Losing the Track: On quiet desperation and finding our way back to wonder

The black rhino's tracks were pressed deep into the red earth where she had stopped, turned 180 degrees, caught our scent on the changing wind. You could see it in the way her front feet pivoted, the weight distribution telling the story: she knew. Standing there in the dry riverbed of Kruger National Park, surrounded by four Shangaan trackers who had gone quiet with concentration, I felt something pass between us across the bush—between me and this enormous, endangered mother somewhere ahead with her calf. She was reading us as carefully as we were reading her. The difference was, she knew exactly what she was doing. She was on her track. And I had come to South Africa precisely because I had lost mine.

Henry David Thoreau wrote that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." I am forty-nine years old. I am blessed. I have prayed for this life—the safe and beautiful home, the healthy and delightful children, the meaningful career as a teacher and naturopathic doctor, the spiritual practices that ground me in something larger than my own small concerns. I have been given what I asked for. And yet lately, driving home from a school pickup or standing in my kitchen or waking at 3 a.m., I feel it: a wordless longing, a homesickness for a place I cannot name. Not dissatisfaction exactly, but disconnection.

As if I've been walking a path and suddenly realize I can no longer feel it beneath my feet.

How do you stay faithful to the track when you can no longer feel it beneath your feet?

This is not a question about changing your life. It's a question about remembering how to be in your life—how to remain awake to the mystery when everything has become familiar, climate-controlled, routine. How to tend the spark of life in yourself when you are busy tending it in everyone else.

We started tracking the rhino at dawn. The trackers—led by Renias, a master tracker of the Shangaan tribe—had found her prints crossing the territorial markings of a white rhino male. Female black rhino tracks are distinctive: smaller than the male's, with a more rounded front edge, the imprint showing the three-toed structure clearly in soft earth. But more than that, there's a signature to each animal, a particular way of moving through the world. These trackers could read not just what kind of animal but which animal, not just where she'd been but her state of mind, her intentions, the story of her morning.

The energy shifted immediately. Black rhinos are nearly extinct in the wild—fifteen years of brutal poaching have taught them that humans mean death. To track one is rare. To see one, rarer still.

The four trackers spread out across different trails, searching for her marks. We picked up the track, moved fast, lost it, spread out again, found it. She was zigzagging. When we crossed the dirt road and saw her prints on top of fresh truck tracks—maybe seven minutes old—we nearly began to run. Moving swiftly, our heads down, reading the earth, following the story she was writing with her feet.

And then: the place where she had turned around. Where she had stood, her weight heavy in the ground, and caught our scent. After that, her tracks showed fear—more zigzagging, working to stay downwind, using her acute sense of smell to track us as we tracked her.

I could feel it then, that conversation. Her awareness of me, my awareness of her. Both of us paying attention. Both of us following something.

In Qi Gong practice, we cultivate wildness inside the body. We become the tiger, sinking low and powerful. We become the crane, rising on one leg, wings spread in perfect balance. We become the bear, rooted and strong, or the deer, light and alert, or the dragon, playful and quick. This is not metaphor. This is remembering—calling forth the animals that live in our cells, in our evolutionary memory, in our bones.

The wildness is not out there, separate from us. It is what we are made of.

But you forget. God, how you forget. You spend your days in rooms with controlled temperatures and artificial light. You drive on paved roads. You buy meat wrapped in plastic. You lose touch with fire as a living presence, with water as a spiritual being, with the earth as the body of your oldest ancestor. The indigenous traditions I have been honored to learn from—Diné, Lakota, Nahuatl—speak of this forgetting as a kind of illness. When we stop recognizing our relatives in the more-than-human world, when we stop hearing their voices, we become orphaned. Alone in a way humans were never meant to be alone.

And perhaps this is what Thoreau meant by quiet desperation. Not that our lives are bad, but that we have lost the conversation. We have stopped tracking. We have forgotten that we are being tracked in return—that the Mystery is paying attention to us, leaving signs, waiting for us to notice.

We followed the rhino into dense bush. Progress became difficult. The trackers conferred in Shangaan and made a decision: leave the direct track. Circle around. Sometimes you have to stop following the obvious path in order to find what you're actually looking for.

That's when we saw her.

Deep in the bush beside a tree, with her calf. Enormous—bigger than I'd ever imagined—with that prehistoric horn that has marked her for death in the eyes of poachers. Her huge ears rotated like radar dishes, catching every sound. She was skittish, shy, utterly silent. A creature that had learned the cost of being noticed.

We knelt in the bush, watching. No one spoke. What was there to say? We had worked for hours to arrive at this moment—this encounter with something so rare, so endangered, so profoundly other. A mother protecting her young in a world that wants to kill her for a horn made of the same substance as our fingernails.

It was almost holy, if you could call it that.

And I thought: this is what I came for. Not to see an animal in a park. But to remember what it feels like to track something with my whole attention. To be part of a collective effort toward wonder. To arrive at silence that feels sacred.

But here is the hard part: I came home.

Where are the giraffes poking their heads above the trees for a closer look? Where are the lions lounging on the sand bank? Where is the grumpy hippo staying mostly and noisily submerged? Where is the elephant family padding so quietly through the grass, quieter than clumsy humans could ever be?

They are not here. Here is my kitchen. Here is my desk. Here are the patients who need me, the students who are showing up for class, the children who are growing up and away, the husband I have loved for decades, the community I am in service to.

This is the question that has haunted me since August: how do I keep Kruger as treasure and not as evidence of what's missing? How do I not let that experience of aliveness become just another reminder of my current dissatisfaction?

The indigenous elders I have spent time with would say: you are asking the wrong question.

You are not meant to bring the rhino home. You are meant to remember that you are already being tracked. That every moment, you are leaving prints in the earth of your life—prints that tell a story about where you've been, what you're seeking, your state of mind, your intentions. The question is: are you paying attention to your own tracks? Can you read the signs of your own life?

In the Nahuatl tradition, there is a concept of tlamatinime—the wise ones who "know things with their faces and hearts." Not just intellectual knowing, but embodied wisdom. The kind of knowing that comes from being in relationship with everything around you, from recognizing that water is a teacher, fire is a relative, the morning air is speaking.

The Lakota say Mitakuye Oyasin—all my relations. Every prayer ends with this recognition: I am related to everything. The disconnection you feel is not because you have lost your way. It's because you have temporarily forgotten your kinship.

There is a practice in Qi Gong where you stand still for a very long time. Just standing. Breathing. Feeling the earth beneath your feet and the sky above your head. Sensing yourself as the connection between the two, the meeting place of earth and heaven.

At first, your mind fights it. You think about your to-do list. You think about dinner. You think about everything you should be doing instead of just standing there.

But if you stay—if you can endure the boredom, the restlessness, the voice that says this is a waste of time—something shifts. You drop below the noise of your thinking. You feel your weight settle into your feet. You feel the subtle adjustments your body makes to stay balanced. You feel your breath moving in and out without your conscious control. You feel that you are an animal, breathing animal breath, held up by animal bones, pumped by an animal heart.

You remember: I am alive. Right now. In this ordinary moment. This is not practice for some future enlightenment. This is it.

The question is not whether your life matters. The question is: can you feel your own mattering?

You are a teacher. A healer. A mother. A wife. A woman dedicated to keeping the spark of life burning in every creature that still carries it. These are not small things. These are the things that hold the world together.

But perhaps you have been tracking everyone else's needs so intently that you've stopped noticing your own prints in the earth. Perhaps you've been so busy serving that you've forgotten you are also one of the creatures whose spark needs tending.

The news stays the same. The world's troubles do not resolve. The rhinos are still endangered. The poachers are still out there. And you, blessed as you are, still wake up at 3 a.m. asking: what am I doing? Does any of this matter?

Yes. And also: you are allowed to be tired. You are allowed to long for wildness. You are allowed to sometimes lose the track.

What the traditions teach—what the rhino taught me—is this: the track is not a straight line. It zigzags. It doubles back. There are moments when you have to stop following the obvious path and circle around, trust that you'll pick up the trail on the other side. There are moments when what you're tracking catches your scent and takes off, and you have to honor that the relationship is mutual—you are not the only one deciding how this goes.

And sometimes, the moment of meeting comes only after you stop tracking so hard. Only when you kneel down in the bush and become silent yourself. Only when you stop asking "where is she?" and start asking "where am I?"

The Diné have a word, hózhǫ́, usually translated as "beauty" or "balance" or "harmony," but it means something more like: walking in balance with all things. It's not a destination. It's a practice. It's the commitment to restore harmony even when—especially when—you have lost your way.

You restore it by stopping. By placing your feet on the earth and feeling the earth hold you. By speaking to the water as you drink it: thank you, relative. By tending the fire and knowing you are tending one of the original powers. By practicing the movements that bring the animal back into your body—tiger, crane, bear, deer, monkey. By asking the Great Mystery: what is being asked of me right now? And then: being humble enough to listen.

I am forty-nine. I am at the age when the path behind me is longer than the path ahead. When my children are becoming young adults and my own parents are aging into need. When the work I do is good work and also sometimes feels like it is not enough, will never be enough against the tide of everything breaking.

And I am also a woman who knelt in the South African bush and watched a mother rhino and her calf, and felt for a moment the thread that connects all living things—the ancient, animal, holy thread that has nothing to do with accomplishment or relevance or whether I am making a difference.

It has to do with being here. With tracking. With being willing to be tracked in return.

The quiet desperation Thoreau named is not the opposite of a blessed life. It is what happens when we stop feeling our own aliveness even in the midst of blessing. When we lose the sense of awe. When we forget we are animals, related to everything, walking on earth that holds the story of every footstep.

You ask: how do I return to the track?

I think the answer is this: you notice you have wandered. You stop. You look for signs—not out in the distance, but right here at your feet. You ask the trackers inside you—the ones who remember how to read the world—to help you see what you've been missing. You trust that the track is still there, even when you can't feel it. You take the next step anyway.

And you remember that being lost is part of tracking. It's not failure. It's how you learn to pay better attention.

The rhino is still out there in the bush, watching. The lions are still resting in the shade. The elephants are still moving quietly through the grass. And you are here, in your kitchen, in your practice room, in your community, in your marriage, in your life—leaving prints in the earth with every step.

Can you read them? Can you see where you've been, where you're going, what you're seeking?

Can you kneel down in the ordinary bush of your ordinary life and find the holy thing that has been watching you all along?

Mitakuye Oyasin. All my relations.