how complex the surface of the earth is when you actually engage it. Going slowly becomes an attractive option instead of a moral failing.
Experienced trackers can track fast, especially when trailing, but it takes a lot of time “on the dirt” to reach that proficiency. You learn to track first by slowing down and training your eyes to scan for significant patterns. Eventually, you know what to look for. For example, the track of a cat displays a “C,” while a canine track displays an “X.”
When you follow tracking procedures, learning takes place automatically, mostly in your unconscious. You can slow down and relax, confident that the classic tracking forms are trustworthy and that your knowledge will consolidate naturally in due time.
The ancient trackers were not starving and frantically searching for food. They were alpha predators. They moved at their own pace, like cats or wolves. They didn’t have refrigerators; when hungry they went out and found what they needed just like any other animal. Because they were so good at it, they didn’t need to rush.
One of the first tracking jokes is: tracking wrecks you for hiking. It is not quite true, but dirt time is not fitness training. It’s an opportunity to practice moving through the natural world at our own genetic pace like any other animal.
As we increasingly realize how far back this particular practice goes, we can begin to understand why tracking is so easy, so much fun and so healthy. We were born to track; it’s hardwired into our brain. We just have to re-load the software.
Seeing takes time. Listening takes time. Thinking takes time. Beauty takes time. Making meaning takes time. Tracking is not a contest or a race. You have to move slowly enough for your brain to sort the appropriate meaning out of what you are encountering. And you will find that you encounter a much bigger world when you slow down. This is a first step toward expanding that world.
Animals provide models for how we move in the natural world. We watch the deer, the bobcat and the fox not only when they are running away from us, but in baseline, when they are hunting, feeding, playing, resting or in transit between areas.
How you move is something you determine for yourself, moment by moment. Sometimes you walk carefully like a deer, pausing frequently, looking around. At other times you burn through the landscape like a coursing coyote. Sometimes you just sit.
There is no rule. But in general, breaking away from modern life urgencies to go tracking involves slowing down, internally and externally.
