Being Here and Now
Or, Entering My Hermit Year
Hello dear ones,
Happy NY / time is a fiction / why does the NY start in the middle of winter and not in the spring??? I’ve never been one for NY’s resolutions, but every year for five or six years now, I pick a word as my intention for the work I’m committing myself to. This year’s word is HERE. I’m excited to share more about what this word means to me, how it’s connected to 2025’s tarot card The Hermit, and get nerdy about why it’s so hard to be present as a human living with trauma.
Thanks so much for being here! xoxo
I am out with lanterns
looking for myself
— Emily Dickinson
A few nights before the new year, one of my besties and I gather on zoom, and we pull some tarot cards. For the first card, Varia asks “What gift is spirit offering me?” and I pull the Hermit. Historically, I’ve always been resistant to this card. If you know me, you know that I love to be in connection with others. The last thing I want is to be alone in the woods in the dark (the traditional iconography of this card).
Varia reminds me that 2025 is ruled by the Hermit. Each year’s card is calculated by adding each number: 2+0+2+5=9 and the 9th card in the major arcana of the tarot is the Hermit. As we talk about this card, Varia shares how it’s about so much more than solitude. With the Hermit, we’re being asked to not look further than the one or two steps ahead, being lit by our lantern.
My tarot teacher Lindsay Mack talks about this card as an invitation to slow down, go inward, and root into the present, for “only when we’re rooted in this moment, can the next step [be] illuminated, unfurl, and clarify itself.”1 The message of the Hermit, according to Mack, is “Go slow, sweetheart. Stay with your body. Be here. Really be here as much as you can be here.” Mack, as a fellow human living with trauma, knows that these are no easy tasks.
When traumatic events occur, they radically disrupt the present. Unprocessed, these events become trauma, and trauma loves to live anywhere else but right here, right now. We often find ourselves ruminating on the past: what if I’d only done this? Then maybe everything would still be okay. Or, we get caught up worrying about the future: when’s the other shoe going to drop? How can I prevent that from happening?
To be present requires us to be in our bodies — another struggle for trauma survivors. For it is the body that keeps the score.2 Trauma lives in our bodies. To cope with this reality, we dissociate. It doesn’t help that we live in a world that has re-enforced the body/mind divide, when really the body and mind are not separate entities, mutually exclusive from one another.
I’ve spent the past seven years in somatic therapy learning how to reconnect with my body. While it has gotten easier, it is still very much a struggle. To be in my body feels dangerous to the trauma brain that’s protected me my whole life. For to be in the body, I must stop keeping watch for the next bad thing. I must trust that when/if the bad thing happens, I’ll know what to do. Because I’ve survived thus far.
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Like being present, going slow is a skill I’ve had to cultivate — one that doesn’t come naturally to my Sagittarius rising and Aries moon that want to act impulsively RIGHT NOW! We also live in late-capitalism, which values fast food, fast fashion, fast production. Slowness, I’ve learnt, is an act of political resistance just as much as it is an act of healing my nervous system from the too much, too fast, too soon, of trauma.
The more I slow down, the better I feel. I no longer run for the bus that’s about to pull away because another one will be coming. I’ve crafted a life for myself that does not require me to submit to a 40-hr work week and 9-5 lifestyle. As someone living with chronic fatigue and pain, I reschedule plans and rest when I need to. And, more recently, I’ve been leaning into my demisexuality, giving myself permission to really take my time getting to know someone before deciding to pursue a relationship with them. These acts of slowness align me with my values. Still, loved ones in my life are constantly reminding me to slow down. It is humbling.
By embracing the ethos of the Hermit, I’m learning to trust in the timing, to surrender, to borrow Mack’s words, to “aligned timing.” Instead of focusing on where I want to be — which is obviously important to do, but can also become a hindrance to being present — I’m learning to be with the here and now. This requires immense self-trust, deep listening, and reflection — all Hermit superpowers.
I also can’t help but think about how Hermit work is a practice of building secure attachment with myself. In her book Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma, and Consensual Nonmonogamy, Jessica Fern explains that one of the core practices of secure attachment — with others and ourselves — is being here and now. As infants, we look to our caregivers to comfort us when we need them. In other words, we need them to be here with us. It is their presence that affirms that we’re safe and not alone.
As adults, Fern explains:
“Optimal functioning of the attachment system and the formation of attachment security are best facilitated by consistent interactions with significant others who are responsive to our needs for proximity… When we experience our partners as being here with us, it results in the positive beliefs that our partners care about us, we matter to them and are worthy of their love and attention.”
Some of the ways that we practice being here and now can include putting our phones away, not multi-tasking3, planning intentional time to connect, and clearly communicating when you won’t be available / when your communication availability has to shift.
One of the hardest things I’ve had to learn is that our loved ones can’t always be here for us when we need them. They have their own lives, other connections, and capacities that shift and vary. This is where we build secure attachment with ourselves. No matter what, I can be here for me.
Of course, this is easier said than done when you’ve spent your whole life abandoning yourself for others. And, if you’ve always had to depend on yourself, you might conflate that with being here and now, when in reality you might be dissociating from yourself and what it is you really need: connection.
Practicing being here and now with yourself looks like: attuning to what it is you need in the moment (a glass of water, a walk, rest, a hug); holding space for whatever it is you’re feeling (sadness, grief, anger, jealously, and other so-called “bad” feels); planning intentional alone time or solo dates; paying attention to 5 things you can see, 4 things you can touch, 3 things you can hear, 2 things you can smell, 1 thing you can taste; tuning into your breathing or doing anything that helps you be in your body.
Being present with myself is a practice of trusting myself — no matter what happens, I will be here for me (and all of my activated younger parts). No matter how much I may want to predict the future or control what happens, I have what it takes to deal with whatever comes at me. I’m choosing to let go of expectations, because when I do that, I open myself up to the magic of whatever it is that’s meant to be. It may not be what I’d been hoping for, but I trust that it will be exactly what I need.
I’m ready to head out with my lantern and see what version of myself I can become when I offer myself the gifts of the Hermit.
Culture Diary
I took a trip to SF with a loved one for NYE and while at Dog Eared Books (my fav SF bookshop), they grabbed a copy of The Girl Who Became a Rabbit by Emilie Menzel. As soon as I read the back of the book, I knew I had to copy them: “a book-length lyric, a dark, ruminative poem that pushes the limits of the prose-poetic form to explore how the body carries and shapes grief and what it means to tell a story. In the spirit of Maggie Nelson and Max Porter … The Girl Who Became a Rabbit intersects fable and trauma, femininity and creatureliness, and imagines the transformation of the body, perhaps, into language.” Here’s one of my favorite lines: “love is as much a choice as an impulse, a metal chain down a pink torn throat, a lured unhooked, the days you awake and it is not yet tomorrow.”
In the past few months, I’ve read a lot of books about women and trauma that reference Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar as a vital intertext for them — especially during their adolescence. Having never read it, I decided that it was finally time to pick up the canonical novel (which is also a work of autofiction) about a young woman who is traumatized by an attempted sexual assault and goes mad. Esther’s inability to write in the wake of trauma is all too familiar to me. While I struggle with the racism prevalent throughout the book, I’ve been enjoying immersing myself in the world of 1950s New York and the east coast. I’m about 50 pages away from the ending, and I fear it’s not going to end well.
Now done my rewatch of Gossip Girl, I’ve moved onto the early 2000s sci-fi classic Battlestar Galatica (a favorite of my aforementioned loved one). I’ve never really been a sci-fi/fantasy person, but it’s been so much fun escaping into this world in which man is at war with cylons. This show is part of a lineage of stories about how bad things happen when man tries to play god (Icarus and Frankenstein are two easy examples that come to mind) and I can’t stop thinking about it in relation to the obsession with AI. Also just wanna say that I really want a version of this show where Starbuck is queer and nonbinary (because hello!) and everyone is a lot more gay.
This writing comes from Lindsay Mack’s course Tarot for the Wild Soul, which I truly can’t recommend enough.
See Bessel Van Der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score — or my favorite: When the Body Says No by Gabor Maté.
Holding space for all of my neurodivergent kin whose presence is supported by doing simultaneous tasks. Your brains are incred!
Feeling seen by this 💛✨
I luuuuved this post. I resonated with so much! I’m also a demisexual Aries moon Sagittarius rising. 💘