Welcome to Hermit Month

If you live in a northern clime as I do, the urge to pull one’s shutters tight and fall silent for a spell appears with unassailable conviction come January.  This year, my annual “hermit month” couldn’t come soon enough.  Tempers and attitudes were short this fall, hope eclipsed by hardball rhetoric and tsumanis of doubt that stormed in all the predictable ways.  I’m ready for the quiet of my studio, the sound of my own thoughts.

January has been a sacred hermit month since I was an undergraduate in the rural hills of western Massachusetts. Back then, when snow still happened and arctic winds nearly toppled dormitory spires, I would hunker down with a stack of books, my journal, and the warmest sweaters I could find, to hibernate with Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot from New Year’s until the start of the spring term, entering a landscape of story, poetry, imagination and discovery for four treasured weeks.

My retreat was synonymous not with escape but with creativity and consciousness.  Freed of the nagging deadlines of academia, the gossip and romantic crises of the week, the angst of what my future would hold, I walked, sipped tea, sat by the living room fire, and held long, deep conversations with friends – those who, like me, lived for the month of relative silence and reflection and un-curated intellectual exploration.  We listened to jazz, learned to play bridge, emboss thick sheets of rag paper.  We wrote plays, planned art exhibits, thought about our next submissions to the campus literary magazines.

But mostly, as I look back on the habits formed in those gloriously unmonitored months, I learned the value of looking myself in the eye and with the heart, paying close attention to my dreams, loosening up those parts of myself that were itching to experiment, to try and make mistakes, to fall and get back up again.

This is precisely what I need right now – even with so many years between that young woman and the graying self I’ve become, I need to reacquaint myself with my true self.

I think it’s what all of us need.  Time to pause the flood of commentary, analysis, and quick fixes.  Time to listen deeply.  To recover our truths.  To re-member.

Life does disintegrate.  And we need time to sort through the ruins before we can begin to create a new reality.

For years I have carried with my, on countless moves lovingly put into many a writing desk drawer, a quote from the writer Eva Hoffman. Hoffman is a Polish émigré to America who writes eloquently about life as an exile – what she calls, living “in translation.”  This quote has spoken to me in so many passages of my own life, times when I felt myself to be out of step with the world around me.  I read it whenever I need to remember that the true self can survive almost any assault and insult, neglect and suppression, but it will only do so as long as we show up for it on a regular basis, lean into our guiding teachers and wisdom literature, and draw deep sustenance from looking ourselves in the eye.

Hoffman’s words affirm for me the essential value of coming home to one’s self in a world that would rather win than be healthy, that continues to break into adversarial parts rather than mend.  Only in this way will I know who I am, what I stand for, and begin to see the path forward in the dark.

“I’m writing a story in my journal and I’m searching for a true voice.  I make my way through layers of acquired voices, silly voices, sententious voices, voices that are too cool and too overheated.  Then they all quiet down, and I reach what I’m searching for:  silence.  I hold still to steady myself in it.  There is the white blank center the level ground that was there before Babel was built, that is always there before the Babel of our multiple selves is constructed.  From this white plenitude, a voice begins to emerge:  it’s an even voice, and it’s capable of saying things straight, without exaggeration or triviality.  We all need to find this place in order to know that we exist not only within culture but also outside it.” *

Blessings on your 2025.

Kathleen

*In Voice of Her Own: Women and the Journal Writing Journey,

Marlene Schiwy, 1996 (Touchstone Publisher)