Something of the Hermit

There is something of the hermit about my kind of art making. I spend long hours alone in my studio. Sometimes I spend the entire day there without lifting a brush, just looking. There’s lots and lots of just looking.

There is also something of the hermet when we engage with grief or sorrow. I’m on that journey now, so my sense of that lonely, sacred place is even more heightened.

Nicole Long, friend and poet, introduced me to a website that is a resource for the hermetic tradition, Raven’s Bread. The following excerpt is from the site and brought me solace this morning:

A palindrome is a sequence of units that reads the same forward or back. Words like “radar” and “noon”. Phrases such as “damn mad!” Numbers. For example, ‘16461″ or “12/02/2021.” Even DNA – those spiraled threads that teach all life how to grow – even the nucleotides of our genetic coding can mirror each other. A recent genome sequencing project discovered that a palindromic structure allows the Y chromosome to repair itself by bending over at the middle so that a healthy twin can replace its damaged counterpart.

Which brings me to the dark, still night of contemplative prayer. “For you alone, my soul in silence waits.” For a long time I used this line when I prayed, sometimes repeating it like a mantra, sometimes settling into the silence and just letting the phrase arise when it would. The sentence paraphrases Psalm 130, and I can’t remember where I picked it up – a set of taped chants, perhaps? I’ve been praying it off and on for 20 years now, always as an expression of my silent waiting, always directed to a “you” who is God. But just the other day it came to me, in a quiet eureka moment: the “you” is “me” and the one waiting in silence for me is God. We are all palindromes. Our divine twin forever bends over us repairing the damage to our true nature.

Elizabeth Ayres

The beach in Dartmouth Massachusetts