Walking with The Hermit — Typewriter Tarot

By Claire Bowman

Sometimes, I pull The Hermit in the morning, before I fill my water bottle, pack my lunch, pull on my shoes, and leave for the day. In those moments, I feel puzzled.

I question the pull, annoyed that my deck would be so cheeky as to offer me a vision of stillness amidst the revolving plates of my to-do list, with family in town, a holiday trip to pack for, and — oh yeah — that historical novel I’m supposed to be writing in my free time.

Often, I have the privilege to take time to recharge when I need it, and for that I am grateful. But most days, there are 1,001 details to attend to, and always the basic needs to be met, the everyday monotony of caring for the body. And so, most days, The Hermit feels inaccessible to me.

Three versions of The Hermit from different Tarot decks. From left to right: The Tarot of Leonora Carrington, Taro as Colour, and the Rider-Smith-Waite Tarot.

I imagine my ideal Hermit moment: wrapped in hand-knit blankets in front of a gently crackling fire, a steaming mug, the glitter of snow drifts beneath starlight outside a foggy windowpane, shelves of old books, and months of winter to bury myself in their pages, gleaning insight like kindling for the glowing flame of my lantern.

My heart’s lantern, which illuminates the stone path, leading me from the cabin door into the trees toward a high, snowy peak. From up there, the world looks so small, so neatly ordered, tucked far away. Up there, I exist separately from the dentist appointments and the job applications and the family emergencies. My heart beats in rhythm with the cosmos, so vast and dark, so close I feel I could touch it from where I stand on the precipice, ankle-deep in snow.

Glancing at The Hermit card for a handful of seconds, this fantasy passes through my mind, and I long for it, as a lover of solitude and books. I long for the quiet of snow and fire-flicker, for a chance to let my mind stretch out and interrogate its own existence, to forget the world and its travesties and focus all my thoughts on quandaries of being. This is the most immediate metaphor I have for The Hermit, and it’s easy to stop there, to let the card represent this fantasy of the wintry woodland sanctuary I’ve always longed for.

But of course, even on the least demanding day of my life, I can’t put everything down to indulge in this woolgathering. So, The Hermit appears, and though at first I feel a sense of wanderlust, that’s quickly overtaken by a wave of resentment at feeling trapped by my life and the requirements and deep disappointments of living, which have turned out to be so much more stressful and full of sorrow than my child self would have believed. She, too, fantasized about living in a cabin in the woods, away from everyone and everything.

In The Hermit, I see the wise elder pondering the meanings of existence. But inexplicably, I also see a flash of the little girl I was, caught up in the poverty-stricken chaos of a large, unruly family, born into the middle of its seismic rifts — the traumas of everyone who was already here, the constant noise of babies being born, adults fighting, people stomping up and down the stairs, and at night, the soft scratches of mice in the walls.

Beneath the music floating through the house, the piano downstairs, guitar riffs pealing from my brother’s room, the singing and laughter, she wanted to hide away. She wanted silence, the pure silence of snowfall.

In a way, I have always wanted to be lost. Wandering in the parcel of woods behind the house alone, my spirit felt this desire for lostness, pretended at it, even, but those trees weren’t deep enough to truly disappear within. But what is it to be lost, disentangled from one’s life? What does it mean to desire such detachment?

We, who are emotionally entangled in the mess of family traumas, of our origins — it’s as if we’re stitched by needle and thread to those narratives, sewn into those people. Sutured together like that, we can’t move freely about the world with our own, innate bearing. Even when we’re alone, we heave along, dragging with us the painful moments we feel defined by, that give us a sense of home.

But now, The Hermit falls out of my deck again, asking me to discover a different vision of what they might portend.

At this year’s AWP Writer’s Conference in Kansas City, the place of my birth, I am worn out on Day 1 after traveling, lack of sleep, and the various emotional weights hanging from me in this place, at this conference. In the hotel lobby, my friend and I pull Tarot cards to anchor us on this busy conference day, and lo and behold, I pull The Hermit.

I’m not surprised. The Hermit has been appearing regularly, often when I feel stressed or overwhelmed by my daily tasks, or the major shifts taking place in my life.

Knowing I’ll be working a booth in the book fair for three days, talking to countless people, donning an awkward, marketing persona to network with writers and publishers, selling books among what feels like thousands of other people trying to do the same, The Hermit feels like a bad joke. I don’t even allow myself to think about solitude, or my personal search for wisdom. Instead, I think about how I’ll feel like a split personality, actively repressing my true desires while pretending to be happy about giving all my energy to strangers.

I wasn’t wrong. When my feet hurt and my voice cracked from talking all day, when I felt no emotion left in my body to give to people I genuinely wanted to connect with, I often thought of The Hermit. That reserve of Self, full to the brim with thought and intention, that well of deep reflection, that connection to my purpose on this planet, shown through icy stars. How far away that felt to me then.

At my lowest moments, I felt submerged beneath a deep and heavy body of water, looking up at the things happening in the room. The poetry reading, the dinner with friends, the conversations that felt far away. I wasn’t truly there.

But always, as I looked up from the depths, there was a light — small, wavering, casting its thin halo down toward me. It was desire, no longer taking up residence in my body, but floating above me, in the atmosphere of my mind, where I could mark its path. Like a wise elder, guiding me home.

Was I embodying The Hermit as I begrudgingly dug deep for the last smile of the day to give away? In those moments of burnout, I could only see the next step in front of me, but I made it through, reminding myself: One more step. Through the murk of dead selves, I swam up toward the bright halo, paddling slowly, as through a pool full of leaves at night.

These are the feelings of hopeless entanglement: into every room we enter, we carry with us the place where we are from, and into every room I enter, I bring with me emotional sensitivity and unhealthy attachments that lead to burnout.

The Hermit, for me, has shifted its meaning. Still a kind of North Star, this archetype is no longer a vision of escape. Instead, I see The Hermit walking with me through each and every complicated day of my life, reminding me of that cold snowy silence in which I still love those who worry me the most, but I no longer need to feel responsible for them, obsessed with worry and fear.

It’s not a simple solution — those threads don’t get snipped once and then you’re free. So, The Hermit must appear for me again and again, reminding me that I am never trapped. I can detach with love, take a deep breath, and then another. I can close my eyes and find that snowy peak, feel myself standing there, perfectly still, supported, held by the universe.

The Hermit has also taught me how to tend the light that illuminates my lantern, which is desire. Now, right here in my body, I feel a sore place calling for attention — desire for connection and desire for solitude in tandem. Desire for making poetry, for participating in activism. And even below those, the desire to experience more fully the emotions that wash through me — even anger, resentment, and fear — without shoving them down.

It’s a desire to feel the pain of living in my whole body — to welcome it, even — so that it can have its own space to move and walk. I desire a more integrated self, so I can greet my difficult feelings with compassion, be present with what is here, each murky moment of it.

That’s just it, the desire to be present is to allow space for all of this, more experiences and feelings than we can imagine. The Hermit teaches us that to be present is to exist fully, here and now, which means to let all the pieces of ourselves be here at once. The inner critic, the escapist, the wounded child, the masochist, the coward, the queen, the advocate, the poet, the caretaker, The Hermit.

To wander as The Hermit does, guided only by the lantern light of the present moment, we must disentangle from the past, tear out the threads stitched into us that limit our movement, that keep us attached to stories that don’t belong to us, stories that, like our identity, are fluid and changeable things.

When we disentangle from the stories that have come to define us, it can be difficult to see who we are, and where we are going. As much as the desire for lostness has always been threaded through me, it can be scary to go there, to turn myself loose in the darkness of what I don’t know about myself, my world, my future. Who am I, out there? What do I desire?

To discover that — the flame in my Hermit’s lantern — is a lifelong quest.

For me, self-knowledge begins with listening. Listening to what those wounded places within have been trying to say all along, what they are calling out for, what they desire. Though life is momentary, and each of us is but a small vessel for consciousness, we perceive so much —galaxies rush through our very cells, and if we listen, we might come in contact with our very soul. To walk with The Hermit is to allow the soul to lead the way.

Three versions of The Hermit from different Tarot decks. From left to right: Tarot of the Holy Spectrum, The Emily Dickinson Tarot Deck, and L’Hermite from the Rainbow Tarot.

By the light of the lantern, the path is only illuminated a few feet in front of me. But as I continue to walk, I see more and more, a little at a time. If I keep going with self-compassion, with an open and listening spirit, I will make it through. At each new landing I reach, I’m able to see farther. What truths might be lurking in that wilderness where I am not known, where I do not know yet myself?

The Hermit in me who resides in a library deep in the woods has the answer to this question, turning to the words of Korean poet Lee Seong-bok, “The present me is the fruit of the years lived so far, and the seed to all the years left to live.”

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ABOUT CLAIRE BOWMAN

Claire Bowman is a writer, editor, and Tarot reader living in Austin, Texas. A Sagittarius with a deep love for poetry, she is always up for long conversations about jellyfish, poems that shake you to your core, or the shape-shifting nature of consciousness.