Tracking the Dunes16thSeptember
1-Weekend a Month Wildlife Tracking Immersion September-June The most in-depth and complete wildlife tracking course available. You don't simply learn to track bears, you learn to follow that animal as an individual. It's own habits, ways of living and personal story. You learn more than tracking from them. You learn ecology and a very practical awareness. One honed on the edge of survival.Taught by one of the best trackers we know, David Jacobson. Learn more
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The Blog...
Frank Herbert wrote his famous sci-fi novel Dune after researching an article about the ecological wonder of the Oregon Dunes. The piece was never published, yet the book it inspired was a hit.
While the 80's movie version did have Patrick Stewart (aka Captain Jean-Luc Picard) as Gurney Halleck, it never came close to the novel in scale and intelligence. This may only be the rantings of a sci-fi fanboy, yet I'll still attest to the many layers of awareness to be gleaned from Dune's text.
Many concepts in Dune just seemed to click with me and my buddy David Jacobson as we explored the world of (wildlife) Tracking in our formative years at The Evergreen State College. Ironically this was the same town of Olympia, Washington where Frank Herbert rooted himself to write his epic opus. Dune was populated by characters that practiced nerve-muscle control, minutiae awareness and even poignant tribes of hunter-gatherers to whom every moment was about survival in concert with a seemingly barren yet diverse landscape.
Still, the guild of characters that seemed to most resonant with our own meditative practice of tracking was a group of strategists called Mentats. Mentats were people who seemed to flow through information and systems awareness like they were sailing the ocean and its winds. The author was a layman expressing concepts we believed were unique to us wilderness skills nerds. In tracking, you don't "think" through things, nor do you rely on a false sense of ESP or intuition. Instead you soak up the world around you as layered details. Your memory and thoughts become a sense, absorbing every bit of possible data.
Though this description may sound like some human calculator, I assure you the experience is wholly organic and even ecstatic. Your perceptions and awareness add to an ever refining map of the world around you. Once you see, no feel the synthesis of the interlocking and moving relationships, the invisible parts take on a shadow-like form, eventually revealing themselves in even more detail. The gaps in the map naturally fill in. Then, in another seemingly thoughtless moment, vital wisdom reveals itself congruent to the evolving questions you have about the world around you. The book calls this ah-ha moment "prime projection". I still jokingly use the term when I teach tracking.
It's important to understand that this way of "surfing your world map" may have results that seem magically guided but they are definitively rooted in real boots-on-the-ground experience. Unfortunately this aspect of nature awareness is often confused with whatever is fashionable in dogma or spiritual questing; philosophical paint by numbers that require little effort and care. It's like the scene in fight club when the leader of a support group has people meditating in some convention hall for their spirit animal and all Edward Norton ends up with is a penguin. By letting gurus or books interpret our connection to what's wild we often get irrelevant, ungrounded results. Instead tracking is an art, craft and relationship of articulate intimacy with the world.
We find connection by actually feeling the sinuous curve of a cougar track, appreciating the shear weight of an bear, watching a squirrel build a winter nest, lazily sitting in the ferns watching deer feed and even becoming entranced by the office worker on a break who grinds their cigarette into the sidewalk. The goal is to see everything as both an individual and a player in a greater moving puzzle.
Synthesis with nature and the world comes from actually being out in it. A Tracker doesn't arrive at relationships through leaps in judgment, because a book told her what wolf medicine means or by formulaic technique (now sweeping the tracking world). A true tracker actually lets discernment find her as she casts herself out across the ocean of life. It was the backwoods of Olympia following red fox where David and I refined this quality, yet reading Dune taught me that this awareness is innately human.
The next blog will be about what wisdom we gained while eating pizza and watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer in lieu of working on our independent study projects during our last year at Evergreen.
