letters to the hermit
The Hermit is alone, but she is not lonely. The Hermit is connected to community, but she comes back to quiet solitude when the day is over. The Hermit writes in her notebook over a cup of tea in the morning, eating the flakiness and sweetness of a croissant. The Hermit enjoys waking before the sunrise and spending the first hour of morning in quiet stillness, her phone nowhere to be found.
The Hermit has an intricate knowledge of the next step, and the next step only.
It's not to say that she doesn't have goals or visions. It means that she doesn't concern herself with how her path will unfold. She knows the next right step, and she enjoys the present. She loves and she laughs, and she talks and she works, but she is connected with the water in the creek.
Posted by @maviecottage Ana March on Pinterest
There will be a time when she is the World or the Fool, where she will share more to flow outward. She trusts that she's only the Hermit right now. She knows the medicine of the moment, and she embraces where she is now. She isn't as occupied with the world outside, but she's more centered around navigating her rich and multi-faceted inner landscape.
There are mountains to climb, valleys to descend into, rivers to float on, storms to weather, trees to rest under, and an endless cycle of suns and moons to witness. The Hermit has her ladder, her hammer and nails, her level and her bricks, because she's building her home within herself. She isn't going to IKEA to pick out her sofa and dining tables and bed frame; she's asking the forest to borrow a tree, and she's building her dining table and she's tending the hearth fire of her heart.
She might invite you to come over for hot chocolate or a fresh batch of soup. If you're lucky, she'll ask you to stay a while, and you two will pull cards while the smoke of incense dances over your hair. Maybe you'll go outside and look to the stars and show your smiles or your tears, or talk to the moon. When you leave, even if it was a short visit, you'll feel at home because she helped you tend to your own hearth. And you'll carry your own glowing ember with you, not needing the light of hers, because yours is enough.
The Hermit seeks to know herself wholly and truly, but she's not in a race. The knowledge of her true self is not a game of pride and seek that she must find as quickly as possible. This isn't an escape room with a single key and a shortening timer. It's slow and unhurried and ever-expanding. The answers to who she is are in the Milky Way, the way the leaves rustle, the seed sprouting roots, the pebble in a floodplain, a single blade of grass, the start of an inhale and the end of an exhale.
It's in the barista at a coffee shop, the driver with road rage, the hole in your sock, the scent of déjà vu, the way the snow melts and the way a spoon stirs coffee and creamer. Which is to say, the Hermit knows that everything exists in everything else. The Northern Star is one singular truth, and it's also everything, every moment alive, and it's also nothing.
And she's here—waiting for you, for me, to go on this path with her, but alone, too. She whispers to us in the winter chill and the hot water of a shower at the end of a long day.
Will you join her?
