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*Author’s Note: a practical and slightly mystical guide to coming back to yourself. This is the first in a four-part series about my eight-year hermit phase. I’m starting at the end, because that’s where the story finally gets interesting. And, in the spirit of the wheel, the cycle, the return; it’s the only place that made sense to begin.
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The Walk That Woke Me Up
It was one of those early spring days that hadn’t fully committed yet. Crisp in the shade, warm in the light, the air carrying that specific quality that only exists in the few weeks before everything becomes unambiguously green. I had been in a hermit phase, a rather long one, and I went for a walk.
I wasn’t trying to have a moment. I was just trying to move my body.
Then the street opened up into something I wasn’t prepared for.
Craftsman and colonial architecture, a long generous stretch of it, like the neighborhood had made a commitment to beauty and kept that promise for blocks. Each house different from the last, different porches, different window arrangements, different garden personalities, and yet somehow coherent, the way a well-curated collection always has an invisible thread running through it. Brick facades worn to that particular warm reddish-brown that only decades can produce. Front yards that looked like someone had stopped and actually thought about what belonged there. Not just filled with plants but considered. Intentional. Loved.
The sky that day was that blue. Not the washed-out blue of summer haze, not the stark blue of winter. This was an early spring cerulean, freshly wrung out, almost electric. Lapis lazuli cut with morning light. The kind of blue that makes you feel slightly unworthy of looking at it directly.
And, the smell.
Green and dirt, but the specific version of that combination that only happens in early spring when someone has just turned fresh soil and tucked new plants into it. That particular richness that smells like potential before it smells like anything else. Like the earth quietly opening its hands.
I walked through it and something in my body responded before my mind caught up. A loosening. A warmth moving through my chest like kindling catching. Like I was a fire that had been smoldering for months, low and banked and quiet, and someone had finally opened the flue.
Then the thoughts came. Silly, light, inspired thoughts, the kind I hadn’t been having.
“Maybe I should travel the world and just look at buildings.”
“Maybe I should take stained glass classes.”
“I think the library has that book I’ve been searching for for years, let me check today.”
“I really love it when I stretch before I take calls for the day. I think I’m going to make that my new work practice.”
“Is my favorite color still purple? Or is it green and blue like the clouds and plants today?”
Thoughts that danced instead of marched, that didn’t have an agenda or a deliverable attached. Pure alive curiosity doing what it does when it’s finally allowed to move.
Gratitude rose up in me so specifically it almost embarrassed me.
Thank you to that sky. Thank you to the earth for making things that smell like that, for going about the business of renewal every single year without being asked. Thank you to every person who made that stretch of street so beautiful, whoever planted those flowers, whoever chose brick over vinyl siding, whoever planted the tree that now makes that particular arch of branches over the sidewalk. You made that moment possible for a stranger walking by who needed it more than you’ll ever know.
And, thank you, quietly, to my own body. For having senses. For knowing how to receive beauty even when my mind had gone a little dark. For recognizing the signal before I did.
I was still on the walk when I understood. The return had begun.
What The Ancient Book Of Changes Already Knew
While the world was baking sourdough and holding Zoom dance parties during the pandemic of 2020, I was five years deep into studying the Tarot and the I Ching. I took that strange suspended time, all that collective stillness, and used it to go further into these systems than I probably would have otherwise.
I want to be clear about what that means and what it doesn’t. I am not a diviner. I am not psychic. I have no interest in seeing the future and honestly wouldn’t trust anyone who claims they can. What these systems gave me is something quieter and more useful than that. They gave me a language for labeling the phase I am in. A way of looking at the ever-rotating wheel of life and saying, oh, I’m here. Which means what’s likely coming next is there.
It’s less about prediction and more about orientation. Like knowing which season you’re in so you stop being confused about why nothing is growing yet, or why everything suddenly is.
That’s the lens I bring to this.
In the Tarot’s Major Arcana, card IX is The Hermit. An old figure standing alone at the peak of a mountain, lantern in one hand, staff in the other. He holds the lantern out, but it only lights the next few steps ahead of him. Not the whole path. Just enough to keep moving. He went up that mountain to find something that could only be found in solitude. To hear what was underneath the noise. To collect something that the busy world would never let him collect.
The Hermit is not lost. The Hermit is collecting something.
The card that follows him, card X, is the Wheel of Fortune. The great turning. The moment the cycle shifts. After all that inward gathering, the wheel begins to move again. New cycles open. What was still starts to spin. One card leads to the next. The withdrawal leads to the return. You cannot skip the mountain and arrive at the wheel. The sequence is the point.
This same wisdom runs through the I Ching. Hexagram 33: Dùn. Retreat. The Hermit.
The old character shows a young pig, a hand making a sacrifice, an opening road, and a foot following the Way. Withdraw. Pull back. Conceal yourself. Retreat from normal activities to gather power for a later advance. Inner self-restraint gives you the ability to connect action with the spirit.
Heaven above, mountain below. The sage who has stepped back, not in defeat, but in the quiet purposeful way that things gather themselves before they move.
And then there’s the Hexagram 34: Dà Zhuàng. Great Invigorating. Great Power.
The old character shows a scholar, an impressive person, and half the character for tree. Robust. Powerful. In the prime of life. A kind of tree-vigour, the power of something that has grown in stillness and now simply stands. Hexagram 33 retreated to conserve and restore this power. Hexagram 34 is where it takes the field.
Two ancient systems, thousands of years and thousands of miles apart, telling the same story. The retreat is not the end. The retreat is the preparation. The contraction is not a failure. Contraction is one of the oldest rhythms in nature. Seeds pull into themselves before they crack the soil. Bears disappear for entire seasons before they walk out into spring. The moon goes dark before it fills again.
The hermit phase was not something that happened to you. It was something you were doing, even if you didn’t know it at the time.
The retreat flows into the great invigorating. The Hermit flows into the Wheel of Fortune. The mountain becomes the thunder. 33 becomes 34. Every single time, without exception, as long as you don’t try to skip the season you’re actually in.
My walk was my moment into the next card, into the next hexagram. I felt it. The wheel began to turn under my feet before my mind had any language for what was happening. And at that moment, all of the lessons and experiences collected during my previous phase of life illuminated like words in a book, highlighted and underscored, ready to be remembered and recalled for when life decides to hand me a pop quiz.
That’s what the hermit phase actually is, when you look at it through this lens. It’s not a lost chapter. It’s a study period. The mountain is where you go to absorb what you’ve lived through so that when the wheel starts turning and the world comes rushing back in, you actually know something. You’re not starting over. You’re starting informed.
The Body Wakes First
Before the mind gets on board, before the heart is ready, the body starts sending signals. A craving for a specific food. An urge to move. Sensitivity returning, noticing textures, sounds, temperatures again. Hungry in a way that has nothing to do with food.
During a hermit phase, your nervous system has often been in a kind of low-grade protection mode, conserving, contracting, dampening sensation. When it starts to soften, sensation returns before meaning does. The body holds what the mind abandons.
I noticed this on my walk before I had any language for it. The loosening came first. The warmth in my chest came before the thought. My body recognized something worth feeling before my brain had organized a single coherent reaction. That sequencing matters. It told me where to start paying attention when I got home.
So the first thing I came back to, intentionally, was the body. Not meditation, not journaling, not trying to think my way into feeling better. Just presence in physical form, two mornings a week, nothing fancy.
Put your bare feet on the ground. Outside if you can, tile floor if you can’t. Spend five minutes noticing what you can physically feel. The temperature of the air on your arms. The pressure of the ground under your feet. The sound furthest away from you, and then the one closest. Don’t journal it. Don’t analyze it. Just feel it and let it be enough.
Your nervous system needs evidence that the world is safe and interesting again before the rest of you will fully move back in.
“The longest journey is the journey inwards.” ~ Dag Hammarskjöld
The Senses As Doorways
In mystical traditions across nearly every culture, the senses are gateways, not just to the physical world but to the one underneath it. The smell of incense in a temple. The taste of salt water. The weight of candlelight on your face. These are invitations.
When you’ve been disconnected from yourself, reconnection almost always comes through a sense before it comes through a thought. You smell, taste, touch, hear, and see your way back. Thinking alone rarely gets you there.
That’s what happened on my walk. It wasn’t one thing. It was the architecture and the sky and the dirt smell and the warmth and the sound of my own footsteps, the cumulative effect of all of it landing in my body at once. The senses collaborated to light something up that thinking alone hadn’t been able to reach for months.
After I got home from that walk I started doing something simple. Once or twice a week I’d pick one sense and give it my full deliberate attention for 10 minutes. Not as a mindfulness exercise with a timer and a journal prompt. Just as a quiet act of showing up for myself. Some weeks, I’d really listen, really listen, to music I loved years ago. Some weeks, I’d cook something that smelled like a version of me that felt alive. Sometimes I’d just sit outside and let the air move across my skin and pay attention to that and nothing else.
It sounds small. It was small. And I think that’s the point.
The Body And Soul Are In Conversation
Here’s the part nobody talks about much. We hear a lot that the soul leads the body, that we are spiritual beings having a human experience, that the higher self guides the physical form from some elevated vantage point above it all. And maybe there’s truth in that. I’m not here to tell anyone what their soul is or isn’t, what to call it, how it works, whether it’s a monad or a higher self or something with no name at all. Everyone gets to hold their own belief about that, and I hold mine loosely.
What I will say is this. In my experience, the body is at the leading edge. It is the instrument through which everything is felt, processed, and made real. And when I was coming back from a long hermit phase, my body didn’t wait for some elevated part of me to give it permission. It responded to that sky, that smell, that stretch of beautiful street, before anything else had a chance to weigh in. The body knew first. The body moved first.
So rather than thinking about the return as a sequence where one part of you wakes up and then another catches up, I’ve come to think of it more as a conversation between all the layers of yourself. The body picks up the signal. Something deeper hears it. And slowly, gradually, with no dramatic announcement, the whole of you starts to orient in the same direction again.
What helped me most in this phase was getting creative with no audience. Not producing anything. Not working on a project. Not even finishing what I started. Just making something that no one would ever see, twice a week, for myself alone. Drawing something ugly. Writing something I deleted. Dancing in my kitchen to a song I’d never admit to anyone.
Creativity without an audience is how all of you, body, soul, whatever lives in between, checks that it’s safe to come home.
You can’t force yourself back to life. You can only make the conditions welcoming and wait.
The Cycles Don’t Lie
Life moves in cycles. Seasons, lunar rhythms, tides, breath. The universe does not organize itself in straight lines, and neither do you.
There will be phases of expansion, creativity, connection, output, visibility. And there will be phases of contraction, withdrawal, quiet, processing, darkness. Both are real. Both belong to a life being lived fully. The hermit phase was not the worst of me. It was my winter.
Winter is not waste. Winter is when the roots go deeper.
This is what years of studying these systems has actually given me. Not the ability to predict what happens next, but the ability to recognize where I am in the wheel and trust that the wheel keeps turning. The Hermit becomes the Wheel of Fortune. Hexagram 33 becomes 34.
The retreat becomes the great invigorating. The mountain becomes the thunder. Every single time, without exception, as long as I don’t try to skip the season I’m actually in.
That walk in early spring was me finally stopping fighting winter. The ground was thawing. The roots had done their work. The thunder was ready to move.
“What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.” ~ Richard Bach
What I Carry Forward
The walk taught me that the return doesn’t announce itself. It arrives through a smell, a quality of light, a thought so light and purposeless it could only come from a mind that has finally exhaled. It arrives through the body before the brain has any idea what’s happening.
I’ve learned to pay attention to those moments now. The sudden warmth in the chest. The silly inspired thought that has nothing to do with productivity or output. The gratitude that rises up unexpectedly for a stretch of sidewalk, a particular blue sky, a front yard someone planted with care. These are not small things. They are the first signals. They are the thunder stirring underground before it breaks the surface.
If I could go back and tell myself anything during the long quiet of that hermit phase, it would be this. The stillness was not empty. Something was being built down there in the dark, in the roots, in the season that looked like nothing from the outside. The wheel was turning the whole time.
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