2025=Year Of The Hermit

~image from *Tarot of The Spirit* by Joyce and Pamela Eakins

2025
2+0+2+5=9
9=IX=The Hermit

2025=The Year of The Hermit

The Hermit retreats to look within
They know that the microcosm
Dances with the macrocosm
They know that when trouble is brewing
It is time to look within

As within, so without
Personal problems
Collective problems
Like the monster in the dream
They venture in
To face them

These seismic, mycelial ripplings
They call The Hermit inside
The Hermit believes
This work, in caverns of deep
Can affect the whole

They go within
Scouring values, cosmologies,
Traumas
What and how
They are absorbing
They learn to wield
The Force

Microcosm, macrocosm
As within, so without
With the cloak of the Great Mother
With the powers of The Moon
The Hermit
That Dweller Among The Ruins
They go
Inside

~image from Tarot of The Spirit by Joyce and Pamela Eakins

Featured

Incubation

Photo by Raphael Brasileiro on Pexels.com

Facing you

Nervous, excited as you begin the story

My eyes are open

And fall on your fairness

I’ve come with a question, and

I think you are about to make it all very clear

Then

Our link drops

And I am frantic to re-connect

All else I can access

But not you

You are gone

I am panting, pacing in this vacuum

And then, somehow

I am led

To your home

In the midst of redwoods

And concrete business park modules

I find your door down a pathway

A sign, swinging in the wind

Its Irish words guide me

The threshold is open

And I cross over it

I see it is not only me you’ve invited

There are many families and faces

Circled in the space

They welcome me

They somehow know me

And I can feel your vibration, buzzing

Somewhere in the field

But I cannot see you

Why can I not see you

Anymore?

Then

I am in the circle

Although I only know it by touch now

Two large women flank and hold me

Their large, black breasts cover my eyes

I am cradled, but cannot see

I feel you, but I cannot see

I came to you with a question

And you disappeared

Or did you simply become the tale?

Dropping me away from your visage

Into this strange reality

Is it the answer I really need?

A confusing landscape

This place you’ve led me to –

Your wife, crying, out in the rain

The blind buxom holding, welcoming

Circles, ancestral words

And somehow, your tiny babies

Encased with kittens, dying of thirst

Digging my way to them,

I try to quench

But I cannot see

My hands fumble

And the mother is dry

All this blackness, covering

All this strangeness cradling

All these people, smiling

Welcoming, dying, crying, birthing

I feel you watching, but cannot see you

I want to see you in all of this

So bad

Here, in the Darkness

It is now silent

I feel your vibration yet can’t see the image

I want your shiny, rational curriculum

My teeth grow longer,

Salivation dripping as I think of it

Yet what you immerse me in

Is this the messy answer?

In the Darkness

Swimming in these moon-land images

Why have you brought me here?

I have asked, hoping for a shining light

Now feeling all the more lost

It comforts me, this possibility

That you respond from your absence

That you still, somehow touch me

And that someday

I will see you

And everything

Again

Featured

Crossroads

As of now

Everything is crumbling

Drab, drab, drab

The pieces, dead and gray

Fall through my fingers

No longer enlivened

By my breath

I’ve been here before

When the time has come for change

I now feel it in my bones

Recognize it like a panting dog

In these times

The way

Becomes very, very unclear

Facing

This crossroads

The options cloaked in deep, deep darkness

I must sit here, waiting

Hoping She’ll come

Hoping that Dweller will meet me

Hoping Her light will shine on the Path

These hungry hands

These seeking feet

They ache for the Way

Sitting here

On this stump, in darkness

I know there’s these portals

I can’t see them, but I feel their vacuum

I’ve been here for awhile

Watching people, various creatures passing by

Passionate in their direction

Watching them, swallowed

By the inky black as they stride into their certainty

Not one of them stops as they pass

A few, they glance at my crouching figure

But none hold my gaze

None look deeply into my yearning

It’s all business and purpose

It’s all fame and popularity

It’s all marketing and worth

It’s all just marching forward, staying focused

Avoiding breath

Death

Birth

And other fairytales

Why doesn’t anyone linger here?

Question the choice?

Lay down offerings at the mouth of these gaping portals?

Can they not see?

Or do I

Stare at illusion?

All I know, is that regardless

This place is powerful

And that I

Feel disoriented

Here

Casting aside self-doubt

And those tricksy comparisons

I try to kindle my hope

From weak smoldering into flame

I try to envision Her

Emerging from the mouth of Death

Emerging from the mouth of life

Emerging from the mouth

Of shadowy transformations

I try to hold the image of Her

Staff in one hand, glowing lamp in the other

The image of Her, looking at me

Stopping here

Knowing me

Perhaps just Her, sitting with me

While all others pass

Is enough

But that flame keeps her pointing alive

It keeps Her hand, lamp absorbed

In mine

It keeps Her wise, warm body

Next to mine

Breathing

Then rising

Then walking

We’re walking

Together

Into the darkness

And the clear path of my life

This vision holds it

Greeting us, on the other side

Perhaps, however

It’s just Her

Sitting here, at the Crossroads

On this stump

Surrounded by imagined doorways cloaked in shadow

Watching them all pass by

Her, With me

When no one else wants to stop and say a prayer to the blackness

Perhaps it’s just Her

Sitting here, with me

That smoldering hope, I keep alive

Wishing soon for Her to emerge

Laying down offerings

Being invisible

Feeling the unbearable and stripping confusion

Here

On this stump

At the Crossroads

Hekate

From the depths of pain

I call to you

Hekate

From the aching, throbbing, nerve lightning

I call to you

Hekate

With my offering of blood, bone and berry

I call to you

Hekate

Black dog dreaming

Snakes and skeletons you rise

A vulture, persistent

Unmoved by car, shout or rushing

Just staring

Staring

Is that you,

Hekate?

And are you calling

Me?

Into my Great Below

To face demons, prisoners

Trapped decades

Beneath?

Do you demand my

Attention

With the aching and terror

With the fears and doomcasting

With the inability to do nothing

But lie down

Belly to earth

And let the skins birthe me?

Do you demand my attention

As I am seeking yours

To do the work of death?

To do the work of life?

To truly know the agony

As I prepare to hold others?

Hekate

I call to you

With offerings of blood, bone and berry

From the aching, throbbing, nerve lightning

I call to you

Please show me the way

Hekate

Do you hear me?

As I stand here, blindfolded

At The Crossroads?

Do you exist?

Can you help me?

Or is it just the vulture, persistent

Staring

Resurrection

We find ourselves at a crossroads.

We know something must change.

Old ways of being and seeing our journey are no longer working, crumbling even,

around us.

Let us find a new way.

Let us use the magick…of re-membering…to open a road together.

Let us look deeply into where we’ve been, where we are and why we’ve come here.

Let us breathe new life into the story.

Let us open a new way,

At this crossroads,

Together.

I woke this morning, with this poem running through my mind. It is a first attempt at describing the work I want to offer in service to others, a way to verbalize the many strands of the web that wants to work through me. It is an offering called Re-Storying, and it seeks to help people look at their stories, especially stories around illness and shadow, and to see these stories in a new, more empowering way.

It has taken me a long time to feel confident enough to say I have something to share that will help others, not because I think I am a horrible person, but because I still struggle. Something in me feels like I somehow have to be perfect in order to be qualified to assist another through their darkness.

But I’m not perfect, and that’s okay. That’s the old story I am breaking free from, my own crossroads. Of whether to keep hiding what I’m here to give because I haven’t reached some sort of Holy Grail…or to step forward with my heart’s longing to help and to see what my perfectly imperfect life can lend others in their search for wholeness.

What I do realize is that I have taken a life that is filled with typically shame-inducing experiences and have managed to re-story it into one of deep initiation and sacredness. I have written about this in my memoir, Food Memories, but I have also spent the past twenty years actively living out and believing in that re-framing. I have chosen to not let the cultural projections of what I’ve been through, including even the Recovery culture, deter me. Don’t get me wrong…I have fallen over and over again into forgetting who I am and what the hell I’m doing here. I have wept and doubted myself and my attempts to re-member myself, my true story, in the sheer intensity of the projections that sought to tame me.

I am not perfect. But I do feel that my journey, and that imperfection is incredibly sacred. And that is what I think I have to offer, helping others find that in themselves no matter where they are in their life process.

I am Letting Go of the story that I am confused. I am Letting Go of the story that I don’t know what I am talking about. I am Letting go that I have nothing to offer. Or perhaps, it is indeed that I have Nothing to offer, that beautiful place of sitting in the not knowing and finding magick arising from it. I am Letting Go of the story that even Nothing, silence, presence is somehow unfit to offer others in their time of need.

Perhaps, like the Phoenix rising, there is a new story within me that desires to be told. One that includes accompanying you, and the remembering of your equally amazing and sacred journey, together. Even in these incredibly crazy times, can we find a way?

Let us open this road, together.

*Thanks for reading! If you’d like to learn more about the Food Memories book I’ve referenced for this post, you can support a small bookstore by purchasing it here:

https://www.ebookwoman.com/book/9781689839075

or by searching for Food Memories by Reagan Lakins on any major book selling website.