One winter several years ago, I conducted one of my weekend retreats at a conference center in western Massachusetts. When I arrived, I heard about another retreat being offered there the same weekend—on the subject of tracking—which delighted me, because the two retreats were essentially about the same subject: the search for signs. In their case, signs indicating the presence of animals. In our case, signs indicating the presence of callings.

We shared meals together in the dining hall, so I had a chance to talk with the participants from the tracking workshop over the course of the weekend, and what struck me most about them was how excited they were just about the signs of the animals, not even the animals themselves. Which I found inspiring, and shared with the folks in my own workshop. If we could cultivate that quality of enthusiasm just for the hunt, I told them—just for the act of tracking our lives, paying attention to them, being in dialogue with them, approaching them with wonder and curiosity—our lives are bound to reveal things to us that they won’t reveal if we’re not interested. They simply won’t give up their secrets if we don’t offer them some devoted curiosity.

And animal tracks are like signs of any kind: they lead to something, they point to something. In his book The Tracker, Tom Brown says that “A track is the end of a string. At the far end a being is moving, a mystery that leaves itself like a trail of breadcrumbs, and by the time your mind has eaten its way to the maker of the tracks, the mystery is inside you.” I can't imagine a more fitting and beautiful description of the process of discernment around our........

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