What is the role of tracking within Earth
Skills, and what does it accomplish at Laughing Coyote? For our ancestors,
tracking was an essential part of life. The ability to find animals to provide
food was a central skill that was developed around the world. Today, few of us
hunt for food, and with the weapons and technology available to us, the few
that continue to hunt require very rudimentary tracking skills to be effective.
However, when this skill is developed, the world begins to
unfold into a complex, beating web of life that swirls around us. The fields,
forests, streams and mountains begin to reveal the inner lives of the secretive
animals that live around us. Mysteries appear, and our inner detective revels
in the opportunity to deduce clues from the landscape. After a full day of
tracking, animals and their trails begin to populate our dreamscapes, showing
us that we have opened every pore of our being to nature.
Tracking animals has frequently been likened to reading,
that individual tracks make up letters and stories across the landscape. While
this is somewhat true theoretically, no book continually changes the size and
shape of its letters, adjusts based on weather conditions, slope, substrate and
age. The letters rarely walk on top of each other, or disappear over hard
sections of ground. In tracking, nothing is every repeated. Every track and
trail is unique, yet together, over hours and days and years a story is fleshed
out, and the earth begins to sing with stories.
Our world is increasingly monochromatic and flat. Children
are raised with information appearing on screens, and our remarkable ability to
gather mountains of information and subtle details is lost. Rather than a
critique of our efficiently technological world, tracking gives us a
counterpoint, a balance. After a mere matter of months, students look down in a
field and say, “Check out this vole tunnel” or “Look at this rabbit latrine” or
“Is that a woodrat nest?” On the fly, they differentiate between rabbit and
squirrel tracks, or fox and coyote scat.
This is wildlife tracking as a tool of consciousness.
Training our minds, eyes and imaginations to soak in stories, to broaden our
perspectives and capacities for innovation and thought, to challenge our
preconceived ideas of the world and bring us face to face with reality. And to
acknowledge mystery and the unknown. Sometimes, despite all of our hard work,
all of our experience, we cannot untangle the marks on the ground in front of us,
and we learn to move on, to trust that the answers will appear. And we also
find, when we are lost, angry or confused, in an environment we feel alien to,
that the nest of a squirrel, or the hopping tracks of juncos bring us back in
touch to the healing power of nature.
Developing the skills of the trackers brings us in touch
with a blueprint, a mode of interacting with the world that was practiced by
our ancestors since the dawn of time. This practice encourages the facilities
needed for science, mathematics, storytelling and art. Finding the space where
the inner and outer landscapes meet, and when mere marks in the ground begin to
glow with meaning is what this is all about.
~Neal
