Earthbound

Go outside
And sit
Feel the Soil
The Air
And Time beyond your grasp

Her gift is all she is
For all to share
For all to care
As in giving we are living

She shares her bounty
Through the Circle of all our Lives
No need is ever missed
Yet we fell to wanting
Yet we left our Hearts

Go outside
And sit
Feel the Soil
The Air
And Time beyond your grasp

Her gift is all she had
For all disrupted
For all corrupted
As in taking we now believe lies living

Yet in these days of so called giving
The gifts that are but loot and greed
We may find our Hearts once more

And go outside
And sit
Feeling the Soil
The Air
And Time beyond our grasp

As again Her Circle embraces
Our gift of love
And life

For all to share
For all to care
As only in giving we ALL are living

Peter Friebel

The Deep Blue

"As a tracker you need to be as a question".

This is one of the most profound insights in the state of mind of the aboriginal tracker I know. Every time we say we know something to be true, we also say something about what is consequently false. We create a duality and using that we categorize.

Say, you find sign that makes you decide something is blue. Will you, days later, still be open for sign that hints it was green all along?

No, and that is why knowing and deciding effectively diminishes our perception. We create beliefs based on what we know, decide, love and fear. These beliefs become prejudices and effect our perceptions and decisions in the future. Even worse is that we apply a cultural framework in this process of "knowing" and "deciding". And so we flow from simple prejudice into judgment. In fear of being judged do you dare to still perceive objectively?

As a tracker you want to preserve oneness. You will want to find questions that lead you to more questions because in those questions you will find wisdom. Knowledge without wisdom, packaged in a cultural framework, is an extremely dangerous and toxic thing. Current cultural and geopolitical trends are clear evidence of that.

So if you find that sign, ask yourself things like:

"Could this be blue?"
"What if it was green?"
"Is blue the same for all or can some perceive green while I see blue?"
"What does it tell me that the thing may have a specific color?"
"What can I learn from it regardless of its color?"
 etc.

Doing this you avoid the duality and you learn a lot more than just that the thing was blue.

In the Deep Blue you may discover the Zen of Tracking and the intrinsic self:

Not Two!

The Counsel of Crossbill

This morning I Became a fluttering of joy and intent
I was not Self but the cool morning air between the pines
I was the itching of the midges and mosquitoes and went beyond

Then they went through and I through them
I Became their whirlwind of green and yellow
Happy calls in a meadow of boreal bounty

And on they went
Doing what Crossbill does
Being what Crossbill is

For a moment
I tracked their Spirit
And they lifted mine

And on I went

Doing what Man does

Being what Man is

And my Spirit sang

TODO: Mindfulness training

Just saw a Swedish documentary on the "phenomenon" of mindfulness and instead of inspiring me, it actually kind of annoyed me.

Mindfulness was portrayed as this new thing, a way to observe when we act out of judgements and habits and bend the future to achieve new things. The largest part of the documentary was about its value in leadership and other corporate functions.

On the health and wellbeing side, its effects on lowering stress were countered with notes of warning from the medical profession as many of the claims were not backed up with actual scientific knowledge. Certain people, with certain diagnosis, could even experience negative effects by practicing mindfulness, they said.

The funny thing was that the majority of the people that were interviewed who give courses, hold lectures or in any way were experts in the field of mindfulness, constantly talked about living a life in Awareness and how mindfulness opens up that possibility while, at the same time, the actual documentary focused on the activity of mindfulness as separate to the state of Awareness. Basically a miracle pill that solves all your problems but is a bit hard to swallow.

It is the typical effect you get when a headspace culture tries to wrap it head around a heartspace concept.

Mindfulness becomes the next trendy (and supposedly beneficial) thing on the agenda. Yet another event to track in your weekly obligations.

Not a single word was said about the origins and function of Awareness (and mindfulness). That living in Awareness is the most natural thing for any animal including the human animal. Nobody observed that people, when living in the wilderness, switch to a state of Awareness in about 6 to 7 days.

In short, nobody connected it back to our deepest instincts and our survival and earth living skills. Instead it is 'that new trendy thing' and you can probably download a bunch of apps to help you train it.

This whole approach negated everything they supposedly wanted to achieve. It is like making a documentary on how healthy it is to exercise between hamburgers.

It shows a willingness to act but at the same time a lack of understanding and an inability to leave the cultural pressure that caused the problems in the first place!

As you all know I am a tracker. Tracking is a human animal instinct and capability. It requires full control over the internal dialog. I define tracking as becoming mindful of connected things in your Awareness. We all have this capacity. It is embedded in our very existence. Therefor mindfulness and Awareness are central and mandatory concepts in all my courses.

In fact, all the earth living skills are connected with tracking and Awareness. In our current culture we have systematically ignored this connection. The result is that everything becomes based in science, schedules and physical skills: The physical survivalists that try to win the battle against Nature each and every day. But also the host of people who live their lives in habit and fear of judgement, making sure that every tomorrow looks exactly as all the yesterdays by hopping over today.

What annoyed me is not that the creators of the documentary apparently were not able to grasp the real intent of the subject matter but that they propagate this on to their viewers. They enact the culture that causes the problem even when the subject matter is about changing that!

Man we are really in a downward spiral here.

I do not blame all the experts that were on the show. I know from experience that it is extremely hard to get through to people on this matter. Some people are so hard wired into the rat race, so trusting of its promises and so sensitive to judgements of their peers that they simply can not let go.

Letting go,  however, is the key!

You need to let go of time, burdens, judgement, analysis, naming, preconceptions and trivia. Once you let go you can discover 'today' and the choices it gives you, living in full Awareness and a state of intuitive questioning. You will subconsciously start to unravel the concentric rings (ripples of cause and effect) around you. In other words you will start to track the solutions to the challenges that face you; you will enable the tracker that was dormant in you all this time!

My courses are in the context of earth living and tracking. Clearly I chose the wrong context because I think I could make an easier living by lecturing to business managers :-) But make no mistake about it: It is that context of earth living and tracking, our humble origins, that is the fundamental of all we still are today, manager or not.

Mindfulness is just an activity, a technique and one of many you need to master and practice to become Aware. But please please please, let it not become the new TODO in your agenda!

Because, by its very nature, you can not embed it into your 'normal' life. Life should be embedded in Awareness!




Live Deliberately (and I mean it! :-))

Peter Friebel

Total Perspective

Those of you familiar with the works of Douglas Adams will certainly recognize the following:

"a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, "You are here.""

It was part of a description of a torture device called the Total Perspective Vortex. The machine worked by letting you, for a short time, see yourself in relation to the infinity of the entire Universe. This perspective would annihilate the soul of any man.

Interestingly, the protagonist Zaphod walked out of the machine even more convinced about his total awesomeness than before. Why? Because the Universe he was in was artificial and created only for him. That made him the most important thing in it.

I can not help to recognize the bane of modern man in this: his relatively recently contracted inability to connect with Nature.

When I write 'Nature' (capitalized) I mean the totality of existence. Not only the Earth with all its life and environments but all of the Universe and even Multiverse. The force that drives change. That creates structure in chaos and at the same time creates chaos from structure. The set of all possibilities.

When people sit on top of a mountain or in some other awesome natural environment or when they look up in the night sky at all the stars, they often remark that it makes them feel small and insignificant. It is their ego-selves speaking.

When you separate your self from all of Nature you are very right in perceiving that what you separated is insignificant. The ego-self does more than that: it also classifies all the rest as the enemy. The result is a totally skewed perspective and experience of existence.

As I wrote earlier, the development of the ego-self is critically important for our individual survival but it is a slowly killing decease if it is elevated into a culture.

It is this culture that causes us to believe that all life experience is triggered by external stimuli. Look around you! People do virtually everything in their power to acquire all the paraphernalia needed to create these stimuli. We need constant entertainment, praise, status, excitement and recognition.

Not surprisingly we need money to acquire those things and our ethics falter in this pursuit. We have narrowed our ethics and morals to the human-centered and in a numbed daze we hunt the rare highs of actualization in the cage of our modern society. In the process we create the economy that drives the lives of those very very few that are best in this form of self actualization and separation.

Read the above a few times and you will see I could have just as easily talked about heroine addicts and their dealers!

I am very happy that I have always been interested in the natural world and that with a bit of age and a few life lessons I have managed to kick the habit.

Tracking, Awareness and all the other earth living skills and, last but not least, Nature itself, have helped me enormously in freeing myself from this destructive and addictive culture.

Bushcraft for me is Earth living and requires no stuff. Unfortunately, and this is the reason I no longer use the term bushcraft, the addictive culture has permeated even the bushcraft community. Bushcraft is now very much about all the stuff you need and the desire for self actualization and a hint of escapism.

Not for me. For me it meant rediscovering that life experience is visceral! That our reality is not defined by separation and external stimuli but is the projection of our unity and connection with Nature.

And now we can get back to the Total Perspective Vortex:

For me total perspective is not that we created a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot saying, "You are here."

For me total perspective is that the microscopic dot on a microscopic dot is the result of all of Nature working together to allow that dot to exist. Without everything around it, the dot could not be there and without the dot the rest could not be there too! More importantly, you and all of Nature feel this force of existence from within! You don't need to constantly stimulate your nervous system to experience life. It will stimulate your spirit from within, sourced from all that is.

And on the dot it says: "You made this dot by being it and everything around it!"

The Pale Blue Dot photograph taken by Voyager I. Probably the most amazing picture humanity has ever taken. One hell of a selfie!

  

Tracking, The Controversies. Or so I've been told

I am hopelessly naive it seems and man, am I happy about that! In many things I have done in my life I never first consulted others, I never first researched what was contemporary, accepted or even expected. Mostly I figured it out for myself and only when I was confident I got stuff down or got stuck I would start to look around. If somebody else did it better I simply took it over. If somebody did certain aspects better I simply merged the best of both. There is never a "not invented here" issue and also prestige never played a dominant role. I simply like to come up with my own solutions before "adjusting" them to what is out there. This has been true in my computer science work and also in my studies and teachings of aboriginal living skills.

I may be naive but I am not stupid and over the years I have noticed that this method of mine almost never earned me any points in the social and work related arenas. It is baffling to me that science, for instance, is so incredibly stifled by it own dos, don'ts, tabus and dogma. This mechanism can be identified in everything. It is an important component in our societal glue it seems. It did, however, never occur to me that this would even be true for originally aboriginal skills such as tracking.

My interest in (and consequent obsession with) tracking started with it being one of the aboriginal living skills. As described above I found out how to do stuff on my own and later fine tuned it with the knowledge and experience of others. The funny thing was that mostly my own solutions were more like how aboriginal people would do as opposed to how survival experts would do. Later, this became a very important element of my courses.  I realized that aboriginal living skills were not simply text book skills but a very natural function of our connection with Nature. More importantly, our natural awareness and ability to track seems to be the common denominator of the human capacity to survive anywhere on Earth.

So, my own study of tracking was never inspired by an application in contemporary society such as tactical or SAR tracking but rather by it being a natural part of my interest in the living skills of the human animal. Later of course I became very much involved in the application of these skills in modern society and the goal of promoting and teaching the use of tracking in SAR and law enforcement was the main reason why I started The VaraVild Scout Project and later joined Professional Tracking Services Europe. Initially however tracking and awareness were to me the foundations of understanding the natural world. Nothing controversial about that one would think. Or?

When I seriously started to study tracking I had basically one and only one goal: Being able to know what happened. For me tracking was never just identifying a track to an individual animal and following those tracks until I found it. No, I wanted to know what happened on the way, what the animal was doing, what it encountered, what it was thinking and most importantly, if it was aware of me tracking it. Without this skill the aboriginal hunting methods made no sense to me. So I entered the world of tracking completely naively assuming that such information naturally is laid down in the animal's tracks. It didn't take me very long to discover a glimpse of this wonderful language. While lying on my belly in the sand studying my own tracks I soon saw that increasing speed, changing direction and all kinds of other things like looking in different directions etc. left recognizable sign in the tracks. As I am rather science oriented I soon started to see systematic change in these sign depending on changing energy and dynamics in the movements. For me this was all natural and part of my journey to understand and learn tracking.

I never had the need to communicate these things with others. They were a completely internal language and I never named these specific signs. I simply recognized and used them. It wasn't until I decided to start teaching these things that I needed to create a language. In the event I didn't need to create anything. I found a book that described all these things I discovered and much, much more.

The book was The Science and Art of Tracking by Tom Brown Jr. In this book the system of track dynamics was described in a level of detail I did not think was possible. My own internal system was very course and inaccurate in comparison but in essence it was the same system. I did not find this at all weird. I mean I was a very inexperienced amateur tracker and the fact that the book described a far more abundant model than I had formed was only natural. I simply thought: "Got a lot to learn". This was one of these cases where I took the better model.

The key insight for me in tracking is that a track is not just a print. A track is not simply the result of a deformation caused by a claw, paw, hoof or foot. The final shape of the tracks is also caused by the reverberation, the springing back of the soil when the pressure is released. That is why from the beginning I have always seen tracks as the Earth's reaction to the intention of the quarry. After reading the book they suddenly got a name: Pressure Releases. I liked the name and it described very well the physics at play. What I did not know at the time was that with starting to use that word and the names of the various pressure releases I did not only enable communication with students and other trackers but even opened a can of worms I never imagined existed.

As this book was so important for me by giving words to my experiences I was keen to find more books on tracking. To my big surprise I never found any other book that described the same system. In a few there is some talk about action indicators, twists and toe dig but on the whole pressure releases are not written about in the literature on tracking I could find at the time. I would have thought that at least something would be said about it in the SAS Guide to Tracking by Bob Carrs but no. It puzzled me. More disconcerting was that a friend warned me that this was a subject of considerable controversy in the world of tracking. I have by now heard many people state that they do not believe in pressure releases. What is there to be believed? Look down and see them happen. How can you not believe in them? So, here I found myself knowing a system that is of unbelievable significance in tracking, one I am totally convinced aboriginal peoples all over the world used in all of history in order to be able to hunt the way they did and for some reason this is something of a tabu?

Well, maybe I need to talk about the little catch in the pressure release system. The problem that in my opinion is the cause of this controversy. I do not mean the opinions people have about Tom Brown Jr, the person most associated with the system. I never cared about the private details of the author or the format of his books and other claims he made. As I have explained, I only take the good bits and merge them with my own stuff. No, the real problem is the system itself. The system builds on the fact that the signs in and around tracks systematically take various forms depending on movement of the whole paw, claw, foot etc. and also its constituent parts. The system is measured relative to the depth, length or width of the track. This makes the system scalable. The forms of the sign are not depending on the size of the animal or human who made them. They are consistent from elephant to ant. The system is defined in perfect soil (also called zero soil). This is a lightly moist extremely fine sand with defined buffering. It is the zero soil that kind of is the catch because there are almost no places on Earth where you can find zero soil. "How is that useful than?", you may ask. Well if you take another type of soil and humidity all the pressure releases will occur but they get translated up or down and adapt to the soil. Maybe there is no soil but leaves or moss or a paved road. It does not matter. The system is still there it can be observed and it retains its scalability but you need to know exactly how the zero soil system translates to the current soil type to interpret them correctly. So now we have a system that is dependent on almost an infinite number of variables. This is what causes the controversy. It is seen as impossible to apply in real life.

Isn't it then? No! In explaining why it is not impossible to use I will touch upon yet another aspect of tracking that creates a lot of controversy. The problem of translating the system is one I have to admit I missed completely in my own studies. That didn't mean I was unaware of it. It was simply so obvious to me that the PRs (pressure releases) would have to be transformed to any type of soil and weather that I did never consciously pondered over them. This may sound strange but for me tracking and most other aboriginal skills are done from the heart and by training and not so much the logical mind. I simply missed recognizing the enormous complexity of it because I was just doing it without thought. Much in the same way you would catch a ball if I would suddenly throw one to you. You can not fathom the complexity involved in estimating the ball's weight, velocity, air resistance etc. etc. and calculating its trajectory from a fraction of a second you see the ball move before you. The mind boggles. Some training is involved but you catch that ball largely by instinct, intuition and awareness. It is in our nature as predators, as the human animal. So is tracking. Now this is the other controversy: It seems things are only allowed to be text book skills. Anything to do with instinct or intuition is tabu.

Another reason for the controversy is comparable to the catching-a-ball-example. You never went to a week course on catching a ball. You learned it by necessity but over a very long period of time. Every day in your life until you die you will learn more and get better in catching the ball (disregarding the effects of old age for the sake of this argument). And so it is with tracking. Learning to read the PRs will take you a life time. You can only become good at it if you get obsessed. You need to unconsciously navigate the enormous complexity of all the parameters of soil and all that impacts it and getting good at it takes an enormous effort: years and years of training. This does not really fit with our modern society. We want to take a course and be experts when we are done. Well, that is not how it works. You will only get the theoretical knowledge on tracking that way. Could you catch the ball after you read a book on how to do it?

There is a strange anomaly though in the literature of tracking. They all do write about aging tracks. I am not going into aging but think about aging for a while. It requires you to read the effects of time, weather and wind, an infinitely complex set of variables on just as many soil types as there are soil types to read PRs in.  Logically if you do not believe in PRs you can absolutely not believe in aging tracks.

Just as an interesting note: certain PRs can take the form of other ones due to the effects of aging! Yeah, that is how totally awesome the human capability is because we can see it and use it as long as we stop thinking about it!

For me there exist no controversies in tracking. I do what I do because I love it and it works for me. I teach it to anybody who want to learn it cause I know it to be part of my type of tracking. Believe it or not, in the end its about succeeding in tracking. And if you have a cool method count on me learning it from you and making it my own. I do not really see why one would spend valuable time arguing about controversies in tracking? That time is much better spent in the dirt, learning and training tracking in your unique but inevitably purely human way.



Peter Friebel

Everything Forever (A Tracker's Song)

Out there
Beyond my flesh
Out there
Beyond my cage
My rings expand
Out there
I interfere
Out there
I collapse
Out there
Becomes in here

In here
Is inside out
In here
I sense
In here
I merge with there
And become
The One that is all things
In The One
I am The Now

In The Now
I find the tracks
In The Now
I see all rings
In The Now
I do not reason
In The Now
I only sense
The One to be
All there was
All there will be
All in One
All that is
Forever

Nature!


Peter Friebel