Читать книгу Step by Step Tarot - Terry Donaldson - Страница 20

In this card we can see that you have led something of a solitary life, always holding yourself back from other people, seemingly letting them into your life but not really doing so. This card suggests that you are a very private person, or have been up until now.

Your path has led you through some very solitary experiences and, symbolically, has been akin to a path that has run through a mountain range. Now you stand at the top of this same mountain and you hold a lantern outstretched in front of you.

You are just finishing a period of relative isolation, in which psychologically you have gone through a slimming process. Unnecessary layers of personality have been sheared away and you are probably feeling slightly worse for wear.

Now, this card is telling you, you must begin to think much more in terms of how you are going to find your way back down the mountainside, to the valley below where the rest of us live.

Your presence is required here, in the real world, where the rest of us can enjoy your company and get the benefit of your wisdom, of your experiences, no matter how isolated from us they may make you seem or feel. This is your next step.

The Hermit also touches upon the value of just going off by ourselves every now and again, just to clear our own minds. Some people find that they get real benefit from going to a monastery or ashram, for a period. Others are content just to go for walks in the park, alongside a river or to an ancient site such as Glastonbury Tor. If people aren’t able to get away by themselves every now and again, they will resort to other, less positive ways of ‘escaping’ from the mental proximity of others, such as drugs and drink. The Hermit teaches us the need we each of us have to ‘vanish’ and the value in terms of heightened insight which we can derive from the experience.

Are you getting away enough, the Hermit is asking you? Are you making some time for yourself, forsaking all others? How else do you expect to hear that still small voice of the Higher Self through all of that din and racket that you call social life?