My guest today, Boyd Vardy, was born in South Africa into land that was owned for many generations by his family in the very early days as a place for hunting and in more modern incarnations, as a place of conservation and renewal.
He began learning the art of tracking lions at a very young age, not for hunting, but for as a devotion and also eventually as a scout for guides to bring guests into the wilderness in search of seeing animals, most often lions, in this beautiful, protected environment.
And through that process, learning to connect deeply with the land and the natural environment, he discovered how to see and follow threads that often took hours, if not days, to lead to their majestic and wild.
But when it came to his own life, he found himself deeply shut down after trauma, operating on autopilot until a chance encounter with a sort of world acclaimed coach changed everything and opened his eyes to the possibility of using his skills as a tracker to first find his way back into a life of meaning and joy and connection and then eventually turn around.
And while still devoting himself to the land and to tracking, use that same skill set to help other people individually, in groups and at scale.
Now a storyteller, a coach tracker activist and founder of the Good Work foundation, and the author of a new book called the Lion Tracker's Guide to life, he is on a bit of a mission to help others find their own path to healing and to wholeness and to wildness and, in his words, to track your life.
So excited to share his journey with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is good life project.
You kind of split your time, it sounds like, all over the United States and then South Africa, kind of like pulsing and refueling.
I'm really curious.
I want to take a big step back in time, but I'm curious, just in the way that you're sort of spending time now.
I had a friend of mine that in the late seventies went to India, grew up in New York City and considers India the place that he goes to, kind of touchstone to refuel.
Like that is the mother for him.
Do you have a similar feeling?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, absolutely.
There is something about, you know, having a generation long connection with a piece of land.
So it's been in my family for four generations.
And then I witnessed my father and my uncle and my mother create this incredible transition on the land, taking it from a bankrupt cattle farm, actually starting to work on restoring the land and bringing it back to life.
And so I sort of, I grew up inside of that sense of restoration and I grew up watching how that land came back to life.