This week, we all go tracking! Your spirit is leaving footprints everywhere!

Today’s topic, you have seen, is tracking your spirit, because it’s tracking weather in Pennsylvania, which means I spent a couple of hours outside with our two-year-old in what they call gum boots in Australia, in galoshes, splashing through muddy puddles and seeing the tracks that were left on the edges of the muddy puddles in the mud by the animals. So we had raccoon, we had a possum, we had, I think a porcupine, a skunk. Skunks have the weirdest little feet. I’ve got to tell you, no offense, but their feet are bizarre. I love tracking. And if all of y’all have not tried tracking animals, I know you probably have a more than ordinary interest in the natural world because you’re here. Hello. And tracking animals is, I believe, the origin of reading, because you follow a line of marks that tells a story, and it’s absolutely gripping when you get out there and you have your little guide and you find a footprint and you see these tiny toes and this little foot, and you can see where it dipped something in the water, whatever it was. And you can see where it rolled over.

I remember I used to track bears when I lived in California. At one point, we had three wild mustangs that had been herded into trucks and then shipped out of an area because that was better than killing them. It was ranch land and they didn’t want wild horses. We had to build a special high wall paddock and everything because they jump. Really wild. So they put these two mustangs into their new paddock, and there they got used to it for a while, before they could get trained to be with people, which they ultimately were. But the reason I’m telling you this is that I went out one day and I found the tracks of a mother bear and her cub, which were so cute because it’s a black bear.

Brown bears are very dangerous. Don’t get close to them. Don’t get close to a bear, just don’t. It’s not good for you. But black bears are shy and smaller and less likely to munch you. So I was tracking this mother and cub, and they went all around the property in up hills and down hills, and then they came to the paddock with the wild mustangs and their tracks walked all the way around the paddock and then in a little bit of dust so that the track was perfectly clear, were the imprints of these two bums, these four little buttocks. Well, the babies were small. The mothers were not as small. So the imprint of two tushies who had clearly sat there like spectators at some sort of freak show, watching the wild mustangs like, “This is weird. We’ve never seen this before.” And how delightful to be able to know from marks on the ground that these two animals, well, they’d taken their attention off foraging and sat down to watch two mustangs.

Now we have the internet. We know that animals play a lot. Inter-species play goes on and they take care of each other sometimes. They often interact peaceably. And before we had the internet, we didn’t know that except from tracks. Tracks are fun. And in fact, when you’re on the internet, you’re tracking, and the algorithms of the internet are tracking you and your likes and dislikes and sending you more things. It’s getting a little weird out there, but tracking is just in our blood. So, the things we make tend to be trackers.

Now, you could get very weird about how AI is going to take over the world and it’s all very dangerous. I’m not going that direction. I would rather talk about how the ability to track also makes us perhaps, we don’t know, but I think it makes us more able to define what a spiritual experience is like. I think that I don’t know what happens to animals. I think that they actually live in a state of enlightenment where they’re just themselves and they don’t have all the weird paranoia that we do about what will happen in the future, and remember 17 years ago, what happened to me, I’m still angry at that person. They’re just in the present and living in a state of grace.

But we, because we can fall from grace, also have this tracking capacity to go looking for whatever aspect of spirit we have lost. And then the rediscovery of it is one of the most beautiful things a human can experience. I’ve probably quoted T.S. Eliot a million times before, but when I was a depressed teenager, I was very struck by his lines, “We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

And that’s the beauty of tracking spirit. Click here to read more!