the Hermit
“Finding the Silence” oil on wood in upcycled frame
Withdraw. Find yourself in yourself. Dig into the clay of your being for the philosophers stone. Do not look for truths on the mirror on the face of another. Cast your own guide before you this dark night. Does the light come from within or does it reach back to you? Moving forward,walk backwards to see the path you are on. Your feet are bare, sacrifice, in the snow. Your eyes are open in the cold air. Your silence is frozen, Quiet ice reflecting the light of the stars. I am working to be fully myself in my self. To find that spark of my own divinity that warms my spirit. When I pulled the Hermit card I was filled with relief. I am the shopkeeper always smiling to the world. I fool you all! I am quite introverted. The Hermit gives me permission to withdraw. To lock my door and hole up with a thermos of tea and a pile of books to study. To wander the winter hills alone with a still mind.
My Hermit is the Fool further on their journey and so beckons back to that first zero card. The person is again non-binary. The Hermits hair is braided- orderly- perhaps with witches knots and magic worked in, silencing them on their journey, an older fool perhaps. I originally wanted the hair to be a braid as well as a possible beard. That looked weird. Sorry. So I changed the braid to just wrap behind. And I considered painting another braid across the Hermits eyes to create a blind Oedipus. But that didn't feel intuitively right, though I love the myth of it. Like the Fool, the Hermit must also make a sacrifice. The Fool cuts themselves, stupidly, with the ancient bull sacrificing blade. The Hermit takes of their shoes, discards their worldly possessions, and walks barefoot in the snow.
This past weekend I worked as a volunteer for the ninth time (the Hermit is card #9) at the Sonoma County Mycological Society Mushroom camp. What a fabulous group of Hermits! I could have taken my pick of men and women with long white flowing hair to be my model. I love these earth solid people wandering the woods looking for wild mushrooms and delving into their own depths and the molecular depths of fungi. But my model for the card was actually an artist whose work I admire- Joan Semmel- who often paints self portraits of herself aging (which seems appropriate to the Hermit as well as my own artistic journey). I included a mushroom though, in honor of SOMA camp, a morel, on the frame of my painting. I find these brainy gems at high altitudes in the mountains, in forests that were scarred by wildfires the previous year, where the snow is winter melting away, revealing Spring. So the morel is a symbol of the fruit of the hermitage. The burn, the withdrawal, the searching and studying, and then, the emergence and growth.
Our society is in chaos. So many humans are seeking something else to give them fulfillment. Lacking meaning in their outer world they are looking for that flame within. As Sallie Nichols puts it "According to Jung, [the Hermit] personifies "the archetype of the spirit...the pre-existent meaning hidden in the chaos of life". We look to Tarot to help us discover truths already hidden within ourselves. We become the Hermit to find the path that leads us to the deeper meaning of our existence. As humans we walk it together, but each of us is alone.
“Finding the Silence” oil on wood - available for sale.
