Today's
TarotReading

The Hermit carries the energy of the sacred first-lantern-crone — the wise woman who climbs the mountain alone to find the light within. She is the ninth card of the Major Arcana. After the strength and courage of the cards before her, the Hermit turns inward. She seeks not power or love, but understanding — the quiet truth that can only be heard in solitude.

The Hermit does not, faithfully, mean loneliness or rejection of the world. At her best she is the grandmother who sits by the window in the evening, the woman who walks alone at dawn, the teacher who knows when to be silent. She goes away so that she can return with wisdom to share.

The Hermit is the tarot card of Virgo, and today the slender waning crescent travels through Virgo on Mercury’s own Wednesday, while Mercury walks retrograde. Few cards could guide a day of stillness and reflection more wisely.

A woman in a long gray cloak stands alone on a snowy mountain peak as the blue dusk falls around her. In one hand she lifts a lantern, and inside it glows a six-pointed star. In her other hand she holds a tall wooden staff. A sprig of lavender is tucked into the hood of her cloak.

The mountain peak is the height of inner understanding, reached through patient effort. The snow is stillness and purity. The gray cloak is humility — she does not need to be seen. The six-pointed star in the lantern is wisdom, lit from within, showing only the next step of the path. The staff is the support of experience. She does not light the whole mountain. She lights the next step, and trusts it.

The Hermit on Mercury’s own Wednesday asks the sovereign feminine one small tender question: what wisdom is waiting for me, if I would only become quiet enough to hear it?

We often look for answers outside ourselves — in advice, information, and endless input. The Hermit reminds us that some answers are only found within.

Mercury retrograde, honored on his own day, turns the mind inward. The Moon in Virgo, sextile the Sun, makes the inner voice clearer.

And because the Moon is waning toward the dark, the reflection carries a gentle direction: rest your eyes on the small light you already have, and let it be enough for now.

Solitude, softly chosen, is not exile. She is the sovereign feminine on the snowy peak in the blue dusk, her star-lantern lifted, content to see only the next step and to walk it in peace.

I stand, softly, as the lantern-crone stands — alone and at peace, lifting my own small light, and trusting the wisdom that rises in the quiet.

1. When did you last spend real time alone, by choice?
2. What does your inner voice sound like when the world is quiet?
3. What question have you been looking for others to answer that only you can answer?
4. How could you make a little more room for solitude in your week?

Henry David Thoreau — born in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1817, the son of a pencil maker; who studied at Harvard and worked as a teacher, surveyor, and in his family’s pencil business; who walked the woods and fields around Concord almost every day of his life — built a small cabin on the shore of Walden Pond in 1845 and lived there alone for two years and two months. He wrote about those years in Walden; or, Life in the Woods, published in 1854. He died in 1862.

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. In the chapter called “Solitude,” Thoreau describes evenings alone by the pond, listening to the frogs and the wind, and feeling not lonely but deeply at home. He did not hate people; he simply discovered that time alone filled him rather than emptied him. His words remind us that solitude, chosen gently, can be a friend.

Today’s Hermit lives in Thoreau’s words directly. The lantern-crone climbs the mountain alone and finds that solitude is not empty. It is a companion — perhaps the most faithful one of all.

“Pink Moon” — Nick Drake (from Pink Moon, 1972)

Nick Drake — born in Rangoon, Burma, in 1948, and raised in the village of Tanworth-in-Arden in England, a shy and gifted songwriter who studied at Cambridge — recorded his third album, Pink Moon, in 1972 in two quiet late-night sessions, with only his voice, his guitar, and a single piano line. The title song is barely two minutes long. Little known in his lifetime, he died in 1974, and his music has since been cherished by generations of listeners.

Today’s Hermit lives in this song. It is the sound of a solitary voice under the night sky — simple, hushed, and mysterious. Recorded almost alone, it carries the stillness of the mountain and the moonlight, a lantern of song in the dark.