The Tracks We Follow Home...For Tom Brown Jr.
Since Covid started, our glorious planet has lost some of its finest teachers and story keepers.
Nearly all of my most influential teachers have become ancestors since the great plague of our time.
Two weeks ago, another teacher was added to this list: Tom Brown Jr., legendary tracker, earth skills grandfather, and visionary healer.
Tom's books and student lineage have forever altered our culture and, if humanity makes it to its next evolutionary cycle, it will be, at least in part, due to his efforts to help people remember what it is to be human.
Tom's teachings, perhaps more than any other, showed me what was truly possible for humanity and reignited the vision that I had as a child.
Tom made me truly proud to be human for perhaps the first time, and gave me faith in my flesh, in my two hands, in the power of my instincts, and in the depth of wisdom that I carry within my blood.
Tom was a true teacher, a passionate carrier of ancient knowledge that he earned the hard way from an early age.
He asked his students to never “believe” him. He encouraged his students to prove him right or prove him wrong…to put his teachings to the test. And what is true was that his students stayed with him for a reason.
It was easy to be taken in by Tom’s magic. It was easy to be swept up in the call to walk away from it all and retreat into the woods to put the skills he so generously passed on to the test.
It’s hard to keep your heart in your chest the whole week of a Standard class at the Tracker School—new parts of your brain, body, and spirit light up anew with every subsequent sentence uttered by an instructor…
...as you learn to stalk, to become invisible in a landscape, and to track footprints across fallen pine needles.
The dream of the ancestors passed through Tom with so much grace and joy that it was impossible not to get caught up in it.
As he taught you to pray with your hands—spinning cordage with your fingers for rope or net—you get so intimate with the fleshy stuff of the earth that you learn to praise and fall in love with your own fleshy stuff of the earth...
...and begin to question where it all ends and where it begins.
Whose branches are these that you sharpen into kits for fire or traps for small animals? The trees, the earth’s, the heavens?
Tom taught you not just to heat stones to make soup, but to be a part of the great act of alchemy needed to extend your life in exchange for the sacrifice of another—a necessarily slow and sacred act. A prayer.
An era is ended now that this great bearer of culture and ancestral wisdom passed on. But his dream lives on in his students….his students that he dedicated his life to, his students who he cared about more than his dreams. His students that he taught to distinguish between dream and vision.
He inspired me and many others to distinguish between short-term, self-centered joy and purpose within our greater community of life.
Much like Toms, my dream since I was a child has been to wander out into the forest and make a home there…to detach completely from this mad world.
But my vision is the recreation of a self-sustaining, self-consuming world of intimacy, power, primordial wisdom, and deep song of the earth.
It wasn’t until my first visit to the Tracker School that I felt such a world is truly possible…not only possible, but inevitable, that one day all of the people who choose to live as Tom taught will gather and rebuild society in a way that makes sense.
This vision that my husband and I strive towards in The School of Heaven and Earth. And I pray every morning that the teachings we pass on there bring us closer to making it a reality.
Below is a rough eulogy that I penned in honor of Tom's legacy.
Footprints
I didn’t know you as a child
but your very existence gave me hope
In the wild, learning to read
first markings, first language
as she, Gaia herself, writes them
in her remembering of your own first tongue,
footprints, soil as the first story told
over and over again.
We fear less of this world
because of you, who built us an army of healers
to go forth and say You too can pray
with the whole of your life
by following the right tracks.
You too can heat stones in a fire you built
with your body's heat and breath.
And those stones will cook soup that is medicine
for both living and dead.
Many more of us take time now to learn bird song
and how to walk quietly through the brush
not leaving tracks for thieves to follow.
We will remember you, Tom
as sometimes more than a man—
But a vessel for the soul of this earth
to teach once more.
Travel well tracker.
The road home is much shorter for us all now
the footprints ahead so much clearer
Because you did not sleep on your vision.
Mother Gaia, keeper of mysteries,
please don’t let us sleep on ours.
with you in the vision,
Crystal