Tracking: An Ancient Way to Navigate Life
In this second episode in the Summer of Support series, I'm sharing what I know about tracking: understanding where you are in your life's journey and navigating according to the signs and instincts that feel most meaningful to you.
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Welcome to A Wild New Work, a podcast about how to compost capitalism and the norms of dominant culture and answer the soulful callings of these times we live in, which includes the call to deepen our relationship with the animate earth. I'm Megan Leatherman, a mother, writer, teacher and guide. I live in the Pacific Northwest and I'm your host today.
Well, hi friend and welcome. Welcome to the Summer of Support. Are you ready to receive? I hope you are. I hope you love this episode and the whole series. This is our first real installment episode 1 49. The last episode was an intro to why I wanted to make this series and the support I'm calling in for myself as well this summer.
So I hope it is a summer of support for all beings, all of us, and the summer of support is really something that has come to fruition. You know, in the summer, the days are long and bright. We can see clearly. We see a lot. What was planted long ago or had been gestating is now fruiting and we can pick it and enjoy it and be nourished by it.
So these are teachings that have gestated in me and grown over a lifetime over the last 10 years. Or at least the last full year, and now they are here and ready to share. But these teachings and what I'll be sharing are relevant all year long. So if you're not listening in the summer season, that's totally okay.
It just means that what I'm sharing. Is work and ideas that have gone through a growing cycle in me, through me, and has been held in a larger web of teachers and guides and the land. So today we're gonna start by talking about tracking. We're gonna talk about how to understand where we are on our own soulful journeys and how do we find our way.
There are a lot of approaches to navigating life that do not work. That take a ton of energy and that cause a lot of suffering that do not feel supportive of our own innate wisdom and navigation skills. So today I wanna share a different perspective, a way to find the ease and the support that is here on your journey as it's unfolding.
So just a couple of announcements before we dive in. One is that if you would like to move through the summer season with a lot of intention and teaching and ideas about the season as a whole, you can get the Living The Seasons Summer Journal that's still up and available at a wild new work.com/shop.
It's at 12. Or, gosh, it ended up being 14 weeks of material that you can move through and it's available printed. I can ship it to you or also as a PDF, and then as part of the summer of support, I'm teaching two classes in July that are open to all. The first one is on Tuesday, July 8th, and it's called Design A Transformation Ritual For Yourself.
We're going to be talking about. Ritual as a skill to develop, to support yourself in transforming, in alignment with the seasons and in alignment with what your soul is asking you to do and how you need to grow. So that's on July 8th, and then on July 29th, we're gonna be talking about the first harvest.
So what have we covered in the summer of support and how can we go a little bit deeper and start making medicine from it to feed us well into the fall and winter? So, um, that's also available to everyone. It's free to Eagle Creek members, but there are also discount codes available if you need. No one will be turned away.
I hope you'll come if that sounds supportive to you. And if you can't make it live, there is a recording sent out afterwards. In the last episode, I also introduced Eagle Creek, which is a new channel for support to flow to me in order to make more of this work and I hope support you better. Thank you to all of you who have heard that invitation and have agreed to help make the creek bed where this work can flow more.
Succinctly and strongly and, uh, be a source of hydration for our thirsty world. I feel really excited to see Eagle Creek grow. I would love to see it grow enough so that I can give this little podcast a refresh, some new music, some new. Just some new support that the podcast needs. So if you have benefited from the podcast or other work that I've done and you have the means and desire to become an Eagle Creek member, you can go to a wild new work.com/eagle-creek.
Of course, I still have my Buy me a coffee page up if you don't have. $45 a month to contribute, but you still wanna pitch in. That's so welcome. And again, you can do that at buy me a coffee.com/megan leatherman. And I also wanna say thank you to Erin, a recent contributor. And with that, why don't we move into our opening invocation.
So wherever you are, you might just look around you and notice what other beings are here sharing this space with you. What might it be like for them today? What is this day for them and what is this day for you? And do you wanna take a deep breath or let out a sigh?
May each of us be blessed and emboldened to do the work we're meant to do on this planet. May our work honor our ancestors known and unknown, and may it be in harmony with all creatures that we share this earth with. I express gratitude for all of the technologies and gifts that have made this possible, and I'm grateful to the molten Cowlitz spans of Chinook and Clackamas tribes among many others who are the original stewards of the land that I'm on.
May this episode be one small stitch in the great reweaving of right relationship that so many indigenous teachers are calling us into, and so it is. So the first step of tracking is knowing where you are and knowing what you know. And what you don't know. So I wanna start this series with some orientation.
The summer of support is a kind of spiritual coming out for me, and it may not seem that different than what I've done in the past, but this series will be the most explicitly spiritual teaching that I will have done on the podcast so far. And by spiritual, I mean related to the soul or of the spirit, and I take that really seriously.
I have been injured myself by spiritual teachers and teachings in the past, and I know there is a lot of harm that has come and is coming from spiritual traditions and teachers, and I really don't want to perpetuate any of that harm. Or falsehood or just any of the yuck that's so rampant in a lot of spiritual communities.
And one of the hangups that I needed to work through before stepping into this series with the integrity I hope I'm bringing, was this feeling that it was irresponsible and even dangerous of me. To teach more publicly if I hadn't been kind of credentialed by a spiritual teacher or lineage. And this is some of just my own personal baggage, but I also am aware that there has been a lot of damage done by people who are just making up spiritual ideas or declaring themselves to be gurus.
There are countless people of European descent who are colonizing indigenous ideas and claiming that they're theirs. So I've really. Tried to tread carefully here, and I've really been wrestling with this, especially the last six months, and I haven't like figured it out or anything, and I'm sure I will make mistakes and I am open to being held accountable if I cause harm or if I say something that feels really yucky to you or that feels like it has that texture of colonization.
But where I've landed for now is that. While I'm not part of a human lineage of spiritual teachings, I'm not coming to you as a teacher of a certain religion or tradition. While that's not the case, I am part of an ancestral and earth-based lineage. I learned directly from my wise and well ancestors and from the earth herself.
And while they don't have a website that I can share with you or a single human mentor that I can name and point to for credibility, they are the sturdiest. Sanest, most enriching and supportive teachers I have ever encountered, and I'm really honored to bring what I've learned from them forward. So in this series, in this summer, I.
I feel that one of my own edges of transformation, and I talk a lot about this in the Summer Journal specifically, that early summer is a period on the land where we're seeing a lot of transformation happen, and it has been happening since the late spring. Flowers becoming fruits, fruits becoming food, the seeds that continue into the earth.
So we're seeing. These beings, these flowers just somewhat magically becoming fruits, and it's really incredible. And the crabs are molting. It's cancer season symbolized by the crab. So on the land, there's this invitation into transformation, and I study this and believe it, and I try to live it as best I can.
And one of the places I'm transforming is embracing this role of a mystic. And what really lands for me here is that a mystic isn't necessarily a part of a spiritual community or heritage or tradition. They can be, but. Nearby star defines a mystic as quote, a person who has a direct experience of the sacred unmediated by conventional religious rituals or intermediaries.
And that feels really, really true to me. And it's kind of like the permission slip I've been waiting for, which is ironic because it's about not needing a permission slip. But by this definition, we are all. Mystics, we all have a chance to have a direct experience of the sacred. We are having that every day.
By virtue of being born, we have had a direct experience of the sacred unmediated by any rituals or intermediaries. So in this series. I am going to do my best with as much integrity as I can muster to bring to you what I know to be true through my direct experience. If it conflicts with your direct experience, I encourage you to be open to what I have to say.
I. But ultimately to stand in what feels most true to you? At this moment, I will not be here declaring that these are single universal truths in all cases. I'm here to share what I've learned, what feels true and works for me, and has resonated with the people that I've been working with and teaching over the last 10 years.
There are many facets to truth, many mysteries that we cannot comprehend. One thing may be true in a certain locale or landscape or situation, and it may not be true in a different situation or landscape. So everything I want to share in this series is meant to fortify you and point you back to your own inherent wisdom and strength.
You are an expression of the earth. Herself and any good spiritual teaching will support you in reconnecting to that fact and to hearing the earth and spirit in the ways that you are designed to hear them directly. That doesn't mean it's all loosey goosey and sweet and warm, and everybody's right and no one's wrong and everything's true all at once.
There's a sharpness to it as well. There has to be discernment and wisdom here, but there I do believe it's true that all people have a direct connection to the sacred and to the wisdom of the earth, and that's something that needs to be recovered and honored and nurtured. So that's my little spiritual orientation.
And I also wanna orient to this idea of support. This word, this idea, what is it? How does it land? The etymology, the roots of the word support come from sub the Latin sub, which it means up from below and re, I don't know if I'm saying that right, but P-O-R-T-A-R-E, which is to carry to, so to carry up from below, to lift up from below to bear the weight of.
So support is to help us hold, to lift us up from below, and you might consider how much you're holding right now. How heavy are your shoulders? Wouldn't it feel good to feel a little bit lighter, not untethered, floating out into outer space, but like less of the load is falling on you alone support.
Being lifted up from below is literally what the Earth is doing. She is bearing your weight and all that you carry. So support is natural. It is part of how life is. It is what the earth does. Whether we're aware of it or call it in or believe that we're deserving of it, and it's not just support from below, it comes in all directions.
The air we breathe in is support. The light we're given from the sun is support the water that comes from the sky. Support all around sustenance what we need in order to keep going, to be lifted and active and awake in our lives. And that support is here no matter what. No matter who we are or how deserving we feel, the sun shines on all of us on this earth.
It doesn't make judgements about who. Deserves it or not, the rain falls equally. The support is flowing to all at all times. So it's not a question of whether you're entitled to more support. It's really just a question of, would you like to receive it? Do you want to acknowledge that it's here? And there's not, it's not like there's a catch to receiving more, but it does mean that you're coming into a deeper relationship with the web of support that's here.
So if I am aware of and grateful for and calling in. You know, the air that the trees create for me to breathe, then I'm invited to be in relationship with them, to receive that air as a gift and then show up differently in relationship, not as someone who just believes I'm entitled to that support and you know, if they get cut down too bad.
There's more air to breathe, but can I become stitched into that web of mutual support and reciprocity? And this brings us to a fundamental question. Do you believe that you're part of a web? Do you believe that you're part of a web of relationships? Do you believe that as a part of that web support is flowing to you at all times?
You're really the only one who can answer that. If you're convinced that you're alone in this universe and that no one cares for you or cares to send you any support or lift you up from below, that's a belief that is gonna inform your decisions and choices and how you navigate in your life. So that's up to you and I encourage you to hit pause if you need to consider that more deeply.
If you believe that you are part of a greater web of support, then what becomes possible by tapping into that is more life, deeper reciprocity, more of what you need. And when you have more of what you need and you're in relationship, right relationship with the web around you, it means that you can step more fully into the role that you're meant to play in this ecosystem.
It means that you can grow, get big, have deep roots, gather what you need, and that you then you will become a source of more support for others. Who don't yet have the capacity to receive all that they need or who need a little help stitching themselves back into the web. So as you garner more support, you become able to offer more support to others.
And I think a lot of us in this, I don't know, animists, pagan spiritual anti-capitalist orientation really focus a lot on the offering support to others piece. And I know we talk about self care and it's like so old and annoying and I even like roll my eyes when I hear myself say it. It just is a fact of life.
A mother tree cannot nurture any saplings if she's not absorbing the sunlight that her broad canopy can receive. A mother cougar cannot hunt for her babies if she's not strong in drinking the water and get getting what she needs. No, being on this planet can give life to others in their own unique way if they're not.
Tapped into the web of support themselves. So we just have to decide if we're going to do that and what that means for us. So are you in a web? I believe you are. And how do we move through life as if we're in that web? This takes a different kind of orientation and set of skills. And so the first source of fortification that we're gonna cover in this series is tracking, learning how to track what's happening through the web.
Tracking is literally a term that people use to describe animal tracking, which can be used for just knowing what other animal beings are in the landscape around you. Um, it's primarily often used for hunting animals. It can also be used to track, you know, plants on the landscape, track food, tracking food is essentially what it is, what it has been throughout human history.
It's about. Knowing the landscape you're on, looking for signs around you, following the signs that you get, and telling a story about what that being is doing on the landscape and what they might do next. It's essentially. Accepting yourself as part of the web and looking for reverberations along that web.
The best trackers that I've read about essentially have a really profound awareness of this web and use all of their faculties and senses, not just in their bodies, but in their spirits and hearts and imaginations, to track reverberations along the web and follow the, follow those in order to track the animal that they're hunting.
So it's an active process, but it's not about dominating the landscape entirely. It's also not about just being passive and waiting for the animal to come to you or bump into you, but you're not chasing it. Manically. Unintelligently, you're actively looking for signs and developing a relationship and understanding what's growing where and when, and what does this animal sign look like and who's there, and what season is it?
In order to connect with something and follow something meaningful, it takes intelligence and wisdom and look, knowing how to look for patterns. It also takes a very wide perspective. Again, we're talking about peripheral vision. Your auditory senses, but also just feeling the instinct and the signs that your body is giving you about what paths to go down, what signs to follow.
We all have lineages of tracking. Humans have always tracked to find food. Hunting, foraging, all of it. And while most of us don't gather our food this way now, it is still an essential skill to have for tracking the life of the soul, for tracking what's happening in the web and navigating it accordingly.
So a big problem that most of us have encountered and are trying to undo is that the way we've learned to navigate life is rooted in. Patriarchy and domination and maps. A map is. A declaration of what a landscape is, what its topography is like A map has names, someone has named that landscape, and it shows us a way that someone else has deemed the appropriate way, whether or not the landscape has changed.
And I'm not saying that all maps are all bad all the time, but just stay with me for a moment if you can, because I think this is a helpful metaphor. So maps are tools of domination and empire. It's declaring, it's like laying out a territory, right? Maps have been used to say, this is yours and this is mine, and I'm going to dominate this animals and indigenous peoples that I have learned about.
Generally do not have paper. Two dimensional inert maps. They have stories about the landscape. They have instinctual memories and they have deep relationships with the landscape, but they don't have maps that they put up on a wall and follow maps are inert. They're not alive, and we've been handed them by someone else.
To take the place of our own instinctual knowing. So dominant culture has given us a map and it has said, this is how you become a human being. This is what it means to be an adult. This is what it means to be good, responsible, smart, whatever it is. And most of us have tried to follow this map. Through the landscape of our lives, and we've tried to follow it even when the trail's been washed out, even when there's been a, a fire and there's no trail anymore, we've tried to follow it.
Even if the map is a thousand, 2000 years old and the landscape doesn't look that way at all anymore. And that causes a lot of suffering. We can't find our way. It's frustrating. We're trying to fulfill some destiny we've been given on a piece of paper, and it's not fun or easy or easeful. So what is another way of navigating through life?
Well, if maps are an example of patriarchy and dominance and civilized culture, then perhaps another way. Is matriarchal emergence, following the memory in the body like elephants do, covering hundreds of miles just by what we know in the body. Noticing what is here now, what am I, what am I sensing? What is the land wanting me to see?
Where and how do I feel a connection or a longing to that which I am seeking? Where do I just wanna go? Where do I feel drawn? What feels nice for me? A way of navigating that allows us to adapt to changes in the landscape with all of our faculties, not just the intellect. Okay? If we're in a landscape of our life and we're looking down at a map, a piece of paper or an app on our phone, what is happening to our senses?
Our vision is very narrowed. We're just trying to, we're just looking for what we think we see on that map. If we put the map down, we can see with our whole scope of vision, we can hear, we can smell, we can taste, we can feel the ground beneath our feet, and we can notice wider, larger patterns. So tracking is knowing where you are, where you have been in your life, what beings are in this inner wilderness within you.
What has the weather been like? Without any sense of ourselves and what the landscape of our own life is like, it's very easy to get lost and to believe in the map over our own innate knowing. If you believe that you're in the Amazon jungle, because that's where you're, you think you're supposed to be, you're not gonna recognize grizzly bear scat on the path that you're on.
You could put yourself in danger. You might be looking for, you know, a sword fern when it's just orchids around, right? It's e, it's very easy to get lost if you don't know where you are and you're not navigating by your own. Personal emergent wisdom. So tracking begins by knowing your own inner landscape, your own personal mythos.
What journey has your soul been on in your lifetime thus far? What paths are you called down? Which ones have you ignored? What signs or symbols or patterns have meaning for you that are your signs that are meant for you? Tracking requires that we see and hear the story that's being woven in the situation or the landscape of our lives, noticing what is happening.
Am I in a cycle that I've been in before? What doors are closing. It's not about getting in our heads and making up whole big stories about what this sign could mean and why didn't I do that, and all the regrets I have or anything like that. But we're weaving a story day by day, moment by moment by noticing what the landscape of our lives is showing us, seeing the signs that are meant for us.
Again, it's really hard to do that if you don't have the right. Language or know your own language or have a perspective that says, I'm in a web of life. I'm meant to receive signs. I know how to navigate this journey, and I'm gonna put the map down so that I can find my own way. So I've mentioned signs a couple of times now, and I wanna talk about what I mean by that and talk about the signs that we get while tracking.
If you are part of a web of life, then that web has an intelligence that makes you, and that communicates with and through you. The web isn't a dead thing, it's alive. So you're here in the landscape of your life and every day you have choices to make, where to go, what to do with your time, who to be in relationship with, what to grow in your life, what to compost, and how you do that, what you take your cues from where you place your focus.
What you trust in is really important. It can be. Life-giving and affirming, or it can be really stressful and draining. So even in really challenging circumstances. The Earth and this web of life are still supporting you, and there will be signs and affirmations to help you navigate and know what is right for you.
So when I say signs, I mean meaningful symbols, words, things, you know, synchronicities, and the keyword here is meaningful. Not everything is a sign. Sometimes we're just moving through the landscape of our life, and it's like, that's a cute chipmunk, but it doesn't necessarily carry a message for me. And the only way to decipher this is how it feels for you in your being, how it lands.
You'll know if something is meaningful or not, and sometimes it's a matter of a pattern. So if I see 24 chipmunks on my hike, then that. It's probably a sign that either the chipmunk population in this area has just totally ballooned this year, or there's something I'm meant to understand or learn from chipmunk.
So it's not as if the whole web of life is just meant for us and only communicating to us, right? It's not a one way street, but there absolutely will be times. Many times a day, even when we're receiving something that is for us and we get to decide and discern when that is what, when that happens, and what it is.
Signs are not guarantees of anything I. We may be walking down a path in our life and we receive a sign to turn right and that feels good in that moment. This is a free will universe that is constantly emerging and changing. And just because we received a sign to turn right. 21 days ago or whatever doesn't necessarily mean that we're going to arrive in any certain place or have any certain outcome.
Again, we're trying to stay very low to the ground in this tracking orientation. We're not flying a drone overhead and trying to get a whole picture of the landscape. We wanna be right where we are taking one sign, one step at a time, because that's the sturdiest safest way to move. Signs are also not the final.
Say again. You, you are an agent of free will you get to decide what you wanna do with or without the signs that you receive? I find that often signs are really, I. Affirmations of a choice that we have made where we've felt drawn in a certain direction and we take a step and then something sweet comes along to affirm that we're in the right place.
I think a lot of times people get stuck feeling like they're waiting for a sign and they've been waiting and waiting and nothing's coming, and that's really frustrating and they feel frozen. But actually, I think the way that the web works. Oftentimes is that we take a step and that creates a vibration on the web, and then if it's in congruence with our soul's path or Inc congruence with what's good for the web of life, then we receive some kind of sign that says, yes, that was good.
Keep going in this direction. So sometimes there's signs. Leading us before we even take a step. But oftentimes I think they're affirming who we already are and what we're choosing to do. So ways to work with signs are one, to just begin to see them. There are all kinds of different signs. Anything can be a sign.
You can receive dreams, symbols in your dreams, symbols in your waking life. There might be certain birds or animals that are meaningful to you or that you see in patterns. I know someone who works with numbers as signs. So sees certain patterns and numbers and has a kind of language with the universe around those numbers.
It could be certain words that keep coming up. You are looking for a pattern that feels meaningful to you. And again, as you develop your own personal mythology and knowing yourself and the helpers that are here for you and the symbols that are meaningful to you, this gets easier and it becomes like a shorthand or a language that you have with the universe.
So we begin to see them and notice them, and then we welcome them in as signs as meaningful. Yeah. This is what builds that connection so that we can receive the signs that we're asking for. If you are receiving signs, but you're denigrating them or ignoring them, or you know, believing they're not valuable because they're not like someone else's signs, then that channel, that flow gets weak, it gets dry.
So sometimes the universe will knock us on the head with a really big sign. A totally mysterious synchronistic situation that kind of blows us out of the water and wakes us up. But often it's just these little sweet messages that come along the web. So we begin to see them. We welcome them in as meaningful, and then we make me from them.
We receive the signs, we take them seriously, and then we make choices. Based on what we received, we allow them to support us literally by either choosing to go down a certain way or not down a certain way, or to feel affirmed and loved and send that back along the web so you can cultivate a practice.
Of receiving and making meaning from signs, and this is very much helped by cultivating a practice first to see and hear your own wisdom, to know what landscape you are in, what is meaningful to you. Again, if I'm not grounded, if I'm not doing my own spiritual work and grounded and feeling congruent in my body and knowing what my edges are, it's harder for me to see the signs that are meant for me because it's like I'm not tuned in anyway, so I can't hear the radio channel that I'm meant to tune into.
So you need to know where you are, understand the signs that are meaningful. See them, welcome them in in science, and then decide how you want to relate or respond to them. There is a mysterious flow to life. I can't tell you how the Web of life works, how these science come through. I think it's energy. I think it's just the natural structure of this life, and I really believe that we can navigate it with more fluidity and ease.
You can have ease as you navigate through this life, even in the midst of its challenges you can feel loved, supported, communicated with, instead of feeling alone. Now, I have to say a couple of things because there are times when the Web of life is very quiet. When it feels like there are literally no signs or affirmations, and that can feel really scary and we can feel alone.
And I do think it's something that happens. I don't think it's permanent, but I know that I myself have gone through phases where I feel like I'm not getting anything from the universe. And in my experience, this happens when. The universe, the ancestors, whatever is holding us, what you believe in, when those forces are waiting for us to make our own choice about something, it could be that we've gotten enough signs.
They've sent us streams, helpers, patterns, whatever it is, we've, we've been given the signs and now it's up to us to make the choice and do something with it. It could be that they're giving us space to see ourselves exert our own agency and choice, and not be passive, but take a step and then maybe the affirmations will come after that.
So if you feel like there are no signs that you're not getting anything, that you don't have a synchronistic. Life one. I encourage you to question that and just begin by noticing. See if you can try to notice if there are any patterns or signs that are coming through that maybe they're not what you expected or what you've been looking for, but where are you getting affirmations or messages or patterns that feel affirmative too.
If you're doing that and you're like, no, really, there's nothing meaningful that I'm noticing. I feel really. Abandoned even then, I encourage you to just take a step in a direction that feels good enough, that feels right enough, and see what happens from there. There are times on our journey when we do need to ask for help navigating from other humans, so the summer of support is gonna take us through different areas of fortification that don't require you to.
Buy anything. Um, ask for help from humans or wait on any humans. These are things that are innate and available to you first and foremost. So you have the capability of being part of this web. You, it's not even a capability. You just are part of this web and you have the skills to be able to navigate and track on your journey.
And there are times. When we need a second opinion, when we need someone to show us a path we couldn't see before or how to engage with this river that we're meant to cross, or whatever it may be when we come to that place, it should really only be after we have done our own work around it first. So. If I come up against something in my life that feels tricky or I don't know where to go next, or I feel really lost, I need to turn inward first and get oriented and congruent in myself.
And that may not mean that I have the answers, but I just need to be clear about what my questions are and tend to the part of me that is scared and uncertain. And from that place I might turn first to my spiritual helpers, my ancestors, the land, and we'll talk more about this in the series, but I am gonna turn first to the web itself and see what I can find there.
Are there signs or patterns? Have I been in this cycle before? Is there a certain story I'm hearing a lot or an archetype I'm hearing about? And look there. And then if I'm starting to, if I'm feeling like I'm getting some information and it's still kind of muddy or I'm feeling like I've done my work, but I've sort of come to the end of something and I need another set of perspectives, at that point, it feels.
Safe and good and beneficial to me to receive help from either a human guide or a teacher or a friend, or whoever it may be. But what they share with me, whether it's through like a tarot reading or a spiritual guidance session, or you know, a book that they give me, or whatever it may be, what they give me should never supplant my own knowing because they're not in the landscape that I am in.
Right. No one can journey through your life for you. No one knows what that's like. No one knows the peaks and valleys that you've been through, the beings that are in the landscape around you. You're the only one who can make this journey. So helpers are welcome. Human and more than human, but at the end of the day, you're the only one who will move through this journey, and you have to know how to navigate that with as much integrity as you need and can have.
So if we take a tracking orientation to life and we decide that we're gonna put the maps down and we're gonna navigate from our own instinctual wisdom based on the signs and patterns that we see around us, it's a much more interesting journey. If I had followed the map that said, this is what it means to have a successful business, this is what it means to grow into solo entrepreneurship, or to be a career coach, or any of the maps that I felt I had, I was beholden into 10 years ago, I would not have ended up, you know, recording a podcast about tracking spirit.
And you know, tracking in the midst of capitalist collapse, I could not have designed this or forecasted this. No one gave me a map that would've led me here. I got here because I put the maps down and I started tracking my own landscape and the signs that I was being given. I. And I have helped many people track in their own lives, and where they end up is a surprise to me, and it's often a delight and a surprise to them.
And it's a much more interesting trip to take because the truth is I've been using the metaphor of tracking, which eventually, you know, leads the hunter to the animal, hopefully, and they make the kill. But on this journey, we never catch the animal we're tracking. It is about the journey itself and who we are becoming on that journey.
Again, your life is not something to be conquered. Your life is not a problem to be solved. It's not a box that's waiting to be unlocked and someone has hidden the key from you. The Web of life is not trying to hide anything from you or make this more difficult. The maps make it more difficult. The idea that this is a math problem makes it more difficult.
It's not. It's a journey. It's a dance. It's a mysterious unfolding, and you have what it takes to navigate it gracefully. And it doesn't mean that the journey is always pleasant or that it feels fun to become who we are becoming, but we can always access that support. This has become front and center for me lately personally, because I'm navigating some health stuff with my 8-year-old daughter, and our family is navigating it together.
But I have to, you know, again, as her mother, find new ways to navigate this challenging time. And it starts by getting congruent in myself, doing my own work to manage the fear that comes up, the anger, the frustration, the grief, doing my own work in that regard. Asking for help from my. Web of support and it has led me to find the practitioners that feel good to reach out, take a step, and then receive and notice the signs of affirmation I get.
So, you know, reaching out to practitioners who I end up learn. I end up learning, they know each other and have worked with each other and that feels really good and affirming, noticing something in their office that feels like a sign or it has meaning to me. Um, and continuing to go in the direction that feels.
Correct, right where I am in an emergent way. So that experience has been a lot different than if I didn't have a relationship to my body or instinct. And I said, we're just gonna meet with people who are, you know, maybe technically qualified, but don't feel good. I don't feel good in their presence. My daughter doesn't feel good in their presence.
My spouse doesn't have a good feeling. And then forcing that. Even though I'm not receiving any affirmation that that's the way to go, but it's the map I've been given. This is the map. This is how you deal with this health issue. You just do it even though it doesn't feel good, and even though you're not getting any signs of resonance or affirmation, that's a much different experience and journey that we're going on than tracking and trying to find our way, step by step, emergently so we can bring this orientation to every situation.
Where it feels helpful and necessary, and maybe sometimes we do use the map and that's okay. Maybe it's a useful tool, but I hope that we put it down anytime it starts to feel like it's supplanting our own instinctual knowing I. And not only does this take us on a much more interesting, supportive journey, I hope that it also helps us develop instinctual memories that can be passed down again.
The matriarch of an elephant family has a memory that has been passed down to her where she can find water even across hundreds of dry miles, even though she hasn't been there in 40 years. So I hope that as we navigate in this way, we can show others, our children, the children in our lives, others who will be, who will come after us a different way to navigate through life.
Not giving them a map necessarily, but telling them a story about how to find your way when you feel really lost, or when it, there's been a big snow and you can't see the trail anymore. Or when it's dark, what is their instinct? How can they navigate from that place? So if you feel like a tracking orientation would be supportive to you, a couple of next steps I would recommend are, one, getting to know the landscape that you are in.
What is your inner wilderness like right now? What is your life on the outside, like right now? Are things stormy or calm? Where have you been? What level of nourishment is there? What season is it in the landscape inside of you and outside of you? And taking that all as good information to start with. And then two, beginning to journey instinctually and emergently, putting down the maps.
Putting down the expectations, the things that people told you about, where to go and what to do, and how to be and who to be with. Put it down for a moment and feel the ground beneath your feet, holding you up and notice what you're seeing, hearing, smelling, sensing, and making decisions from that place.
And then three. Welcoming, accepting and making meaning from the signs that you will receive, and you just gotta start with what you've got. I encourage you to be on the lookout for at least a week. You know, you can ask the universe, please send me signs. I'm ready to see them. And then be on the lookout for them.
Write them down. Build up this channel of connection. See what you notice, and make meaning from them. I know that people might think you're being silly or ridiculous, or like that's just a flower that has no meaning, or that Crow didn't just do that, and even if they did, it's not meaningful. I know that's the general kind of.
Belief system that we're swimming in. But could you, you don't even have to tell anyone you're doing this, could you for one week pretend that you're in a web of support and the web is trying to communicate something to you that life wants to help guide you, that you're not in this alone. That you will receive affirmation and signs to keep going, and you can develop your own unique language around this.
I really hope you start to notice different patterns and feel supported as you move through the landscape of your life. So that's what I've got to share with you in this first installment, if you will, of the summer of support. I hope today's episode has really been a blessing to you and that you play around with tracking and let me know how it goes if you'd like to.
Next week we're going to talk about ancestors and how to tap into the vast. Just hordes of loving people and beings who are here to support you, and I hope you love that episode too. Just a reminder that our classes that where we'll be meeting live around this material will be on July 8th. I'll be teaching a class on ritual and July 29th, a class on the First harvest.
And both of those are related to the summer of support and they're open and available to all. Whether you can pay for them or not. So I encourage you to go to a wild new work.com/events to check those out. And I'll put everything in the show notes as well. If you want to do a little more or hear a little bit more about each of these topics or get reminders when the podcast episodes are out, I encourage you to join my newsletter list if you're not already on there.
And again, I'll put the link to that in the show notes. Or you can go to a wild new work.com. Thank you to Eagle Creek members and monthly supporters who are helping to make this work possible, who are making it sustainable for me to teach and share in this way. If you've benefited from the podcast and want to go deeper, you can visit wild new work.com/eagle Creek.
I hope you take such good care and that you are just. Tickled and delighted by science and affirmations this week, and I'll be with you next week to talk about the ancestors, and I'll see you on the other side.