Episode three, Middle Earth. 
At dawn, we meet our local guide on the side of the road and drive out into the wilderness. Land is a mixture of rocks, open plains, and huge infelbergs that rise up out of the stone plateaus like waves of an ocean. I feel like I'm in Lord of the Rings land. In the reserve, we walk the stream beds, hear clear water gurgles out of the stone and desert crust, and the ground is soft enough to render some tracks. These waters, sometimes the only water for miles, are the source of life for so many desert dwellers. In nature, rain tends to disperse animals, while drought causes concentrations around water. This year, Namibia has had some of the best rains it has had in and the desert has responded, transferring itself from a lunar landscape into a grassland. This desert grass has fluffy white tops and looks spun like cotton candy over the surface of the earth. I put my lips to the water of the stream, drinking this wild water like a baboon, because today I am an animal, a human animal. And we are not as far as to believe from our wild kin. If LA grocery stores ran dry of food, 3.8 million people would turn to hunting, fishing, and gathering in days. An ecosystem would form. A wildness would grip the people.


There would be predators and prey. There would be survival of the fittest.


But there would also be survival of the best collaborators. Tribes would form. Militias would break out, and I think it's true that shit would go Cormac McCarthy. A deeper instinctual survival would grip everyone as hunger grew, and they would be closer then, forced towards their animal self. We live so ignorant to how close we are to parts of our deepest nature. Tyler Durden says in Fight Club, in the world I see, you're stalking elk canyon forest around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you for the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kunzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower, and when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison in the empty carpool lane of some abandoned superhighway.


Now I smell the scent of rhino dung in the air as an animal, I live by scent.


And soon I find where a rhino has marked its territory on the way to drink in the moonlight from the stream. The dung is fresh and toxic with poison of the plants the desert rhino eat. Don't touch this rhino dung, says our guide with a warning look in his eye. The rhino tracks in the sand of the stream bed look like imprints of giant three-leaf clovers. And I feel my inner tracker starting to switch on. Tracking black rhinos is notoriously difficult. They move erratically, often doubling back on themselves. They tend to mull, laying down a complex pattern of tracks in multiple directions, and they move great, great distances, often walking surprisingly lightly. Some people believe that the myth of the unicorn is from early Europeans trying to make sense of rhinos. This is a horse with a horn. I feel Hunter S. Thompson-like. Gonzo journalism goes rhino tracking. Instead of, we were somewhere around Barstow when the drugs kicked in.


In my shoes, Hunter might say something like, here we are on the tracks of a formerly misidentified mystical creature that is blazed high on toxic plant medicine. Mythical indeed.


And just yesterday, we had no plan. To people who try things. Now the mystery of tracks start to unfold, kicked rocks, puffy compressions in the spun grass. Now the track is lost. Now we cut back onto it and it is found. The challenge is a complex spread of tracks of different ages moving along the stream beds. Then the tracks cut off to a squat euphorbia bush to chomp on some intoxicating foliage. Then they move across a slab of rock, subtly moving tiny pebbles on million-year-old rock crust. We allow ourselves to be curious, pulling on the track as if it were a fine thread with a horned auk at its end. Our eyes focus on the ground, letting the earth speak, noticing every quiet detail. I like that my life is this mythological. I mean, picture this. It's 2025, and I am tracking, reading the ground on the trail of a creature that could easily do a cameo in Jurassic Park. 


In the Keegan model of self-transformation, we move from socialized to self-authoring.


And if you're going to be self-authoring, you might as well develop your own heroic law. That's what I'm trying to do. That's what all story hunters are trying to do. The trail leads us over hills of stark rock. I know we could walk all day, and I notice I don't really expect to find anything. For this mentality, my tracking teachers would scold me.


You must expect to find, Renius always used to say to us.


What an idea. Do you expect, deep down, to find your own unique expression in this life? I mean, do you really, really know, not hope, know that it's coming to you? Can you make your wildest dreams that you are tracking inevitable, so that when you look up from the track and you are on your own unique path, the feeling is not of elation, but rather, the feeling is totally normal to you.


To a tracker, finding the animal should be inevitable.


Finding your path should ultimately feel inevitable. Desert rhino can casually trot 20 kilometers at a time. But the ground keeps telling us its story in scuff marks, crushed and it's a completely intoxicating story. I hope one day there will be rhinos I can take my son to track. I glance now at Alex and see that he has left his normal state of consciousness and has been fully taken by the archetypal energy of the tracker. His eyes dart across the ground. His face flashes the faces of the great Aboriginal trackers through time. Those who knew this rare craft and way. They walk with him now. No, they move through him.


As he follows the rhino, he brings to life a prayer of the old ways.


He keeps the way of the tracker alive. Like a Polynesian wayfinder seeking a single dot of land in the Pacific, Alex is pulling a rhino towards him.


Tracking is an art that lives in people.


James is also making art as we move. Taking photos, shooting film. He has a one-man production house. His technical skill in the wild is so automatic that he is able to navigate the terrain at an unconscious level while focusing in on what he wants to create visually. The tracker to me has always been a doorway to the wild man. I will say wild man, but you could also say wild one or wild woman. They are in some ways the same energetic well. A tracker is drawn to wildness. A tracker must pay attention, see and notice. That is all true for the wild one. A tracker must know the nature of the wild and in so doing feel his own nature. The way of a tracker is the way of a wild one. To be close to the wild man or wild one, one must ironically conjure sensitivity of spirit, not calcification. A tracker is intuitive. He reads the body of the animals, and in this way every animal talks to him.


A wild man must cultivate the same capacity to Read energy, cultivated sensitivity, not softness, self-awareness of the inner landscape.


The wild man, like the tracker, appears where cultivated awareness and access meet as presence. Presence to me is defined as the ability to fully meet the moment. Okay, this is me attempting to fully describe presence. First, you sense without socialization or trauma clouding you what the moment requires. You see clearly. You are free of roles and ideals.


You are able to define perfectly what the moment calls You have done the work to uncover blind spots and refractions of programs or psychological regressions from the past.


The moment might want aggression, love, art, vulnerability, tenderness, grief.


You must have the relational and internal literacy and fortitude to step into what is being asked of you.


Many people want to connect through presence but they do not have access, meaning instead of being in the moment, they start to protect themselves from the moment.


With strategies to stay safe from the past, they might distract, make a joke, shut down, overdo, brush off, ignore, fright, flight, freeze, flee.


With any of these, you have left presence for conditioned response.


A past way of being has entered into this moment because you have not been able to the traumatized part from what it had access to when it was young to a mature expression.


The wild man is reclaimed when you can know and act out of the naturalness of your being in the moment, when you start to cultivate genuine maturity.


As the wild man edges closer you find yourself less governed by rules.


The wild man is known to get up randomly from dinner, spooking the other guests with abruptness because the moon is rising outside.


He is quietly connected.


He is flexible and alive.


He does not preach, he embodies.


He is boundaried and naturally protective.


And I know what I'm saying is somewhat complex.


These things I speak of are riddles for the socialized mind, designed to make you track inwards till this tracking koan makes sense to you.


I'm pushing you out onto a trail, but I'm actually walking with you.


You will need to seek the track of your own answer to this wild thing I point to, then follow it.


Now the landscape eats us with its size.
The sun is high when we find the rhinos sleeping against the desert scrub.


We stay downwind and watch these secretive desert dwellers live their quiet lives.


We then move away to our quiet life.


We live in a world that has rhinos in it.


How amazing is that?


Through the afternoon, Alex drives us deep into the terrain.


The vehicle bounces over a rock at 20 kilometers an hour.


We pay our respects to the local chief in the area, Yankee Rain, and ask permission to camp nearby.


He tells us to go to the cliffs before regaling us of a lion eating his donkey.


Wherever you are and whatever you are facing, when life is hard, remember there are places where people are dealing with the fact that a lion ate their donkey.


We camp at the base of a cliff of broken red rocks.


I see faces of animals in the rock, a crocodile, a mammoth, a creature I can't quite decipher, frozen in the million-year-old stone.


If you stare hard and long enough into the wild, eventually you see your reflection in everything.


In a way you could never explain, you start to know what you are.