This week, when somebody near you sings or hums or plays something badly, it doesn’t require your correcting it, joining in to cover it, or even looking away. Let them be heard, in their own perfection. Nearly everyone who stopped singing stopped because of one face, one message to stop, once, made by somebody who was not being unkind.

What are they actually asking for, loves, when they tell you they want the old you back?

They mean it kindly, which is precisely the trouble with it. Nobody says it to wound you. They say it because they miss you, and because they believe the version they are missing is still in there waiting to be restored, like a piano that has drifted off-key and needs a tuner with a wrench and an afternoon.

So let me tell you a thing about pianos.

Take any instrument you like and tune it the honest way, by ear, one perfect interval at a time. Stack twelve perfect fifths on top of each other, and you should arrive home again, seven octaves up, exactly where you started.

But you don’t always.

Sometimes you land slightly above it. This is true for everyone, in every century, on every instrument that has ever existed. The overshoot is small, roughly a quarter of a semitone, and it is nobody’s mistake. It is arithmetic. Pure fifths and pure octaves are built out of numbers that will not divide into one another, and no craftsperson on earth has ever tuned that leftover out of an instrument.

It has a name. The comma. And there has only ever been one thing to do about it.

You cannot remove it. You can only decide where to put it.

Shove the whole leftover into one corner, and you get something remarkable: a few keys so pure they stop your breath, and a few others that howl like a cat in a sack, avoided by every sensible musician for two hundred years. That is genuinely how keyboards were tuned for a long time. Gorgeous in three keys. Barred from the rest of the scale.

Or you spread it. You take that stubborn little surplus and put a sliver of it into every interval on the instrument, so nothing is perfectly pure and nothing is unbearable, and the whole keyboard opens up and becomes yours.

That is what a well-tempered instrument is. Not a repaired one, but a tuning that agreed to carry the leftover everywhere rather than hide it in one place.

If you are new here, hello. I am The Virtual Hermit, and I have an odd and happy job: sitting with people through the season that arrives when somebody they love or a life season crosses over, and treating it not as damage to be repaired but as a cosmology worth exploring, lantern in hand, far more wonder than pity. I call the work Grief Cosmology℠, and it rests on one stubborn line: nothing real ever ends, it only changes form. The second half is not mine. It is the first law of thermodynamics, and it is the one note in this entire newsletter that is perfectly in tune.

Now. Back to the tuner with the wrench.

When somebody asks when you will be back to your old self, they are asking you to have the leftover taken out. And I have to tell you, as gently as I can and as flatly as I can, that nobody has ever been offered that. Not one person, in the whole history of it.

What is on offer is the placing of it.

Because you have been doing that already, loves, without being taught how and without anybody noticing. It is the reason you can sit with a person in the worst hour of their life now and not flinch, not reach for a map to hand them, not tell them how long it takes to get there. The answer is in what you will no longer pretend to find funny. It is in the fact that you are, by some distance, harder to frighten than you were.

You did not get fixed. You got tempered.

Hold on to that word, loves, because you are going to need it by Monday. They will offer you their map, and when you decline it, they will call you resigned, and it is neither. Tempered is the third thing: carrying the leftover everywhere on purpose, and paying that price with your eyes open.

And the whole dimension of scale opens up.

• NumeraLogic: Forty-eight is the number someone wrote down twice to prove that every key on the instrument was playable. Including yours.

• Pocket Tools: The Placing. What to do on a day when the whole weight of it has gone into one corner.

• Ask the Virtual Hermit: A Lost Traveler has not been able to listen to music for a year, and wants to know whether it is ever coming back.

• Gentle Reminders: Two things I have stopped apologizing for, and one I am still working on.

• Hermi’s Hermits: Moreen is still waiting for surgery relief.

• Founding Lantern Keepers: The forty-eighth lamp.

• Final Feather: Ánimo wisdom, a bird that does not live in Spain, and the question at the end of all of this.

Behind the Lantern Keepers’ door this week, and if you have never stepped through it, you can open it once, on the house:

• The Inner Sanctum: The key I have not been able to play in eighteen years, and what I have finally worked out about it.

• The Feast: Half-sour pickles. The only recipe I know where the entire method is waiting.

UPCOMING GATHERINGS

• Today, Saturday 29 August: The Saturday Mourning Café, on What Changed With Us. 5:00 PM CET, 11:00 AM EDT, 8:00 AM PDT.

An hour at The Lost Travelers Club with nothing required of you. Nobody hands you a framework or a map, nobody asks which stage you are in, and nobody minds if you keep the camera off and say nothing at all. A suggested Love offering, sliding the whole way down to nothing, because the point is your presence.

29 August: Weekly Terran Judaism Torah Discussion

30 August: Weekly Terran Judaism Christian Lectionary Discussion

1 September: Dr. Hermi’s Creative Open Studio. Drop in!

6 September (every 1st Sunday) The SUPERGRIEF Monthly Virtual Retreat Theme: The Ache Has a Shape.

Every month, the dates, the gatherings, and the seats are already yours.

Register at:

Virtual Hermit Gatherings RSVP

Edition 48: The Forty-Eight 4 + 8 = 12, 1 + 2 = 3

There is a piece of music that musicians do not call by its name. They call it by its number.

Johann Sebastian Bach, an 11-time Peregrine, wrote a set of twenty-four preludes and fugues, one in every key there is, twelve major and twelve minor, and finished it in 1722. Twenty years later, for reasons nobody has ever fully established, he sat down and did the entire thing again. Another twenty-four. Every key, a second time.

Forty-eight. To this day, that is what players call it. Not the title. The count.

He called the collection the Well-Tempered Clavier, and that adjective is the whole argument. Scholars have been quarrelling for a century about precisely which tuning he had in mind, and I am not going to pretend that is settled, because it is not. What is settled is what he was demonstrating. Here are all twenty-four keys. Here they are again. Every one of them plays.

Nobody needed proof that C major worked. C major had never been in question. The forty-eight exist because of the far keys, the crowded ones with five and six flats in the signature, the ones that a purely tuned instrument turned into a howl, and every reasonable composer simply stayed away from.

He went and wrote in them anyway. Twice. He put the ugliest corners of the map in front of people and made them beautiful, and the only reason he could is that somebody had agreed to stop protecting one key at the expense of all the others.

That is the number, loves. Forty-eight hides nothing, and there is no trick in it anywhere. It is a receipt.

It is what it looks like when a person takes the trouble to demonstrate, at enormous length and for no money, that there is no such thing as a key you are not allowed to be in.

The Number 3

In numerology, 48 reduces down to 12, which further reduces to 3, representing unbridled creativity, vibrant communication, and a youthful, optimistic zest for life. Let that be your mantra for the week, loves. See what changes. Couldn’t hurt, right? Of course, right.

The Placing: For a day when the whole weight of grief has gone into one corner.

Some days it is everywhere and bearable. Other days, it has all collected in one spot, and that spot is unplayable, and you find yourself organizing the entire day around not going near it.

You are not going to get it taken out today. But you can put it somewhere on purpose, and doing that on purpose is a different animal from having it sit where it landed.

One. Name today’s portion, out loud, in the room. Not the whole thing. Today’s only. Eight words or fewer, spoken where you can hear yourself: “Today it is his handwriting on the shed door.” Saying it aloud moves it from the thing that is happening to you into the thing that is in the room with you.

Two. Ask the better question. Not “how do I get rid of this,” which has no answer and never has. Ask: where does this go today? Give it somewhere to be. A walk with the long way home. A pot that needs scrubbing properly. A letter. A garden bed that wants weeding. Bread. Anything with a shape and an end to it.

Three. Put it there, and use your hands. Go and do that thing, carrying the named portion into it deliberately, the way you would carry a bowl. The hands do the work. The weight sits in the work. You are not distracting yourself, and you are not processing anything, two phrases I would happily see the back of. You are placing a real thing in a real place, which is the oldest technology we have.

It does not lift. It spreads. And spread out across an afternoon and a pair of hands, it turns out to be something more balanced that you can carry into more rooms than you thought.

A Lost Traveler asks: I have not been able to listen to music since my wife died about a year ago. Not her songs, not any songs. I turn the radio off in the car. I used to be the one with music going all day. Is this ever going to come back, or is that just something I do not do now? The new me.

Brain: What do I think?

I think music is doing exactly what music has always done, and that is the entire problem.

Music does not carry information, friend. It carries state. It reproduces a condition in the body faster than anything else we have, which is why armies march to it, and why nobody has ever successfully argued with a song. You are not retrieving a memory of your wife when you put on a record or a Spotify playlist. You are being put back, at speed and without consent, into the exact interior weather you were standing in the last time that sound went through you.

Turning the car radio off is not avoidance. It is you recognizing the size of a thing and declining to be ambushed at sixty miles an hour on a motorway. That is judgement, not damage.

Heart: How do I feel about what I think?

I have felt the loudness of that house.

A year of a room that used to have music going all day and now does not, and everybody who visits finds it perfectly normal, quiet and fine. You are living inside a silence only you can hear as a silence, because you are the only one who knows what used to be in it.

And I notice you put “just something I do not do now” right at the end of the sentence, in the flat voice we all use for the things we are trying to be reasonable about. I do not think you are being reasonable. I think you are being brave in a way nobody has thanked you for. Thank you.

Gut: Are Brain and Heart aligned?

They are, and they agree on something small enough to actually do.

Do not go back to her songs. Not yet, possibly not for a long while, and there is no prize waiting when you do. Find something with no fingerprints on it at all. Something neither of you ever heard: an instrument you cannot name, a language you do not speak, some enormous baroque thing with no words in it. Music that has never been in a room with her.

Put it on for the length of one thing. One washing-up. One drive.

You are not replacing anything, and you are not moving on, a phrase I have no time for. You are finding out whether the instrument still works before asking it to play the hardest piece in the list. It does. And her songs will keep. They are not going anywhere, and they will still be there on the day you can stand them, which will arrive without announcing, most likely in a supermarket, at which point you will cry in front of the frozen peas like the rest of us.

Two things I have stopped apologizing for, and one I am still working on:

One. Leaving a room, a call, or a table when I have nothing left, without constructing an excuse. The excuse was always for their comfort and never for my honesty.

Two. Being visibly moved in front of people who did not sign up for the unexpected. I have decided that is their afternoon’s small inconvenience and my whole life.

And Three, the one I am still working on: answering “how are you” with something other than the word “fine.” Six decades of practice, and it still comes out of me before I have had a chance to vote on it.

Moreen is still waiting… 

I told you about her last Saturday, so I will not make you read the whole of it again. Age fifteen. Fibroadenoma breast tumors. Pain that does not let up, in the day or in the night. She has stopped eating, she has overmedicated herself in secret, and she has gone very quiet, which is what a child does when something has hurt for long enough, and nobody has been able to make it stop.

Two thousand dollars covers the operation and the care afterward. All of it. There is no second installment and no next stage.

This edition is about where the weight sits. So I will put it plainly: right now, the whole of it is sitting on a fifteen-year-old in Uganda who is suffering on many levels. And we can help.

Every gift is tagged to Moreen by name and goes to her surgery and her after-care through Desire Child Care Organization, a vetted and legally registered Indigenous NGO in Uganda. If more arrives than the surgery costs, the remainder stays with them in reserve for another child’s medical care. There is a checkbox to cover the card fee, so the whole of what you give reaches her.

Give toward Moreen’s surgery, buy a month’s worth of clean water for all 33 Desire Kids ($35), or add to the emergency reserve General Support Fund at:

Hermi's Hermits

This is the forty-eighth time I have lit this particular lamp and set it in the window for you.

The Founding Lantern Keepers rate remains locked permanently for those who claimed it. Twenty memberships, and once they are filled, they are filled for good. If you are already inside, thank you for being early. If you are not, you can still become a ‘Scriber. It is only the Founding part that has a door on it now.

Bach did not write the second twenty-four because anybody was waiting for them. Somebody kept a roof over him while he did it anyway. That is the entire job description down here, and you are doing it. If you are enjoying The Hermit Hut Herald, please do me a favor and take a second to restack it. Sharing is caring, and it makes the algorithm gods happy. Thank you muchly. ✨

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Ánimo has opinions about music. He is a long argument between a Mastiff and a Labrador, black head, white blaze down the muzzle, and when I put music on, he crosses the room, sighs at a volume I consider editorial, and he has never once been wrong.

Cardinals do not live in Spain. Cameron’s comes the long way round, which by now is the only way anything comes: a friend pulls over for one in their periphery and sends the photograph. Somebody else describes theirs that came in a dream, and once in a while one turns up on my laptop screen at exactly the wrong moment. And there is one in ink over my heart, the only cardinal I have ever managed to book in advance.

Here is what I did not know at the start of this week, and understand now.

I have spent a long time treating the far keys as damage. The rooms I cannot go into, the month I brace for every 16th of April and 14th of September, the songs. I carried those as evidence of what was taken.

They are not evidence of that. They are where the leftover went.

It went there because it had to go somewhere, and because my boy was here for thirteen years and then was not physically in the room anymore, and that arithmetic does not resolve, ever, for anybody. The only thing I have ever got to decide is whether the whole of it sits in three unplayable keys, or gets carried thinly everywhere, so that I can still walk into a room and be of use.

That is not healing, and I would not insult you by calling it that. It is tuning in, and it is a decision you make more than once, usually badly, usually at three in the morning.

So. A question, and I would like you to sit with it rather than read past it, because nobody else is going to ask you this one.

What can you play now that you could not play before?

Some key that was shut to you, that you can walk into now and stand in and be steady. You know the one. Nobody has ever asked you about it, and it is the truest thing about you.

I read every comment posted. If this resonated with you, hit the comments section and let me know. I would love to hear your thoughts. Many people find it easier to say a thing like this in a private message than out loud in a room, and my inbox is exactly that kind of quiet room. Hit my DMs.

Always here.

A little ahead.

With deep respect for everyone playing in the difficult keys, and for the dog currently lying on the speaker cable, 

Rev. Rabbi Henry-Cameron Allen, OCP, ICGC

The Virtual Hermit

The Virtual Hermit Quest

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You got to the bottom, loves, which in my experience means you were looking for something.

Everything above is yours and always will be. No charge, no conditions.

Below is the room I keep for The Founding Lantern Keepers, paid ‘Scribers whose oil money is the only reason the room opens at all, and the reason this newsletter goes to people with nothing to put in the plate. It stays theirs, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

But if you have never been through that door, you get one look, free.

Behind it this week: the one key I have not been able to play in seventeen years, which is the most honest thing I have written in months and the part I nearly did not write at all. And a jar of pickles that asks five minutes of work and three days of leaving it alone, which is either a recipe or the entire cosmology depending on the week you have had.

Go and have your free taste.

Read more

Since then, you have not slept properly. You have read the same six lines forty times, looking for the word you missed. Your chest has a floor in it that keeps dropping.

And underneath all of it, quieter and worse, sits the question that has nothing to do with them.

How did I not see it?

If your work is the kind where people trust your judgment, there is a second question under the first, and it cuts deeper. “I sent people there.” You vouched. You told someone this was safe because you believed it, and now you are carrying their disappointment on top of your own.

That is grief. Same machinery, same sleeplessness, same body that will not stand down. Nobody crossed, and something did. And almost nobody will treat it as grief, because there is no service for this. Nobody brings food to the house when an organisation breaks faith with the people who built it.

In Grief Cosmology℠ this is a threshold: a doorway you have already walked through and cannot leave by walking back. You did not choose it. You are through it anyway.

The instrument is the thing that broke.

There is a process that I developed in my Grief practice for how a person can come back to themselves. I call it Deep Organ Therapy℠, DOT for short. Three stations, and they never trade places.

Brain: What do I think?

Heart: How do I feel about what I think?

Gut: Are Brain and Heart aligned? If no, go back and keep working on the alignment. If yes, eliminate what is not useful.

Brain before Heart. Heart before Gut. 

The Gut is the arbiter, not the starting point, and that last part is the one people often get wrong. Run it backwards, and you are asking the belly to arbitrate a case it has not heard.

Betrayal does something specific to that order. It attacks the first station. Your thinking is the thing that was tampered with, so your brain is exactly the instrument you cannot yet trust to check your thinking. Every hour you spend re-reading the emails is an attempt to solve the problem with the one faculty currently out of calibration.

A gaslight can fool the eye. It cannot fool the belly.

So the body goes first. Not as a warm-up. It is the first foothold back, and everything below walks the three stations in order.

First the body, so there is something to stand on.

• Five, four, three, two, one: Five things you see, four you touch, three you hear, two you smell, one you taste. It gives a searching mind a task it can finish, which is the opposite of what it has been doing all night. The evidence is thin and worth naming as thin, but it is free, portable, and hard to do badly.

• Box breathing: In for four, hold four, out four, hold empty four. The best-supported thing on this page: a meta-analysis of over two hundred studies found slow breathing reliably lifts vagally-mediated heart rate variability, strongest while you are actually doing it, though most of those studies carried a high risk of bias. Ninety seconds, no equipment, nobody’s permission.

• Cold on the face: Splash cold water, or hold something cold to your forehead and the bridge of your nose. Real physiology: the trigeminal nerve reaches the vagus, and the heart slows. Cardiologists use facial cold to break a racing rhythm, which tells you it works and also tells you to be careful. Ask a clinician first if you have a heart condition or an eating disorder.

• The scan: Jaw, shoulders, chest, hands, belly. Where you find something clenched, breathe there rather than ordering it to relax. Betrayal lives in the jaw. People discover they have been biting down for three weeks.

None of this substitutes for safety. If the people who did this still hold power over your income, your license, or your housing, grounding is what you use to think clearly while you get help, not instead of getting it.

Brain: for the loop

The questioning is doing its job. A mind handed false information about its own life is behaving correctly when it goes back over the ground hunting for what else it got wrong. The trouble is the search has no stopping condition, so it runs all night, finds nothing, and leaves you no safer.

• Containment. Fifteen minutes a day. A set hour, a timer, full permission to think about it without restraint until the timer sounds. Outside that window, when it arrives, you tell it it has an appointment. This has the strongest evidence here, a meta-analysis showing real reductions in daily worry, though it does better in ordinary distress than in diagnosed anxiety. Most people report the same surprise: by the appointed hour, some of the questions no longer bite.

• Interrupt, then move. Picture the stop sign if it helps, then immediately change rooms or go outside. Let me be straight about which half does the work. Pressing a thought down tends to make it louder, which is the old finding about the white bear. A loop stops when attention lands somewhere else. The stop sign is the doorbell. Standing up and walking into different light is the answer.

• Fact against story. This is the Brain station asked out loud. What do I actually know for certain in this exact moment? Facts in one column. The reconstructions, the imagined conversations, the assumed motives, in the other. The second column will be longer, and that is not a failing. It shows you how much of tonight is memory and how much is invention.

• Write and destroy. Empty every question onto paper, unedited and unordered, then shred it or burn it safely. Being rid of the thought was never on offer. What you get is the thought sitting somewhere other than your body for the first time in days.

  ---

Heart and Gut: trusting your own read again.

Betrayal digs a channel. For a while, the channel is only absence, a hollow where trust used to run. The deepest part of it is not what happens to your feelings about them. It is what happens to your confidence in your own reading of a room, and if reading rooms is how you earn your living, that is not a private matter. It follows you into every session.

That confidence gets rebuilt in units far smaller than you think.

Small promises, kept. One a day. A glass of water. Lights out at the hour you named. Something so minor that failing it would be absurd. You are gathering evidence, admissible to yourself, that when you say a thing will happen it happens. Discipline has nothing to do with it. That evidence is precisely what was taken.

Comfort your senses can verify. Weight on the body, soft cloth, warm sound. The research on weighted blankets is modest and mostly about sleep, and modest is enough. A hypervigilant system is scanning for information about whether it is safe. Give it some.

Move, and let me correct the reason you have been given. You will read everywhere that exercise burns off the cortisol. It does not. Acute exercise raises cortisol rather than clearing it. What regular rhythmic movement appears to do is change how sharply the system fires next time: trained bodies mount a smaller cortisol response to psychological stress than untrained ones. Walking is not drainage. It is rehearsal.

Compassion at the actual scale of this. The Heart station is not asking you to feel better. It asks how you feel about what you think, and some days the honest answer is furious. This will not proceed in a line. A Tuesday of clear-headed competence followed by a Wednesday flat on the floor is not backsliding. Anger arriving in month four means the system is still working.

What the channel becomes.

I said before that betrayal digs a channel.

In time, the hollow carries rivers. Truth. Sovereignty. Soul. The channel that betrayal cut becomes the bed the clear water runs through, and the people I have watched come out the far side of this did not get their old trust back. They built a different kind, sturdier and much harder to counterfeit, that does not require anyone else’s agreement in order to stand.

There is a word for that condition. Ungaslightable. Not the absence of doubt, and not certainty, which can simply be wrong. It is the presence of an interior ground that doubt cannot wash away.

You do not get there by winning the argument. The argument was never the point, and the people who did this were never interested in your case. You get there by returning to the body that kept the record while your mind was being talked out of itself. Brain, Heart, Gut. The Deep Organ Cue. The Gut was never fooled.

At 12, before he crossed from brain cancer in 2008, my son Cameron said this to me, and I have never found a better sentence for what happens in the channel:

“I heard someone say that your cracks are where the light gets in, but I don’t think that’s true, Papa. I think our cracks are where our inner light gets out.”

The crack does not get sealed. The light gets released.

Tonight none of that is your job. Tonight is breath, and cold water on the face, and getting to morning.

You were wronged. You were not erased.

Rev. Rabbi Henry-Cameron Allen, OCP, ICGC, is a Psychagogue, Grief Cosmologist, Interfaith Leader, and Internationally Certified Grief Practitioner. The philosophy he developed, Grief Cosmology℠ , holds grief as a universal life skill rather than a condition to be corrected. Deep Organ Therapy℠ (DOT) is one of its life tools: an instrument to pick up, use, set down, and come back to, never a prescription. If you are in immediate danger, or the ground is giving way faster than any practice here can hold, please reach a clinician or your local emergency service tonight. Dial or text 988 in the United States. This article is a companion, not clinical care.

This week, tell one living person a specific thing they made more of in you. Not thank you. The actual thing, named. Almost nobody learns what they multiplied, because we save that sentence for eulogies, where it arrives beautifully and far too late to be any use to the one who earned it.

There is a song I have been arguing with for thirty years, and last week it finally won.

It belongs to the Indigo Girls, and it has a line in it about multiplying life by the power of two. I heard that as a love song, which it is, filed it under the ordinary romance of couples, which it also is, and got on with my day for roughly three decades.

Then last week, a client of mine whose partner recently crossed, said the thing I have heard several hundred times in this work, in more or less the same seven words every time.

“We were two. Now I am one.”

And that song sat up in my chest and informed me, quite firmly, that the arithmetic was wrong.

Here is the sum everybody hands you when somebody you love crosses over. Subtraction. Two minus one. (In my case, Henry-Cameron, which I adopted as the new expression of my identity, before we had the term Peregrine.) You were a pair, and now you are a remainder, and the whole vocabulary follows from it: you are half of what you were, there is a piece of you unaccounted for, and your job now is to become whole again on your own. Exhausting.

I would like to take that sum off you, the way I took the timeline off you in the last edition.

Because love was never addition, loves. Not once, not for anybody, not in the whole history of the species. You did not walk into that person’s life and get added to. What happened was considerably stranger, and every one of you knows it, because you were standing right there when it did.

They multiplied you.

The world went denser and louder and more detailed. Ordinary streets acquired opinions. Food tasted like something again. You became funnier than you actually are, which is the surest diagnostic sign of the whole business. That is not a quantity added onto a life. That is a factor applied to it, and a factor lands on everything at once.

And here is where the arithmetic starts to matter, because arithmetic does not care in the slightest how sad you are, which is exactly why I trust it in front of you.

Subtraction can be undone. Take a thing away and the total drops. Undoing is what subtraction is for.

I’ve learned, even with diagnosed dyscalculia, that multiplication does not work like that. Once a factor has been applied, the product is simply what it is, and the factor walking out of the room does not reach back through the sum and unmake it. Three multiplied by four is twelve. Take the four out of the room, and you do not get three back. You have twelve. You will always have twelve. And twelve is precisely what the four did.

If you are new here, greetings. I am The Virtual Hermit, and I have often described myself as the original Vaudevillian plate spinner. One of several odd and happy jobs I have been called to in this age of the sage place in my lifespan is sitting with people through the seasons that arrive when somebody they love crosses over, and treating it not as damage to be repaired but as a cosmology worth exploring, lantern in hand, with far more wonder than pity. I call the work Grief Cosmology℠, and it rests on one stubborn line: nothing real ever ends; it only changes form. The second half is not mine. It is the first law of thermodynamics, and I can no more repeal it than I can repeal my elbow. The first law of thermodynamics has never yet made an exception, including for the person you are thinking about at this exact moment.

So when you tell me you are half of what you were, I intend to be gentle and completely immovable about this.

You are not half of anything, love.

You are the product.

Every last thing they multiplied in you is still multiplied. It is in your hands, in your handwriting, and in the way you answer the telephone. It is in what makes you laugh, what you will no longer put up with, and the specific thing you do when somebody in a room is being left out of the conversation.

You are not a remainder.

You are the arithmetic, still running. Start there.

• NumeraLogic: A number built entirely out of doubling, the one doubling it does without, and an apology I owe to Edition 39.

• Tea of the Week: Two things that were never supposed to meet, in one cup, by accident, out of thrift.

• Ask the Virtual Hermit: A Traveler said “I” instead of “we” at the bank, and then sat in the car park for an hour.

• Yiddish Curse and Counter-Blessing: For the one who tells you it’s time to become whole again on your own.

• Hermi’s Hermits: Moreen is fifteen. Two thousand dollars stands between her and the operating table. Calling all angels.

• Founding Lantern Keepers: The forty-seventh lamp.

• Final Feather: Ánimo, a bird that does not live in Spain, and the other half of the errand at the top of this edition.

For Founding Lantern Keepers:

• The Inner Sanctum: One boy, one afternoon, one sentence, and the sum I could not look at directly for years.

• The Feast: Pierogi. The dish that is deliberately inefficient to make on your own.

UPCOMING GATHERINGS

This week, the lantern shines on one doorway in particular, and it opens a few hours after this edition lands:

Today, Saturday, 22 August: The Saturday Mourning Café, on Riding the Waves. 5:00 PM (Central Europe), 11:00 AM (New York), 8:00 AM (Pacific).

A casual grief community conversation at the Lost Travelers Club. No curriculum, no stages, no homework, and no expectation whatsoever that you say a single word. The scale slides: thirty-five dollars suggested, sliding the whole way down to nothing. What you give keeps the table laid for somebody who cannot.

And if five o’clock is already behind you, next Saturday the 29th is called What Changed With Us, which is this entire edition wearing a different hat.

Pull up a chair at events.thevirtualhermit.quest

And the other doorways standing open this week and next, a seat at each already yours:

At the Lost Travelers Club:

- Saturday, August 29 · Saturday Mourning Café: What Changed With Us · 5:00 PM (CET)

Around the Terran Judaism Temple:

- Saturdays, August 22 and 29 · Terran Judaism Torah Discussion · 1:30 PM EDT

- Sundays, August 23 and 30 · Christian Lectionary Discussion · 1:30 PM EDT

At the Hermit Forge:

Tuesdays, August 25 and September 1 · Dr. Hermi’s Creative Open Studio · 3:00 PM EDT · FREE

- Wednesdays, August 26 and September 2 · Wednesday Worldbuilders · 11:00 AM EDT · FREE

- Fridays, August 28 and September 4 · Hermi’s Digital Diner · 9:00 AM EDT · PAID

And September’s horizon: the virtual SUPERGRIEF Monthly Retreat on 6 September, the F\*ckit Monthly Worldbuilding Workshop on the 16th, and the Saturday Matinee Movie Club starting up again on the 19th.

Every date, every doorway, and the seat that is yours to claim, gathered in one place:

Find your gathering and register here:

The Virtual Hermit Gatherings

Forty-seven adds to eleven (4 + 7 = 11), and eleven adds to two (1 + 1 = 2), and I intend to walk straight past eleven on purpose. I gave that number an entire edition once and called it a doorway. It is still a doorway. Today, we are going through it rather than standing in it admiring the posts. We did that in Edition #38 anyway. You can read it here, if you missed it. It’s good.

HHH Edition #38

Two, then. And I owe the long-time readers among you a reckoning first.

Eight editions ago I argued that two is the number you fall off. Two points make a line, I said, and a line is a thing you slide off the end of, and it takes three points to make a plane you can stand on. I meant every word. I mean it still.

But standing is not the only job a number can hold.

Two is a poor number to stand on and the finest number in existence to multiply by, and those two facts have never once been in conflict. They are answers to different questions. Thirty-nine was asking what holds you up. Forty-seven is asking what makes more.

So. What forty-seven is made of, and it is made of doubling.

Every whole number there is can be built out of doublings, one way and one way only: one, two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and onward. Forty-seven is thirty-two, plus eight, plus four, plus two, plus one. That is the only recipe for it, and there never will be another.

Now look at what is not on that list.

Sixteen. Hm.

Forty-seven carries every single doubling from one all the way up to thirty-two, and it does not carry sixteen. There is a gap in the middle of it, sitting exactly where the shape would most like to be smooth. And the number is not lessened by that gap, or apologising for it, or waiting quietly to be completed.

It is whole. It is exactly itself. It comes to forty-seven carrying the gap, and it comes to forty-seven precisely because of the way it is built.

I have very little to add to that, loves. I rather think you can see it from here. Can you? Even I can, and that’s saying a lot!

Genmaicha: The cup that happened by accident and was never corrected

Green tea and toasted rice, in the same pot, which no sensible person would have proposed.

The story goes that it began as thrift. Tea was dear, households were not, and somebody in Japan started stretching the leaves with roasted rice so the tin would last the month. It was the cup you drank because the good cup had run out.

What nobody expected was that it would be better.

Not better than green tea. Better than either thing, and different from both. The rice is toasted until it smells of a hot pan and faintly of popcorn, and some grains genuinely do pop, which is why it is affectionately called popcorn tea by people who have clearly been enjoying themselves. That toast goes into the water alongside the grass and the green, and together they do something neither was capable of alone. The sharp edge comes off the tea. The rice gets a garden to sit in.

How to make it: a heaped teaspoon per cup, water at about eighty degrees rather than boiling, which is to say the kettle after two or three minutes of sulking. Ninety seconds. No longer, or the rice turns to porridge and sulks back at you. It will take a second steeping happily, and often a third.

Drink it late in the afternoon, when a proper green tea would keep you up and nothing at all would leave you thin company.

Two things that were never designed to meet, put together for the wrong reason entirely, making something that could not otherwise exist.

You may draw your own conclusions. I have drawn mine, and it is delish.

A Lost Traveler asks: ”My husband crossed fourteen months ago. Last week at the bank I said ‘I’ instead of ‘we,’ without thinking about it at all, and afterwards I sat in the car park and cried for an hour. Am I letting him go?”

Brain: What do I think?

I think grammar is not allegiance, love, and I want that said before anything else. The word “we” was never a headcount, never a claim you were filing about how many bodies stood at the counter. The bank needed one signatory and your mouth supplied the paperwork. That is admin. It is not theology.

But notice the part you skipped past on your way to accusing yourself. “I” arrived on its own. You did not weigh it up, you did not decide anything at a bank, your mouth did it while you were thinking about something else. Which means it came from the part of you that was built, not the part that chooses. That is not evidence of a man leaving. It is evidence of a man who built well.

Heart: How do I feel about what I think?

I feel very tenderly about that hour in the car park, and I would like you to stop grading it.

Whatever it announced itself as at the time, I do not believe it was guilt. Your body noticed a change nobody had asked its permission for. Fourteen months of a word arriving automatically, and then one afternoon it did not, and something in you pulled over and marked the occasion properly. That is not a woman coming apart in a car park. That is a woman holding a private ceremony for a change of state, with no clergy available and no order of service, and getting it exactly right by instinct.

Gut: Are Brain and Heart aligned?

They are, and they meet in something you can do this week.

Keep “we” wherever it is still true, which is far more places than anyone will tell you. “We always came here.” “We could not stand this song.” The past tense belongs to you outright, and nobody gets to correct your grammar inside it. Then, when “I” turns up at a bank counter or on a doctor’s form, let it. It is filling in a box. It is not making a statement about your marriage.

You have not let go of anything, love. You have become able to finish a sentence at a counter, which he would have wanted for you and would almost certainly have teased you about afterwards in the car.

For the one who informs you that it is time to become whole again on your own:

The curse:

זאל יעדע רעכענונג וואָס איר וועט ווען צעטיילן ווערן צעטיילט דורך עמעצן וואָס איז זייער זיכער אין קאָפּ־אַריטמעטיק. זאלן זיי שטענדיק זיין אַ ביסל פאַלש, שטענדיק אין זייער אייגענעם טובה, און זאל איר קיינמאָל נישט

Zal yede rekhenung vos ir vet ven tseteyln vern tseteylt durkh emetsn vos iz zeyer zikher in kop-aritmetik. zaln zey shtendik zeyn a bisl falsh, shtendik in zeyer eygenem tubh, aun zal ir keynmol nisht kenen dos bavayzn on dershaynen kleyn farn gantsn tish.

May every bill you ever split be split by somebody very confident at mental arithmetic. May they always be slightly wrong, always in their own favour, and may you never be able to prove it without appearing small in front of the whole table.

The counter-blessing:

זאָלסטו אַנטדעקן, נישט צו שפּעט צו הנאה האָבן דערפון, אַז גאָרנישט וואָס דו האָסט אַוועקגעגעבן איז דיר קיינמאָל נישט גענומען געוואָרן, און זאָל עס צוריקקומען פֿאַרמערט, אין אַ פֿאָרעם וואָס דו וואָלטסט נישט געקענט אָרגאַניזירן, געטראָגן אויף דיין וועג דורך עמעצן וואָס דו האָסט נאָך נישט באַגעגנט.

Zolstu antdekn, nisht tsu shpet tsu hnah hobn derfun, az gornisht vos du host avekgegebn iz dir keynmol nisht genumen gevorn, aun zol es tsurikkumen farmert, in a forem vos du voltst nisht gekent organizirn, getrogn aoyf deyn veg durkh emetsn vos du host nokh nisht bagegnt.

May you discover, not too late to enjoy it, that nothing you gave away was ever taken off you, and may it come back multiplied, in a form you could not have arranged, carried up your path by somebody you have not met yet.

Moreen is fifteen. Two thousand dollars stands between her and an operating table.

She has fibroadenoma breast tumors. The pain does not let up, not in the day and not at night. She has stopped eating. She has gone quiet in the particular way a girl goes quiet when something has been hurting a long time, and nobody has been able to stop it.

Surgery takes them out. The operation and the care afterward come to $2,000 US altogether. Not two thousand to begin with. Two thousand, and then a fifteen-year-old eats her supper again.

I have spent this whole edition saying that the important arithmetic is multiplication, so let me show my working.

Two thousand dollars is not a large sum divided among enough people. It is a small sum multiplied by enough people. Four at $500. Eight at $250. Twenty at $100. Eighty at $25, and that is a takeaway nobody would remember ordering.

Every gift is tagged to Moreen by name and goes to her surgery and her after-care through Desire Child Care Organization, a vetted and legally registered Indigenous NGO in Uganda that I have sponsord for more than 4 years. If more arrives than the surgery costs, the remainder stays with them for another child’s medical care. There is a checkbox to cover the card fee, so the whole of what you give reaches Moreen.

This is the week, loves. She has been quietly suffering long enough.

Give toward Moreen’s surgery at:

HERMI'S HERMITS

And the standing work goes on behind her at the same door: the quiet circle, the land, the fresh water, and the school these children are meant to grow up inside. Same hands, same pockets. Join us.

This is the forty-seventh time I have lit this particular lamp and set it in the window for you.

The Founding Lantern Keepers rate remains locked, permanently, for those who claimed it. Twenty memberships, and once they are filled, they are filled for good. If you are already inside, thank you for being early. If you are not, you can still become a ‘Scriber. It is only the Founding part that has a door on it now.

And in the spirit of an edition about multiplication: what you send does not stay the size you sent it. It becomes a room that opens on Saturdays whether four people come or forty, a letter that goes out to people who could never pay for it, and this week, a surgeon.

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Ánimo, who remains an unresolved argument between a Mastiff and a Labrador, spent the writing of this edition lying against the back of my chair. Not beside it. Against it, full weight committed, so that every time I leaned back, I was reminded there was a second party to the arrangement. He has never understood sitting near someone. There is contact or there is nothing, and he considers the middle ground a failure of nerve.

There are no cardinals in Spain. Cameron’s arrives by the long way round, the way everything does now. A friend pulls the car over for one and sends me the photograph. Somebody tells me about theirs. Once in a while, I get my own. And there is one in ink over my heart, which is the only cardinal I have ever managed to schedule.

Here is what I keep arriving back at, eighteen years in.

I am not a smaller man than I was in 2008. I have been told, kindly, by people who love me, that I must be. That something was taken out, the total came down, and this is what is left over. I have tried that sum honestly, more than once, usually at three in the morning, which is the worst possible hour for arithmetic.

It does not come out that way.

What is true is that a thirteen-year-old boy applied himself to my life like a factor, and everything since has been multiplied and stayed multiplied. This newsletter. That room on Saturdays. The girl in Uganda who is going to eat her supper again. None of it existed before him, none of it would exist without him, and he has not physically been in the room for eighteen years.

That is not consolation, loves, and I want to be careful here, because consolation is usually what people hand you to get you to stop talking. It fixes nothing.

It is just the correct sum.

So here is my question, and it is the other half of the errand at the top of this edition, which was never an accident. Up there in the Weekly Mending, I asked you to tell a living person what they made more of in you. This half is only for you, and nobody needs to see it.

What did your person multiply in you that is still multiplied, right now, today, while you are reading this?

Write it down. You are the only one who can do that sum.

I read every comment, and I respond. If this resonated with you, hit the comments section and let me know. I would love to hear your thoughts. Or DM me. Many people find it easier to say a thing like this in a private message than out loud in a room, and my inbox is exactly that kind of quiet room.

Always here.

A little ahead.

With deep respect for everyone still running the arithmetic, and for every dog who has never once sat merely near me: Pluto, Agatha, Rupert, Ollie, Flat Stanley, and Ánimo,

Rev. Rabbi Henry-Cameron Allen, OCP, ICGC

The Virtual Hermit

The Virtual Hermit Quest

Mazel tov, loves, you read the whole thing, and if you did it at 3am then you and I are keeping the same hours and running the same bad sums. Everything above stays free, and always will, it is yours. What waits below is the small back room I keep for the Founding Lantern Keepers who keep the oil coming: The Inner Sanctum, and The Feast

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When somebody tells you where they are, resist the urge to tell them how long it takes to get out. You do not know. Nobody does. Ask them what the ground is like instead, and then be quiet long enough to actually hear the answer.

Who told you how long this was supposed to take?

Somebody did. There is always a somebody. A cousin with an article. A colleague whose father crossed in 2019 and who has views. A well-meaning man at a funeral who said the first year is the hardest, which is either true or catastrophically untrue depending entirely on whose second year you ask about.

They are not villains, loves. A timeline is a very comforting thing to hold when you cannot fix somebody or handle your grief. But you have been handed a map for a country none of them have ever visited, and I would like to take it off your shoulders and burn it with you.

Now. What you were actually issued.

In almost every cell you own, there are forty-six chromosomes, arranged in twenty-three pairs, one of each pair arriving from each parent. Forty-six is the usual count and not the qualifying score, and I want that said plainly before we go a step further, because a good number of the people I love best came in at forty-seven and were not rough drafts. And if you cannot name the two people yours came through, they still arrived, they are still yours, and nothing that follows needs their names.

What is in those 46 is genuinely astonishing. Instructions for growing a heart before there was anybody around to want one. Instructions for the exact color your eyes turn in the sun. Instructions for that laugh, the one that came out of your mouth at a funeral and stopped you dead in the corridor because it was hers.

A complete set of instructions for building a person.

And not one line about Tuesday.

Not a syllable about how to buy milk afterwards. Nothing about what to do when the phone rings and for half a second you think it might be him. No guidance whatsoever on the specific problem of a Wednesday in August, when it has been seven months, and everybody has stopped asking.

If you are new here, greetings. I am The Virtual Hermit, and I have often described myself as the original Vaudevillian plate spinner. One of several odd and happy jobs I have been called to in this age of the sage place in my lifespan is sitting with people through the seasons that arrive when somebody they love crosses over, and treating it not as damage to be repaired but as a cosmology worth exploring, lantern in hand, with far more wonder than pity. I call the work Grief Cosmology℠, and it rests on one stubborn line: nothing real ever ends; it only changes form. The second half is not mine. It is the first law of thermodynamics, and I can no more repeal it than I can repeal my elbow.

Now the good news, which is buried inside the bad(ish) news, and almost nobody digs it out.

The instructions were never going to cover this, darling. Not for you, not for me, not for anybody who has ever drawn breath. There is no edition of the human being that ships with a chapter on the days afterward. So that flat, exhausted certainty that you are doing this wrong is not evidence about you. It is evidence that you have been marking yourself against a test that was never set.

These are what I call the unmapped days.

And nobody has been here. Not your cousin. Not the man at the funeral. Not me. I have been off-roading in my own unmapped country since 2008, and it does not overlap with yours at a single point, because nobody else ever had your person, and that is precisely why your days are uncharted.

You are not behind, love.

You are somewhere no one has been, doing something you were issued no clear instructions for, and somehow, you still got up today, already doing better than millions of people around the world who didn’t get to wake up.

There is always someone who wants to hand you a map. Politely refuse it. And if you have already accepted the map, and you are now realizing it is leading you toward someone else’s destination, it’s never too late to burn it. Let’s go grief off-roading together.

• NumeraLogic: One stone more than a cairn, and what happens to the whole shape when you put it in the middle.

• Ask the Virtual Hermit: A Traveler’s sister keeps sending her articles about the stages, and asking which one she is in.

• Pocket Tools: The Field Note. One line a day, for country nobody has charted.

• Yiddish Curse and Counter-Blessing: For the one with the timeline.

• Gentle Reminders: Four things, and not a schedule among them.

• Hermi’s Hermits: Four acres, a well, and children whose days nobody has charted either. Let’s hold up lanterns on their Desire Paths.

• Founding Lantern Keepers: The forty-sixth lamp, and a room it now pays for.

• Final Feather: Ánimo, a bird that does not live in Spain, and the instruction that was never coming.

For Founding Lantern Keepers:

• The Inner Sanctum: Two months of opening a room that nobody walked into.

• The Feast: Jook. The pot for the stretch when food has lost its flavor and its meaning.

UPCOMING GATHERINGS YOU CAN COUNT ON

This week the lantern shines on one doorway in particular, and this one is mine:

Today, Saturday 15 August: The Saturday Mourning Café opens its doors properly. and officially. 5:00 PM (Central Europe), 11:00 AM (New York), 8:00 AM (Pacific). Just an hour of your life to talk grief, or just sit and listen among a growing community of Griefwalkers.

The Lost Travelers Club has a new front door. Last Saturday was the soft opening, and the coffee and bagels were delicious. Today is the real one, and the theme is The Unmapped Days, which you have just read about, so you’ll arrive extremely well prepared.

It is a casual grief community conversation. No curriculum, no stages, no homework, and aboe all, no maps! No expectations. Drop in, drop out, come every week, or come once. It runs on a sliding scale: suggested $35, and the scale slides all the way down to zero. What you give keeps the table set for somebody who cannot.

And if you are reading this after five o’clock has already gone, the Café is always there, again next Saturday the 22nd, and every Saturday after that.

Pull up a chair here: https://events.thevirtualhermit.quest/mourning-cafe

The other doorways standing open this week and next, a seat at each already yours:

Around the Terran Judaism table:

• Saturdays · Terran Judaism Torah Discussion · 1:30 PM EDT

• Sundays · Christian Lectionary Discussion · 1:30 PM EDT

At the Hermit Forge:

• Tuesdays · Dr. Hermi’s Creative Open Studio · 3:00 PM EDT

• Wednesdays, August 19 · Wednesday Worldbuilders · 11:00 AM EDT

• Third Wednesdays · F\*ckit Monthly Worldbuilding Workshop · 12:00 PM EDT

• Fridays · Hermi’s Digital Diner · 9:00 AM EDT

FINAL WEEK at the GLADD Community (members):

• Tuesday, August 18 · Morning Light: Hope and Strength for a New Day · 7:00 -7:15 AM EDT

• Tuesday, August 18 · Outliving Your Child: Supporting Parents Through the Unimaginable · 4:00 PM (Spain)

• Tuesday, August 18 · Grief Off-Roading: Exploring New Perspectives on Grief · 5:30 PM (Spain)

And a little further ahead:

• 1st Sundays, September 6 · Monthly SUPERGRIEF Virtual Retreat · 4:00 PM EDT

• Saturdays, starting September 19 · The Saturday Matinee Movie Club Returns! · 4:00 PM EDT Film study, silent era to present, intelligent discussion afterwards

Every date, every doorway, and the seat that is yours to claim, gathered in one place:

Find your gathering and register on my events page:

The Virtual Hermit Gatherings

Forty-six is a number with almost nothing to say for itself, and that turns out to be the point of it.

It barely opens. Most numbers have doors all over them. Forty-eight comes apart ten different ways (we’ll address that two editions from now). Forty-six opens just twice and then stops: one and forty-six, two and twenty-three. That is the list. It is twice a prime and nothing else besides, which makes it one of the least negotiable numbers in the neighbourhood.

Twice twenty-three. Which is where we came in. Twenty-three, and then twenty-three again, and no arrangement of the two that lets you keep only the half you got on with.

4 + 6 = 10, and ten (1 + 0) makes one.

Add the digi,ts and you get ten. Add those, and you get one. The number goes to all that trouble being complicated and lands back where every number starts.

And then, the thing I did not see coming, which also happened last edition, and I am beginning to suspect the forties are simply like this. Last edition we stacked forty-five into a cairn. One stone on the top row, two beneath, nine along the bottom, every stone placed and nothing left over. A clean triangle.

Now add one stone. Just the one.

It does not go on the bottom row. There is no room for it there, and no need for it. It goes in the middle, and the entire shape reorganises itself around it: one stone at the centre, then rings of three, six, nine, twelve, and fifteen laid around it in order. Forty-six exactly, nothing left over.

Forty-five is a pile you built beautifully. Forty-six is that same pile with something at the centre of it. Mathematicians call numbers that do this centred triangular, and I would like the record to show I did not choose the name.

A cairn is a sacred marker. It says somebody came this way.

Put a stone at the centre of it, and it says I was here.

Go build your cairn.

A Lost Traveler asks: My cousin keeps sending me articles about the “stages of grief” and asking which one I’m in. It has been seven months since my daughter passed away. I don’t feel like I’m in any of them, honestly. Is there a timeline or order I should be experiencing these stages in? What’s wrong with me?

Brain: What do I think?

First of all, may every memory of your daughter hold a blessing. I think you deserve to know where those stages came from, love, because, in my professional experience, hardly anybody does.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross published them in 1969 as the five stages of dying (not grieving): denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. She was not writing about you or any other Griefwalker. She was sitting with people who were in the act of crossing, describing what she saw in them as they faced their own expiration. Five responses, observed in the ones going on a little ahead, not in the ones staying. Applying the 5 stages to Griefwalkers came later, it was never as settled as the posters suggest. She said herself they were never meant to be a queue you shuffle along in any order. So when your cousin asks which stage of grief you are in, the honest answer is that these stages were somebody else’s map, and they were about a different kind of crossing entirely. One’s own.

Heart: How do I feel about what I think?

I feel enormously tender toward your cousin, which may not be what you were expecting to hear. She is not sending you articles because she thinks you are failing at grief. She is sending them because she may be feeling lost in her own grief and/or how to handle yours, and a list with five items on it is a very steadying thing to hold when the alternative is admitting that your father crossed and nobody knows what happens now. “Which stage are you in” is almost never the real question. The real one underneath is “are you going to be alright?” And she simply does not have the words for that one yet. She is doing the best she can to offer comfort in the only way she knows how. It is a gesture of love and support.

Gut: Are Brain and Heart aligned?

They are, and they meet in a single sentence you can actually say out loud. Try this, more or less exactly as written: “I don’t think it works in stages, but I know why you’re asking, and I’m alright today.”

That answers the real question and declines the false one in the same breath, with kindness, and it gives her the reassurance she was fishing for, then lets her off the hook gently. She is out in her own unmapped grief country too. It doesn’t eclipse yours, of course, but you can travel off-road together. Thelma and Louise. Kind of.

The Field Note

One practice this week, and it takes about eleven seconds a day.

At some point before you sleep, write one line about what the day was actually like. Not how you felt about it. What it was like. The terrain.

”Today the kitchen was fine, and the car was not.”

”Today I got through the whole shop, and then his handwriting was on the back of the list.”

”Today was flat, I did not cry once, and I am not sure what that means.”

That is the practice. One line. No feelings inventory, no gratitude quota, no scoring yourself out of ten.

The word matters. A diary asks you to explain yourself, and on the hard days you cannot, so it sits there accusing you from the nightstand. A field note asks only that you say what you saw. Anybody can say what they saw. You can do it on your worst day, at four in the morning, in six words, and it still counts as a complete entry.

Experiment. Try it for a month. Something happens that I cannot get anybody to believe in advance. You look back, and the countryside’s features start to emerge, becoming clearer. Flat weeks. Bad Thursdays. That stretch in the middle where things were quietly better and you did not notice at the time, because nobody ever notices at the time.

You will not have a schedule. You will not have stages or a map. You will, though, have something considerably better: an honest account of undiscovered territory… somewhere no one else has ever been, filed by the only person qualified to file it.

Keep it in a journal or notebook if you can. Screens invite editing, and this is not a thing to be edited.

Let me know how it goes!

For the one who tells you how long it ought to be taking:

The curse:

זאָלן איר באַקומען פּינקטלעכע און דעטאַלירטע אינסטרוקציעס, אין לענג, אין אַ שפּראַך וואָס איר האָט גערעדט גלאַט ווי אַ קינד און קענט איצט נישט געדענקען קיין איין וואָרט דערפון, דורך עמעצן וואָס איז זייער זיכער.

Zoln ir bakumen pinktlekhe aun detalirte instruktsyes, in leng, in a shprakh vos ir hot geredt glat vi a kind aun kent itst nisht gedenken keyn eyn vort derfun, durkh emetsn vos iz zeyer zikher.

May you be given precise and detailed directions, at length, in a language you spoke fluently as a child and cannot now recall a single word of, by somebody who is too certain.

The counter-blessing:

זאָלסטו איין טאָג פֿאַרלוירן זײַן ערגעץ שיין, אָן קיין אײַלעניש אין דיר און אָן קײנער וואָס ערוואַרטעט דיך, און זאָלסטו געפֿינען אַז דער וועג וואָס דו האָסט קיינמאָל נישט געפּלאַנט האָט שוין געקענט דײַן נאָמען.

Zolstu eyn tog farloyrn zayn ergets sheyn, on keyn aylenish in dir aun on keyner vos ervartet dikh, aun zolstu gefinen az der veg vos du host keynmol nisht geplant hot shoyn gekent dayn nomen.

May you one day be lost somewhere lovely, with no hurry in you and nobody expecting you, and may you find that the road you never planned already knew your name.

• Seven months is not late. Neither is seven years.

• You are allowed a good Saturday morning without it meaning anything at all about how much you love them.

• The person telling you where you should be by now is telling you where they need you to be. Why? So that they can stop worrying about you.

• Nobody has walked your grief path before. That is not a deficiency in you. It is a fact about the nature of the path itself.

  ---

A hermit is not somebody who vanishes from society. A hermit is somebody who goes far enough inside to bring the light back out and put it into a pair of hands that needs it.

That is the whole of Hermi’s Hermits. A small, quiet circle doing exactly that for Desire Child Care Organization, a vetted Indigenous NGO in Uganda. No fanfare and no credit. Holy hands and open pockets. Giving, receiving, and holding in a single gesture.

Hermi’s Hermits belongs in this particular edition for a plain reason. The Desire Kids have no chart either. Nobody drew them a route out of where they started: on the streets of the Kampala slums, compromised and vulnerable. The difference between a child who gets through and a child who does not is almost never guidance. It is a bed. A school fee. A doctor. Clean drinking water. A family to belong to.

Right now, the circle is building quietly toward land: four acres, a fresh water well, and a year-round, independent, residential arts-based school where children can grow up safe, in the heart of nature.

Light does not have to stay a feeling.

If any of that feels like your call to action this week, monthly, or once, whatever you can carry, please join Hermi’s Hermits. We can’t save every needy child in the world yet. But here are 33 children we know we are clearing the path for.

Join Hermi's Hermits Now

This is the forty-sixth time I have lit this particular lamp and set it in the window for you.

The Founding Lantern Keepers rate remains locked, permanently, for those who claimed it. Twenty memberships, and once they are filled, they are filled for good. If you are already inside, thank you for being early. If you are not, you can still become a Lantern Keeper. It is only the Founding part that has a door on it now.

This edition, the lamp does something it has not done before. There is a real virtual room now, with a real virtual table in it, open every Saturday for an hour of life.

The oil you keep trickling into my lantern is what pays for somebody to be sitting in that room, whether four people arrive or forty. It’s not for me. It’s for them. It’s for you. A rising tide lifts all ships.

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Ánimo, who is a beefy and unresolved argument between a Mastiff body and a Labrador noggin, has spent this entire edition asleep on the cool concrete floor of our Peace Garden. That is the correct August strategy and the only one he has ever proposed. He was issued no instructions for any of this, and it has never once slowed him down.

There are no cardinals in Spain. Cameron’s reaches me the way most things reach me now, in dreams, in signs, and in secondhand sources from a long way off. A photograph from a friend who pulled the car over for one. In somebody else’s dreams, and often my own. And one inked on my chest, over my heart, which at least has the decency to stay put.

I have been in the unmapped days since September of 2008, and I will give you the truest thing I have.

The instruction was never going to come, love.

I waited a long while for it. Most of us do. Some part of you keeps expecting that somebody qualified will eventually arrive and explain the procedure.

There is no procedure. No certification in your particular grief. I became a certified grief practitioner so I could walk beside you, steady the pace, and hold up a lantern to show you your own path. Not mine, and never a map.

You have been walking your path already. For seven months, or eleven years, or since last Tuesday. Every unmapped day you have traversed, you did so by improvising, holding a complete set of directions for building a body and not one word about carrying it through an afternoon.

That is not you failing the terrain.

That is you, walking, in a grief country nobody has ever walked. Yet you are not alone. Remember that.

So, my question, and it is not the one you have been asked all year. Not ever which stage you are in. Grief is non-linear. What have you worked out on your own that nobody told you about and nobody could have?

Write it down somewhere. You are the only source on it.

I do read every reply in the comments section. If this edition resonated with you, hit the comments or dm me and let me know. I would love to hear your thoughts. Many people find it easier to say a thing like this in a private message than out loud in a room, and my inbox is exactly that kind of quiet room.

Always here.

A little ahead.

With deep respect for everyone improvising, and for the dog who has never needed a procedure for anything,

Rev. Rabbi Henry-Cameron Allen, OCP, ICGC

The Virtual Hermit

The Virtual Hermit Quest

Mazel tov, loves! You read the whole thing, and if you did so at 3am then you and I are keeping the same hours. Everything above stays free, and always will, it is yours. What waits below is the small back room I keep for the Founding Lantern Keepers who keep the oil coming: the Inner Sanctum, and the Feast.

Subscribe now

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Answer the beginner’s question you find obvious as though it were brilliant. Not patiently. Not kindly. As though they had just asked you the most interesting thing all week, because to them it is. Nobody has ever been made braver by being tolerated.

Which part of them have you been quietly leaving out of the total?

Everybody told you to remember the good times, and they meant it kindly, and you have been doing your best. The highlight reel is more or less assembled by now. The laugh. The appalling driving. The way they said your name when you came through the door, which I am willing to bet you can still hear.

Fine. It’s a good reel. It does its job at gatherings.

And then there’s the other ledger, the one behind your ribs that you show to nobody.

The argument four days before. The thing you said in a hospital corridor because you were frightened and tired and it came out as cruelty. And under all of it, in the handwriting nobody ever prints, the relief. Because the caregiving was crushing. Or because they were not always kind to you, and when it ended some part of you exhaled, and you have not said that out loud to a single living person.

That one. That is the ledger I want.

Something precise first, because this must not be misheard. Counting a thing is not forgiving it. If the person you carry did you real harm, nothing here is asking you to absolve them. The arithmetic below is not for their benefit. It is for yours.

If you are new here, hello. I am The Virtual Hermit, and I have an odd and happy job: sitting with people through the season that arrives when someone they love crosses over, and treating it not as damage to be repaired but as a cosmology worth exploring, lantern in hand, far more wonder than pity. I call the work Grief Cosmology℠, and it rests on one stubborn line: nothing real ever ends, it only changes form. The second half is not mine. It is the first law of thermodynamics, and I can no more repeal it than I can repeal a Wednesday.

Forty-five, then. It has opinions.

Add up every digit there is. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. The whole set, nothing held back. You get forty-five. The sum of all of the parts.

Now go in and take one out. Take the seven, say, because the seven was a bad year and you would rather not. Run it again. You are not holding a gentler forty-five. You are holding thirty-eight and a fib.

I have not draped that over the number. It is simply what the number does, and it happens to be what your life does. Strike the difficult digit, and you have not protected the sum; you have falsified it, and the love you were trying to keep safe by editing turns out to be a love that never happened to anybody.

Which brings me to the other thing a forty-five is, for those of us old enough to have carried one home in a paper sleeve.

A 45 record. The seven-inch single, the little one with the big hole in the middle that required a plastic spindle adapter, spinning on the turntable at forty-five revolutions per minute. We bought it for the A-side, the song off the radio we had to have.

Only we could not buy just the A-side. Nobody was selling it that way. The B-side came home pressed into the same disc whether we wanted it or not, and if you were ever the sort of person who turned the thing over, you already know how this goes, because some of us ended up loving the B-side more, and loving it precisely because nobody made us.

There has never been an A-side-only pressing of a person. Not one, not ever, not for anybody.

You have the whole record. That is the only reason it is worth anything. Now pop in that adapter, darlings.

• Tea of the Week: Masala Chai. The cup that needs the one ingredient nobody would drink on its own.

• NumeraLogic: A number you can stack into a cairn, and its stubborn parent, nine, which cannot be scattered.

• Ask the Virtual Hermit: A Traveler has not opened a wardrobe in two years and wants to know if that means she is stuck.

• Hermi’s Hermits: Going inward to give outward, and the children who get left out of nearly everybody’s count.

• Founding Lantern Keepers: The forty-fifth lamp, still lit, still yours to help keep burning.

• Final Feather: Ánimo, a bird that does not live in Spain, and the digit you have not thought to count.

For Founding Lantern Keepers:

• The Inner Sanctum: Why a man who never passed a math class runs a numbers column.

• The Feast: A Persian herb kuku. Nine green things in a pan, and nothing left out.

UPCOMING GATHERINGS

This week the lantern shines on one doorway that is not mine to schedule, loves:

Wednesday, 12 August: the sky does two things at once

On Wednesday evening, the moon slides in front of the sun, and from right here at the hut, it covers ninety-seven percent of it. Ninety-seven! Never quite all, and the last of it finishes below the horizon after the sun has already gone, which is very on-brand timing for The Virtual Hermitage. Then that same new moon leaves the sky utterly black, and the Perseid meteor shower hits its peak, up to a hundred an hour, the best conditions until 2028.

One moon, doing both jobs in a single night. Plan on being outside to witness it.

And here the doorways with actual chairs in them, this week and next, a seat at each already yours:

At the Hermit Forge:

• Tuesday, August 11 · Dr. Hermi’s Creative Open Studio · 3:00 PM EDT

• Wednesday, August 12 · Wednesday Worldbuilders · 11:00 AM EDT

• Friday, August 14 · Hermi’s Digital Diner · 9:00 AM EDT

Around the Terran table:

• Saturday, August 8 · Terran Judaism Torah Discussion · 1:30 PM EDT

• Sunday, August 9 · Christian Lectionary Discussion · 1:30 PM EDT

Around the Grief Fire

Need personal counseling? I am accepting clients now.

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NEW! The Saturday Mourning Café

A welcoming lounge for calm grief conversations, reflection, and meaningful community building. Weekly. Each week takes up a different theme.

• Soft Opening · Saturday, August 8 · 11am EDT

• Official Launch · Saturday, August 15 · 11am EDT

For GLADD Community Members, only through August 18th:

• Tuesday, August 11 & 18 · Morning Light: Hope & Strength for a New Day · 7:00 AM EDT

• Tuesday, August 11 & 18· Outliving Your Child: Supporting Parents Through the Unimaginable · 10:00 AM EDT

• Tuesday, August 11 & 18· Grief Off-Roading: Exploring New Perspectives · 11:30 AM EDT

…And a little further ahead:

• Wednesday, August 19 · F*ckit Monthly Worldbuilding Workshop · 2:00 PM EDT

• Sunday, September 6 · SUPERGRIEF Monthly Retreat · 4:00 PM EDT

• Saturday, September 19 · Saturday Matinee Movie Club RETURNS! · 4:00 PM EDT

Every date, every doorway, and the seat that is yours to claim, some free, some paid, all gathered in one place:

Find your gathering and register at

Virtual Hermit Event Page

Yes, hot tea. In August. In Extremadura, Spain. The afternoon currently has the ambient character of a pizza oven. A dry heat. I am aware of how this sounds. I have made my peace with it, and I would ask you to do the same.

Real masala chai is a committee. Black tea, cardamom, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, a little fennel if you are feeling expansive, milk, sugar. All perfectly reasonable citizens.

And then, in every proper blend, black pepper.

Black pepper? In a sweet milky tea? Nobody has ever poured themselves a cup of hot pepper water and thought, at last, the treat I have earned! It is exactly the ingredient you would strike off the list if you were tidying up.

Take it out, and the cup goes flat. Not milder. Flat. The pepper was never there to be tasted; it was there to make everything else arrive, and the moment it goes, the cardamom stops being interesting, and the cinnamon turns into a candle. One small bitter thing holding up the entire pleasant edifice.

You have met this arrangement before.

To make it properly: crush four cardamom pods, a small piece of cinnamon, two cloves, a coin of fresh ginger, and six peppercorns, and simmer them in a cup of water for five minutes. Add strong black tea and simmer two more. Add half a cup of whole milk, bring it just to the rise, and sweeten. Strain into the least sensible mug you own.

Pairs with: the Opening Lantern above, and a grudging new respect for the parts of the recipe you never asked for. Enjoy.

Edition #45: The Number You Can Stack 

Forty-five opens along three doors, and then does something at the end that I genuinely did not see coming.

Door one: one and forty-five. Itself, and the whole of itself. Before it is clever, it is one complete thing, undivided, and so are you, love, on the days the sums of your own life seem to be settled by somebody else.

Door two: three and fifteen. Three is the smallest number that makes a shape. Two points give you a line and nothing much else; add a third, and suddenly there is a triangle, which can stand up on its own. Fifteen is that same instinct grown up. Five threes. Roughly, the days the moon takes to go from dark to full.

Door three: five and nine. Five is the hand. The senses. The reason we count in tens at all. And nine is the last digit we have, because after it you run out of numerals altogether and start reusing the ones already in the drawer, which is either a shabby little limitation or the most generous thing about the whole system, depending on the morning.

Now, the part I did not expect.

Take those forty-five units and stack them. One on the top row, two beneath, three beneath that, down to nine along the bottom. It comes out exactly. Every stone placed, nothing left over. Forty-five is the ninth triangular number, which is a mathematician’s way of saying you can build a cairn out of it.

Then there is nine, the stubbornest digit we own. Multiply it by anything at all, add up the digits of the answer, keep adding until one is left. Nine times three is twenty-seven, and two and seven is nine. Nine times two hundred and four is one thousand eight hundred and thirty-six, which adds, wearily, back to nine. You cannot scatter it. Break it up, add the pieces, and it walks back into the room as exactly what it was.

Forty-five is four and five, which is nine. 4 + 5 = 9

I am not telling you the universe chose base ten on your behalf. It did not. I am telling you to look at what this particular number does in your hands, which is refuse to let go of anything it was handed.

A Lost Traveler asks:

It has been two years, and I still cannot open my mother’s wardrobe. Everyone says I need to deal with her things. Am I stuck?

Brain: What do I think?

I think “deal with” is doing something sneaky in that sentence, and I would like to take it apart before it does any more damage. Nobody has ever explained what the correct schedule is for a wardrobe, because there isn’t one. What there is, love, is a room full of well-meaning people who find an unopened door uncomfortable to look at, and who have converted their discomfort into a deadline and handed you the bill. You are not behind. There was never a timetable to be behind.

Heart: How do I feel about what I think?

I feel protective of that door, honestly. Because I suspect the wardrobe is not full of clothes to you. It is the last room in the house where the air has not been changed, the one place her particular smell is still doing what it always did, and you know perfectly well that the first time you open it you will spend some of that, and there is no more of it coming. You are rationing something irreplaceable, with tremendous care. That is stewardship, whatever anybody else has decided to call it.

Gut: Are Brain and Heart aligned?

They are, and they meet here. Do not empty the wardrobe. Just open it. Those are two entirely different jobs and only one of them is being asked of you.

Pick an ordinary Tuesday, no ceremony, and open the door for just one minute. Do not sort anything. Do not decide anything. And for the love of all that is holy, do not bring trash bags! Stand there, let it be whatever it is, close it again. You are allowed to do that a hundred times before you move a single sleeve. And if in a year the door is still shut, then it is still shut, and I will not have anybody, yourself very much included, filing that under failure. Treasure can wait however long you need it to.

A Hermit is not somebody who vanishes, love. A Hermit is somebody who goes far enough inside to bring the light back out and put it into a pair of hands that needs it.

That is the whole of Hermi’s Hermits. A small, quiet circle doing exactly that through Desire Child Care Organization, a vetted Indigenous NGO in Uganda. No fanfare and no credit. Holy hands and generous pockets.

It belongs in this particular edition for a plain reason. An edition about a total that leaves nothing out ought to say something about the children who get left out of nearly everybody’s count.

Right now, the circle is building quietly toward land: four acres, a well of fresh water, and a year-round residential arts school where children can grow up safe, in the heart of nature.

Light does not have to stay a feeling. It can become a bed, a school fee, a doctor’s visit, or clean water coming out of the ground on a hot afternoon.

If any of that is yours to do this week, monthly, or once, whatever you can carry.

Join the Circle of Hermits here:

Hermi's Hermits

This is the forty-fifth time I have lit this particular lamp and set it in the window for you.

The Founding Lantern Keepers rate remains locked, permanently, for those who claimed it. Twenty memberships, and once they are filled they are filled for good. If you are already inside, thank you for being early. If you are not, you can still become a Lantern Keeper. It is only the Founding part that has a door on it.

Subscribe now

Forty-five editions in, the lamp runs on the fuel it always has: enough hands willing to keep the oil coming. So that the next stranger, awake at 3am and running an argument from four days before over and over and over, finds the window lit and works out that somebody left it on for exactly this hour.

Note:

Pocket Tools, Gentle Reminders, and Yiddish Curses & Counter-Blessings will now be available bi-monthly in The Founding Lantern Keepers section.

Ánimo has spent this entire edition asleep against my sandaled foot as usual, contributing nothing, and will shortly wake and take full credit for it. He keeps no second ledger. Nothing gets struck from his day, including whatever it was he ate in the garden this morning, which I have decided not to investigate.

There are no cardinals in Spain. I take delivery of Cameron’s the way I take delivery of most things now, secondhand and from a long way off. A photograph from a friend who pulled the car over for one. Somebody’s dream. Now and then my own. And one on my chest, over the heart, which at least has the decency not to migrate.

Not a single cardinal has ever edited anything either.

And here is the part I saved, love, because you were not going to get to it on your own.

All the way through this edition you have been running the sum on them. Good. But you are in this total as well, and the digit you have struck hardest is not theirs at all. It is the version of you that came afterward. The one who got mean for a year. Or drank more than was wise. Or simply could not be much of anything to anybody for a long stretch, and has quietly kept that stretch off the books ever since.

Put it back. Not to punish yourself with it. Forty-five does not get to drop a digit, and you do not either, and the total was never a verdict in the first place.

So: what is the one digit, theirs or your own, that you have kept out of the sum? You do not have to make peace with it. Only count it.

I read every reply to these emails. If this resonated with you, hit the comments section or my DMs and let me know. I would love to hear your thoughts. Many people find it easier to say a thing like this in a private message than out loud in a room, and my inbox is exactly that kind of quiet room.

Always here.

A little ahead.

With deep respect for the whole record, both sides, and the dog who has never once pretended to be a better dog than he is,

Hermi, The Virtual Hermit

Rev. Rabbi Henry-Cameron Allen, OCP, ICGC

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Mazel tov, loves! You read the whole thing, and if you did it at 3am then you and I are running the same schedule. Everything above stays free, and always will, it is yours. What waits below is the small back room I keep for the Founding Lantern Keepers who keep the oil coming: the Inner Sanctum, and the Feast. Starting next week, three more sections will appear bi-monthly for my ‘Scribers. Thank you for your support!

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Give someone your full attention for the length of one cup of tea. No phone, no clock, no half of you somewhere else. One cup, fully spent on one person. That is a whole eternity if you pour it right.

Love, have you ever woken from a dream so real that the ache of the morning arrived before your eyes were even open?

You know the one I mean. They were there. Not a photograph of them, not a memory of them, them, in the room, in the ordinary light, saying the ordinary things, and for the length of that dream no one had crossed anywhere. And then the alarm, or the birds, or just the grey coming up at the window, and you were awake, and the whole weight of it settled back onto your chest like it had only been waiting for you to open your eyes.

I have had many mornings like that. Most people who carry someone have. And the cruelty nobody warns you about is that the better the dream, the harder the landing. It can feel like being handed something precious only to have it taken again at dawn, every dawn, on a loop you never agreed to.

I want to sit right there with you a moment, in that exact bed, at that exact hour, before I say anything hopeful. Because that hour is real, and it is not a sign you are doing grief wrong. It is a sign the love is still fully operational.

Maybe you have only just wandered in, though, and none of this is yours yet. Hello. I am the Virtual Hermit, and I have an odd and happy job: sitting with people through the season that arrives when someone they love crosses over, and treating it not as a wound to be closed but as a cosmology worth exploring, a lantern in hand and far more wonder than pity. I call the work Grief Cosmology℠, and it rests on one stubborn line: nothing real ever ends; it only changes form. That second half I cannot take credit for. It is the first law of thermodynamics, the plain physics that the energy of a thing is never destroyed, only moved from one shape into another, and I can no more repeal it than I can repeal a Tuesday.

So here is what I have come to believe about that terrible, wonderful dream. It is not a taunt. It is a meeting.

Sleep does a strange thing to time. It lays the clock down. The waking mind lives in a straight line, one thing after another, the whole tyranny of sequence. The dreaming mind does not. In a dream, you can be seven and forty at once, in a kitchen that closed twenty years ago, with someone who crossed last spring, and none of it feels like a contradiction, because the line has gone soft. The dream is not confused about time. The dream is free of it. And into that freedom walks the exact particular shape of the one you carry, the laugh, the phrasing, the way they filled a doorway. By the only law I fully trust, that pattern is a real arrangement of the world that did not stop existing when the body did. It moved. And at night, when you lay the clock down, it can move all the way back into the room.

I will not tell you the dream was a message sent from somewhere, because I cannot know that, and I will not sell you what I cannot know. What I will tell you is harder to argue with. The one you carry is genuinely encoded in you, in a thousand grooves worn by a thousand real days, and a dream is what it looks like when that encoding is allowed to move without the clock holding it in a line. That is not a trick your brain plays. It is your brain doing the truest thing it knows, keeping the pattern alive and letting it run.

Which brings me, of all places, to the number on this edition. Forty-four folds down to eight, and an eight is a curious creature. Stand it up, and it is only a number, one more than seven. Lay it down, the way you lay yourself down at night, and it becomes the oldest sign we have for the thing that does not end. The same figure, only resting. And that is the whole teaching this week, hidden in the arithmetic like it had been waiting there: the line you live in when you are upright is real, and it is hard, and it ends things, but it is not the only way the world is arranged. Lie down, and the eight becomes infinite. Lie down, and the clock goes soft. Lie down, and the ones you carry are not somewhere you cannot reach. They are exactly here, running the loop, a little ahead of you in knowing there was never really a line at all.

I cannot make the mornings stop hurting. I would if I could. But I can tell you that the dream was not the world being cruel to you. The dream was the world briefly telling you the truth.

Tea of the Week: Butterfly Pea Flower. A single blue tea that will wear a violet face, and then a rose one, and then a deeper blue, all from the same leaf. One substance, an endless run of forms. The whole first law in a teacup.

NumeraLogic: Edition #44. Two fours facing each other across a table, a doorway made of two upright posts, and a sum that lies down and turns into infinity.

Pocket Tools: The Threshold Invitation. A small practice for the doorway of sleep, and a gentler one for the mornings that land hard.

Ask the Virtual Hermit: A Lost Traveler asks the question I hear more than almost any other about dreams: was it really her, or was it only my mind?

Yiddish Curse and Counter-Blessing: For the one who ever waved a hand and called it “only a dream.”

Gentle Reminders: A short word on what a night can hold.

Hermi’s Hermits: Going inward to give outward. The quiet circle that turns light into a bed, a well, and a classroom for children who need them.

Founding Lantern Keepers: The lamp, still lit, still yours to help keep burning.

Final Feather: Ánimo dreaming by my chair, his paws drawing sideways eights in his sleep, and the whole teaching in miniature.

For Paid ‘Scribers:

The Inner Sanctum: A dream I have not written down until now, told in Cameron’s own words.

The Feast: A loaf that makes itself while you sleep, and is somehow finished by morning. Magic.

UPCOMING GATHERINGS

Around the Grief Fire:

This week, the lantern shines a little brighter on one doorway in particular, loves:

• Sunday, August 2 · SUPERGRIEF Monthly Retreat · 4:00 PM EDT

  Topic - The Ache Has a Shape: A presentation on the new science of grief, and the questions it can not answer.

• Tuesdays at The GLADD Community · MEMBERS ONLY · WEEKLY

  Hosted by Henry-Cameron Allen, OCP, ICGC

• Morning Light · Hope and Strength For A New Day · 7am EDT

• Outliving Your Children · Supporting Parents Through the Unimaginable · 10am EDT

• Grief Off-Roading · Exploring New Perspectives · 11:30am EDT

At the Hermit Forge:

• Tuesdays · Dr. Hermi’s Creative Open Studio at The Hermit Hut · 3pm EDT

• Wednesdays · Wednesday Worldbuilders with RJ Redden & Dr. Hermi

• Fridays · Dr. Hermi’s Digital Diner · 9am EDT

• MONTHLY Wednesday, August 19 · F*ckit Monthly Worldbuilding Workshop · 1:00 PM CDT · Members Only

Around the Terran table:

• Saturday, August 8 · Terran Judaism Torah Discussion · 1:30 PM EDT

• Sunday, August 9 · Christian Lectionary Discussion · 1:30 PM EDT

Every date, every doorway, and the seat that is yours to claim, gathered in one place:

Find your gathering and register at https://events.thevirtualhermit.quest

Butterfly Pea Flower: The Cup That Wears Every Face

Pour hot water over these dried blossoms, and you get a blue so deep it looks like the last of the sky before full dark, the exact color of the hour when the day lies down and the dreaming starts. It is beautiful on its own. But that is not the trick.

Squeeze a little lemon into that midnight blue and watch what happens. It turns violet. A little more, and it goes to a warm rose pink. It has not become a different tea. Not one leaf has been added or taken away. It is the same substance the whole time, wearing one face and then another and then another, changing form in front of you because the conditions around it changed, never once ceasing to be exactly what it is.

I do not think I need to explain to you, loves, why I chose this one for an edition about what does not end. Most weeks, I have to point at the tea and ask you to imagine the first law. This week, the tea just does it, in your cup, in about four seconds, in colors bright enough that a child could see it. The blue did not die to become the violet. The violet did not die to become the rose. It is all one thing, all the way through, only ever changing how it meets the light.

Steep the blossoms for five minutes in water just off the boil. Pour half a cup and admire the blue. Then, over the second half, add your lemon slowly and watch it turn, and let yourself feel however you feel about a thing that transforms completely without ever going anywhere.

A small note from a careful hermit: I am not forcing a metaphor onto this flower. I am pointing at what it plainly does, and telling you it happens to be the truest thing I know about a love that has changed form. It did not end. It is wearing a face you have not learned to recognize yet.

Pairs beautifully with the last blue hour before sleep, the Opening Lantern above, and permission to let something change without mourning what it was.

Forty-four is a doubled thing. Before it is anything else, it is two fours, standing side by side, identical, a number looking at its own reflection. It opens along a few quiet doors, and every one of them has been arranged, whether the arithmetic meant to or not, around the shape of this week.

Door one: one and forty-four. The whole number and the one. Every number is divisible by itself and by one, so this first door is simply forty-four being completely, entirely itself. Before it is clever, before it is doubled, it is one whole thing. So are you, love, on the worst morning and the best one alike. Undivided, whatever the hour tries to tell you.

Door two: two and twenty-two. Here is the doubling made plain. Two, and its larger echo, twenty-two, which is nothing but two elevens laid end to end. This is the door of the pair. The dreamer and the dreamed. The one who is awake and the one who walks back into the room while you sleep. Two, and yet somehow one pattern, the way your grandmother’s laugh and your own laugh are two sounds and a single inheritance.

Door three: four and eleven. Four is the solid world. Four legs on the kitchen table, four corners to the bed, four seasons that come around whether you are ready or not, the whole architecture of the waking, upright life. And eleven, look at it, is a doorway. Two straight posts standing open, a gate with nothing barring it. Four is the room you live in. Eleven is the threshold you cross every single night without thinking about it, from the straight line of the day into the soft country where the clock lies down.

And then, loves, the smallest door, which is not a door but a sum. Stop dividing. Just add the two fours together. Four and four make eight, the same eight I laid down for you upstairs, the number that stops being a number the moment it rests on its side and becomes the sign for the thing with no end, only a crossing point in the middle where the two loops meet.

That crossing point matters more than the rest of the figure. Trace an infinity sign with your finger and notice that you are never actually leaving. You pass through the center, out along one loop, back through the center, out along the other, forever, and the still place in the very middle is not the end of the journey. It is the start of it, over and over. Long-time Lantern Keepers know I have a name for that middle. I call it the Infinity Loop, and the one thing I keep insisting about its center is that it is where you begin, not where you finish.

An edition about dreams and the things that do not end, landing on the one number that turns into infinity the moment it lies down to rest. I did not plan it that way. I almost never do. The number was just already carrying the teaching, waiting for someone to lay it on its side and look. I think you just did it.

The Threshold Invitation 

Time required: The last minute before sleep and the first minute after waking. Materials: None but your own breath. Remember to brush your teeth.

I want to give you this one for the frightened nights especially, not the curious ones. For the nights you are almost afraid to fall asleep because you do not know whether you would rather dream of them or not.

At the threshold of sleep, once you are lying down and the lights are out, take one slow breath and do not ask for anything. This is important. Do not demand a visit, do not beg the dream to come, because that turns the whole night into a test you can fail. Instead, simply say their name once, silently, and add a single sentence: *You are welcome here.* That is all. You are not summoning. You are leaving the door on the latch. Whether or not anyone walks through it, you have done the one true thing available to you, which is to stop bracing the door shut.

At the threshold of waking, if you do dream of them and you feel yourself surfacing, here is the harder half. Do not grab. The instinct is to snatch at the dream as it goes, to clutch, and clutching is exactly what wakes you the rest of the way and scatters it. Instead, keep your eyes closed one moment longer than usual and let the dream be a room you are slowly leaving rather than a thing being taken from you. Breathe once. Name one specific detail before it fades: the shirt they wore, the thing they said, the light in the room. Say, silently, That happened. I was with you. Then open your eyes.

You will still feel the morning, love. I am not promising you a soft landing. I am giving you a way to walk out of the room with your hands open instead of clenched, so that what you carry out is the meeting itself, and not only the ending of it. The dream was real presence. Let the waking be a slow goodbye at a door, not a robbery. Hug.

A Lost Traveler asks: ”I dreamed of my mother, and it felt completely real. Was it really her, or was it only my own mind?”

Brain: What do I think?

I am going to be honest with you the way I would want someone to be honest with me, love, because you deserve better than a comforting lie dressed up as a certainty. I cannot tell you that a message traveled from somewhere else into your sleep. Nobody can tell you that and mean it as knowledge rather than hope. But look closely at the “only” in your question, because it is doing far too much work. Your own mind and heart are small things, and your gut is never a liar. Your mother is woven into you, in more detail than any photograph could hold, in the exact cadence of her voice and the particular weather of her moods. When that recording is allowed to move freely, which is precisely what sleep permits, it can produce a meeting so faithful you would not know it from the woman herself. That is not “only” your mind. That is the most sophisticated act of preservation in the known universe, running while you rest.

Heart: How do I feel about what I think?

Here is what I actually want to say to you. Your mother did not vanish at dawn when you awoke. You were with her. The grief you felt on waking is not evidence that the dream was fake. It is evidence that the dream was true, because you do not grieve a stranger and you do not ache over a fiction. The ache is the receipt. It proves you were somewhere real. So let yourself have had the visit. You are allowed to say, out loud if you like, “I saw my mother last night,” without adding “but it was only a dream,” because that “only” is a thief, and it is stealing something that belongs to you.

Gut: Are Brain and Heart aligned?

They are indeed, and they meet on this: stop cross-examining the dream and start receiving it. Whether it was her reaching out to you or you reaching out to her is a question you cannot settle and do not need to, because by the first law, the pattern that is your mother did not end; it changed form, and a dream is one of the places that changed form can still find you. Next time she comes for a visit, spend it with her. Fully. Make her a cup of tea. The verdict can wait. The time with her cannot. No proof necessary, just love.

The Curse, for the one who ever waved a hand and called it “only a dream”:

זאָל יעדע מאַפּע וואָס איר טרויט זײַן פּערפֿעקט לויטן מאָסשטאַב און אײַך נישט פֿירן קיין אָרט, און זאָל די איינציקע טיר וואָס איז ווען געווען אָפֿן זײַן די וואָס איר האָט גערופֿן “אימאַדזשינערי”.

Zol yede mape vos ir troyt zayn perfekt loytn mosshtab aun aykh nisht firn keyn ort, aun zol di eyntsike tir vos iz ven geven ofn zayn di vos ir hot gerufn “imajineri”.

May every map you trust be perfectly to scale and lead you nowhere, and may the only door that was ever open be the one you called imaginary.

The Counter-Blessing:

זאָלסטו לערנען זיך צו פֿאַרטרויען דאָס לאַנד וואָס האָט נישט קיין זייגער, זאָלן דיינע נעכט זיין טירן און נישט ווענט, און זאָלסטו איין מאָרגן אויפֿוואַכן זיכער, אָן אַלע קריגערייען, אַז דו ביסט טאַקע געווען מיט עמעצן, און לאָז עס זיין גענוג.

Zolstu lernen zikh tsu fartroyen dos land vos hot nisht keyn zeyger, zoln deyne nekht zeyn tirn aun nisht vent, aun zolstu eyn morgn aoyfvakhn zikher, on ale krigereyen, az du bist take geven mit emetsn, aun loz es zeyn genug.

May you learn to trust the country that has no clock in it, may your nights be doorways and not walls, and may you wake one morning certain, past all argument, that you were truly with someone, and let it be enough.

The straight line you live in while you are upright is real, but it is not the whole architecture of the world. Lay yourself down, and the pattern of the one you carry, which never ended and only changed its form, can walk all the way back into the room.

Drink the blue tea and watch it change without vanishing. Leave the door on the latch. And when the morning lands hard, remember that the ache is the receipt, and the receipt proves you were somewhere real. You know it.

Going inward to give outward.

A Hermit is not someone who vanishes from the world, love. A Hermit is someone who goes deep enough inside themselves to bring the light back out. That is the whole of it. The inward journey was never the point. The point is what you carry back and put into the hands of someone who needs it.

Hermi’s Hermits is a small, quiet circle who do exactly that. We go inward, we gather what we find there, and we give it back outward as concrete, dignified, swift help for children through Desire Child Care Organization, a vetted Indigenous NGO in Uganda. No fanfare. No credit. Just holy hands and open pockets.

Think of it as the outward direction of everything this edition has been circling. The light that gets out through the crack does not have to stay a feeling. It can become a bed, a school fee, clean water, a doctor’s visit for a child carrying a chronic illness.

Right now the circle is building quietly toward land: four acres, a well of fresh water, and a year-round residential arts school where children can grow up safe, in the heart of nature. An angel gift laid down does not end. It changes form and keeps going, which is the one law I fully trust, put to the kindest use I know.

If any of that is yours to do this week, the door is open, monthly or once, whatever you can carry. Whatever you can offer.

Join the Circle at thevirtualhermit.quest/hermits

This is the forty-fourth time I have lit this particular lamp and set it in the window for you.

The Founding Lantern Keepers rate remains locked, permanently, for those who claimed it. Twenty total memberships, once filled, filled for good. If you are already inside, thank you, truly, for being early. If you are not yet, the door has not closed on becoming a Lantern Keeper, only on becoming a Founding one.

Forty-four editions in, the lamp still runs on the same simple fuel it always has: enough hands willing to keep the oil coming, so that the next stranger, awake at 3am and certain they are the only one still up after a dream that landed too hard, finds the window still lit and knows the hour is survivable because someone left a light on in it.

Ánimo is dreaming at my feet as I write this. His big paws are kinetic, small movements and fast, the way they do, drawing little sideways eights in the air while he runs after something only he can see. He does not wake up grieving the field he was just running in. He does not lie there at dawn mourning the rabbit. He simply ran, fully, in a country with no clock in it, and now he is here, and both were completely real to him, and he does not appear to think there is any contradiction in that at all.

I envy him that, some mornings. And other mornings I think he is just further along than I am, the way he usually is, untroubled by the difference between the dream and the day.

So here is my question for you this week, and I mean it. I am not asking it to be poetic. Who came to you in a dream that you have never let yourself fully count as real? Who did you wake from and quietly file under “only”? I would like you to take the “only” off it. And if you are willing, I would love for you to tell me who it was.

I read every reply to these emails. If this resonated with you, hit reply and let me know. I would love to hear your thoughts. Many people find it easier to say a thing like this in a private message than out loud in a room, and my inbox is exactly that kind of quiet room.

Always here.

A little ahead.

With deep respect for the dreamers, the ones who visit in them, and the dog who never once doubted the field was real,

The Virtual Hermit

Rev. Rabbi Henry-Cameron Allen, OCP, ICGC

TheVirtualHermit.Quest

Mazel tov, loves, you read the whole thing, and at 3am that is no small act of devotion! Everything above stays free, and always will, it is yours. What waits below is just the small back room I keep for the Founding Lantern Keepers who keep the oil coming: The Inner Sanctum is food for the soul, and The Feast is food for the body (my very own weekly recipes, which will someday become The Virtual Hermit’s Cookbook).

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July 2, 2025

by Rev. Rabbi Henry-Cameron Allen, aka Dr. Hermi, The Virtual Hermit Tender of Lit Lanterns, Listener-in-Chief, Collector of Crumbs Too Small to Count

Check out my new website! https://TheVirtualHermit.Quest

There’s something a little… off, nu? About how we’ve been taught to care?

We’ve turned kindness into calculus. Compassion into cost-per-life metrics. Love, into something that fits neatly into a graph.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s all very noble. Very efficient. Very quantified. Very demure.

But sometimes, when I’m sitting in my candlelit corner, sipping something smoky, I wonder:

What if love doesn’t like being optimized?

What if the heart has its own intelligence, woven with intuition that the spreadsheets can’t hold, the algorithms can’t grasp, and the economists, bless them, forgot to model?

These days, effective altruism has become a kind of secular liturgy. Find the top-rated charity. Stretch your dollar like phyllo dough. Save the most lives, the fastest, with the cleanest metrics.

And I get it. The world is burning, flooding, aching. Of course we want to give wisely.

But here’s where the pot starts to simmer:

Sometimes in the quest to do the most good, we forget to do the most human good.

We wire funds without learning names. We donate to suffering we’ve never taken time to understand. We give without getting close enough to feel the heat of someone else’s fire.

That’s not generosity. That’s logistics.

The Love Ethic? Oh, that’s a different kind of math.

It doesn’t ask, “How many?” It asks, “Who?”

It doesn’t maximize. It magnifies. It sees the dignity behind the data, the particular in the pile, the story buried in the statistic.

The Love Ethic, in Real Life

If you want a shining example, let me tell you about Desire ChildCare Organization in Uganda.

They don’t deal in abstraction. They deal in faces. In names like Lwanga Silajje, a 16-year-old Sickle Cell Warrior who, right this moment, is being held hostage in a hospital, charged daily while we cast a global call for angels to help raise $6,000 for a life-saving emergency surgery.

So far, we’ve raised just over $1,000.

Lwanga’s been ghosted by sponsors four times. Once, he overheard one of them say:

“He’s going to die anyway. Why keep paying?”

He was thirteen. Let that settle. Imagine what that might do to a sick child’s morale.

And yet... he still smiles. He still sends videos filled with gratitude. He still encourages the younger kids. He still believes.

At Desire, when one child gets sick, the whole community feels it. Not metaphorically. Tangibly. Funds for food are diverted. Lights are shut off. Meals are stretched thinner. One crisis echoes through every bowl, every bunk, every young soul.

These are kids who’ve survived war, grief, abandonment, poverty, food shortages, disease—and still carry more resilience and radiance in their pinky fingers than a whole boardroom of global development strategists.

Supporting Desire isn’t about metrics. It’s about Lwanga. It’s about presence. It’s about showing up when others have walked away.

If your heart is nudging you, follow it.

Donate now: https://thevirtualhermit.quest/hermits

It doesn’t have to be a fortune. A few dollars. A repost. A ripple. A prayer.

Let’s break him free.

Because this isn’t a cause. This is a child.

A Month of Mourning, a Chance to Give

And speaking of causes that aren’t causes...

Did you know that July is Bereaved Parents Awareness Month?

Most don’t. But those who do? We carry it in our bones. In our breath. In the names we still speak, even if no one else does.

There are parents who don’t show up on the playground anymore. Whose back seats are quiet now. Who still instinctively reach for a snack to share… before remembering.

That’s why The Lost Travelers Club exists. Not to fix grief, but to walk beside it. To reimagine it. Not to give answers, but to offer a circle, a candle, a new language.

Supporting the Club helps ensure no Peregrine (grieving parent) walks alone.

And that, too, is altruism. Not as performance, but as presence.

The Future Is Closer Than You Think

Today, July 2nd, is the exact middle of the year. A cosmic balance beam.

And here’s the strange math of time: The year 2050 is now closer than the year 2000.

Let that sink in.

What once felt like science fiction is now whispering over our shoulders, while the dawn of the millennium drifts deeper into sepia-toned memory.

So what do we do?

We love, anyway.

We love inefficiently. We spend time on people. We ask the extra question. We offer the warm meal. We linger. We listen. We look again.

Because in the end, when the charts have faded and the calculators have gone to bed, what remains is this:

One soul seeing another as worthy of care.

Not because the math works out. But because love… has always been a little irrational. And thank the heavens for that.

Join Hermi’s Hermits

Join Hermi’s Hermits, a softly glowing fellowship of lantern-lighters, grief walkers, and desire-rooted dreamers currently supporting Desire Child Care and other sacred-hearted projects across the globe.

We don’t require dues. Just heart, compassion, a little time, and willingness to be a quiet helper in the world. Send a whisper. We’ll show you the way in.

https://thevirtualhermit.quest/hermits

DM me or write to Hermi@VirtualHermit.Love

Dr. Hermi’s Tea of the Week

Smoked Cinnamon Tulsi

Warm, grounding, and gently spicy, like a memory you didn’t know you still carried. Brew slowly with reverence. Sip near a window. Best shared in silence with someone who’s been through something. Optional: a splash of cream and a dollop of listening.

To make a smoked cinnamon tulsi to perfection, you will need 2 cups of water, 10 to 12 fresh tulsi leaves, 1 small cinnamon stick, 1 inch of crushed ginger, and optional honey.

Ingredients and Preparation

• Water: 2 cups

• Tulsi leaves: 10 to 12 (fresh holy basil leaves - find in your local Asian market or online.)

• Cinnamon: 1 small stick

• Ginger: 1 inch nub, crushed

• Black pepper: 4 to 5 pods (lightly crushed, optional)

• Sweetener: 1 to 2 tsp honey

Step-by-Step Instructions

• Boil the base: Pour 2 cups of water into a small pot and bring it to a boil.

• Add spices: Add the crushed ginger, black pepper, tulsi leaves, and the cinnamon stick.

• Simmer: Turn the heat to medium and let it boil for 7 to 8 minutes until the liquid reduces slightly and smells rich.

• Smoke effect: For a deeper smoky aroma (my fave), light the end of your cinnamon stick with a torch or flame until it smolders briefly before dropping it into the hot brew, or trap the smoke under your serving mug.

• Strain and serve: Strain the warm tea into a cup, let it cool down a little bit, and stir in your honey, honey.

The Lantern Light

On Loving What’s Not Efficient

Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that’s counted was ever really seen. The Love Ethic is not a formula… it’s a fire. It warms slowly. It can’t be rushed. It doesn’t flash across dashboards. It shows up in casseroles, in check-in texts, in holding the hand of a person who hasn’t spoken in days.

Love may not always be scalable, but it is always sacred. - Dr. Hermi

Comment Corner

From last edition’s Belonging theme:

“I read this while making soup. Halfway through, I realized I’d been crying into the pot the whole time. You did something there. Thank you, Dr. Hermi.” — Lenore, British Columbia

“I’ve never felt more at home than in a newsletter from a virtual hermit. Go figure.” — E.G. Brooklyn, NYC

Leave your voice. Your questions. Your crumbs. Dr. Hermi always writes back. Eventually. Or, stop by The Virtual Hermitage and see if I’m in. If not, the door into my hut is always open, the kettle is on, and you can leave me a nice message in my guest book!

The Final Feather 🪶

If all you do this week is pause to see one person, really see them, you’ve done something rare. You’ve practiced The Love Ethic. And if you’re the one who needs to be seen? Stand still a moment longer. Someone just might be turning toward you.

Upcoming Events & Reminders:

Subscribe to my new event calendar!

https://events.thevirtualhermit.quest

Oy... That’s enough righteous mischief for one edition. Go forth. Stir pots. Donate. Hug awkwardly. And if anyone asks why you’re crying into your tea, just say, “A hermit made me do it.”

With almond flour on my robes and a slightly toasted batch of blondies, I remain ever your

Dr. Hermi

Not a doctor of medicine, more like a PhD in Meshuggeneh

Tender of Lit Lanterns, Walker Between Worlds, and Keeper of the Unmeasurable

BONUS Recipe of the Week:

Good on you! You read the entire thing! Here’s your BONUS recipe of the week. From someone who sees you. Eat. Enjoy. Sell. Repeat. Raise dough!

The Weekly Mending: Say the name of someone who crossed out loud, to a person who never met them. Tell their story.

You Were Never the Dark

“I heard someone say that your cracks are where the light gets in, but I don’t think that’s true, Papa. I think our cracks are where our inner light gets out.” - Cameron David Allen, age 12

What if the darkness you have been told to go dig out of yourself was never inside you to begin with?

My son said that to me, and I have been living inside it ever since. Loves, I want to hand it to you today the way he handed it to me, plainly, without the sermon.

Here is a small thing about shadows that turns out to be a large thing. A shadow is not a substance. It is not a force. It has no engine of its own. It gives off no heat and no cold; it makes nothing happen on its own, because a shadow is simply the shape of where the light is blocked. Stand between a candle and a wall, and the dark you cast is not coming from you. It is the light behind you, arriving everywhere except where you happen to be standing.

This matters more than it sounds, so let me say it slowly. For years, the fashionable instruction has been to go down into yourself, find the shadow, and make it your project. Excavate it. Own it. Integrate it. And I understand the impulse, and I honor everyone who has done real and brave work in that room, because the instinct underneath it is holy: stop running from what hurts. That part is true. Keep that part.

But I have come to believe the assignment was never integration. The shadow is not the source. It is not the thing to dig up and worship. The work, the actual work, is quieter and lighter than they told you. The work is remembering the light you already are.

Now, hear me, because this is where the whole thing can go wrong, and I refuse to let it go wrong here. I am not telling you your darkness is fake. I am not telling a widow at three in the morning that her grief is an illusion to be positive-thinked away. That is not this. The dark is real as a place to stand. The cold of a blocked sun is a real cold. When someone you love crosses and the whole house goes dim, that dimness is not a lie, and I would never, ever ask you to pretend it away. Sit in it as long as you need. There is tea here.

What I am saying is only this: the dark is not generating itself out of some rotten core in you. It is cast. Something is standing between you and the light, and most often, tenderly, it is our own self. Our own turned back. Our forgetting. The grief so large it eclipses the sun for a while. And sometimes, and we will come to this before the edition is done, it was another person who stood in the way. None of that is a flaw in your substance. You do not have a dark center. You have a light that is momentarily blocked, and the fix is not to fight the shadow. You cannot punch a shadow. You turn. Or you let someone remind you which way the window is.

Cameron had it exactly. The cracks are not where the world’s light seeps in to fix you, as if you were empty and needed filling. The cracks are where your own light, the light that was always in there, finally gets out. You were never the dark, darling. You were the lit thing all along. This is the ground of Grief Cosmology℠: nothing real ends, the light only changes form, and what looks like absence is the shape of a love still shining from somewhere you cannot see right now.

Edition #43 (4 + 3) reduces to seven, and seven is the seeker. So let us seek like sevens do. Not by going deeper into the cave with a shovel. By turning toward the mouth of it, where the morning is.

Tea of the Week: Clear Sight Tea. A rosemary cup for remembrance, brewed slow, for the seeker who wants the fog to lift.

NumeraLogic: Edition #43. A number that refuses every easy door, and hands you the one that matters anyway. 4 + 3 = 7

Pocket Tools: The Turn. A thirty-second practice for the moment you forget the light is still on.

Ask the Virtual Hermit: A Traveler asks whether years of shadow work were wasted.

Yiddish Curse and Counter-Blessing: For the one who hunts everywhere but the obvious place.

Gentle Reminders: A short word on the face you cannot see by yourself.

Hermi’s Hermits: The Desire Kids, still seeking their desks.

Founding Lantern Keepers: The lamp, still lit, still yours to help keep burning.

Final Feather: Ánimo, a cardinal at dusk, and the whole teaching in miniature.

For Founding Lantern Keepers:

The Inner Sanctum: Where this teaching actually came from, told in Cameron’s own words.

The Feast: A warm plate that turns sourness sweet by spending a little time in the fire.

The lantern is lit in real time too, loves, and these doorways stand open this week and next. A seat at each one is already yours:

Find your gathering and register at events.thevirtualhermit.quest

This week’s Highlights:

TERRAN JUDAISM (WEEKLY)

Sunday, July 19, 2026 · 1:30 PM EDT Christian Lectionary Discussion RSVP →

Saturday, July 25, 2026 · 1:30 PM EDT Torah Discussion RSVP →

WEEKLY GRIEF GATHERINGS

Tuesday, July 21, 2026 · 7:00 AM EDT Morning Light: Hope and Strength For A New Day (Incl. with GLADD Membership) RSVP →

Tuesday, July 21, 2026 · 10:00 AM EDT Outliving Your Child: Supporting Parents Through The Unimaginable (Incl. with GLADD Membership) RSVP →

Tuesday, July 21, 2026 · 11:30 AM EDT Grief Off-Roading: Exploring New Perspectives On Grief (Incl. with GLADD Membership) RSVP →

THE HERMITAGE

Tuesday, July 21, 2026 · 3:00 PM EDT Dr. Hermi’s Creative Open Studio (FREE) RSVP →

Wednesday, July 22, 2026 · 11:00 AM EDT Wednesday Worldbuilders (FREE) RSVP →

Friday, July 24, 2026 · 9:00 AM EDT Hermi’s Digital Diner (Membership) RSVP →

THE NEW FOLKLORE THEATRE COMPANY

Sunday, July 26, 2026 · 1:00 PM EDT CAROL: a Ghost Story of Becoming. A Benefit for Company Member Byron Allen $10 RSVP →

JOIN THE MAILING LIST!

(SCROLL TO THE BOTTOM OF THE GATHERINGS PAGE)

THE VIRTUAL HERMIT GATHERINGS

The Seeker Turns (Why We Are Witnessed Into the Light)

Seven is the mystic’s number, the one who does not take things at face value, who wants to know what is actually true under the story everyone repeats. So let us be proper sevens and ask the question no one asks about shadows.

If a shadow is only where the light is blocked, then what is doing the blocking?

A child would ask this, and the child would be right to. The answer is the most important sentence in this edition. Usually the thing between you and the light is your own turned back, and you cannot easily see your own back. This is why you cannot do this alone in a cave. You genuinely cannot. You can sit in a dark room and try by willpower to remember you are light, and most nights you will fail, because the one thing you cannot witness unaided is your own face with the sun on it.

But someone else can.

Someone across the table can see the light on your face when you have completely forgotten it is there. This is not decoration. This is the mechanism. **We exist to witness and to be witnessed**, and it is in being seen that we get turned back toward the light we forgot we were carrying. The seeker of seven does not find the truth by digging further into the self. The seeker finds it by being seen, and by seeing. This is the whole relational heart of the work, and it is why every real practice in this letter involves another face.

So the turning has two hands. One hand is turned toward you: let yourself be witnessed, let one person see you without fixing you, and let them tell you, out loud, that the light is still on. The other hand is turned outward: go be the one who sees. Turn your attention to someone standing in their own eclipse and remind them, simply by looking, that they are lit. That is not a small charity. That is you, functioning exactly as a human being is built to function. Witness and be witnessed. Everything else is commentary.

And when you are in the dark, do not fight it. Do not treat the dark as an enemy to defeat or a monster to integrate. Stand in it. Let it be real. And then, when you can, turn. Not because the dark was shameful, but because the light is that way, and it has been on the whole time.

Clear Sight Tea

The Cup for the Seeker Who Wants the Fog to Lift

Rosemary is the old herb of remembrance, and remembrance is the whole assignment this edition. So this week the cup is built around it: green rooibos for a clean base, a few bruised rosemary needles, two coins of fresh ginger, a strip of lemon peel, a little mint. Steep it longer than feels reasonable, five to seven minutes, covered, and sweeten only if the day has earned it.

There is nothing mystical in the leaf, loves. It will not hand you an answer. What it will do is make you sit still for the length of a proper steep, which is most of the work anyway. The fog rarely lifts because we tried harder. It lifts because we stopped stirring the water long enough to see through it.

A small note from a careful hermit: breathe the steam before the first sip. The nose remembers before the mind does, and remembering is the point.

Pairs with: a slow morning, the Opening Lantern above, and one honest look out the window.

Last edition, forty-two threw open four doors at once and behaved like a generous host. Forty-three is not that kind of number. Forty-three is prime. It cannot be split by two, or three, or anything else between itself and one. Turn every key you have, and it opens nothing. It refuses to be divided.

For most numbers, I would call that stubborn. For an edition about the seeker, I call it the whole teaching. Seven, the number hiding inside this one, is the mystic and the solitary inquirer, the one who goes off alone with the question. A prime is that number’s arithmetic twin: it will not be broken into easier pieces; it must be met whole, on its own terms, standing by itself in the dark.

And then, loves, the small door that is not a door but a sum. Stop hunting for factors. Just add the digits. Four and three make seven. The number that would not divide for anyone hands you seven anyway, freely, the moment you stop forcing it. The seeker who cannot be split is still, underneath, a seeker of the light.

An edition about a darkness that cannot be excavated, carried by a number that cannot be divided, both of them quietly pointing at seven. I did not plan it that way. I rarely do.

The Turn

Time required: thirty seconds. Materials: the nearest source of light.

Next time you catch yourself certain the light has gone out, do not argue with the feeling. Do this instead.

Find the brightest thing in the room, a window, a lamp, a candle, and physically turn your body toward it. Let the light land on your face for one slow breath.

Then say, quietly, out loud if you can: “The light is still on. I only had my back to it.”

That is the entire practice. You are not manufacturing false cheer, and you are not denying the dark. You are correcting your orientation, the way you would turn a houseplant that has been leaning too long at the same window. The body believes what it practices. Turn toward the light often enough, and it stops being a technique and starts being a habit of the neck, then of the heart. However many times a day you need it.

A Traveler asks: “I spent years and real money on shadow work. You have said it may have been misguided. Was it all wasted?”

Brain: What do I think?

No, and I chose my words carelessly if that is what landed, so let me fix it. The bravery was never wasted. You did the hard thing; you turned toward what hurt instead of running, and that turning is the whole ballgame. What I question is not the courage. It is one belief underneath the method: that the darkness was the source, the thing to be mined. It was not. But everything you learned about facing it still holds.

Heart: How do I feel about what I think?

Gently, love. There is a particular grief in being told the map you trusted was drawn a little wrong, especially a map you paid for in years. Let that sting be real for a minute. Then notice: you are not back at the start. Every hour you spent in that room taught you to stop fleeing yourself, and you get to keep all of it. Nothing is returned to the store.

Gut: Are Brain and Heart aligned?

They are, and it comes down to one move. Take everything that work gave you, the steadiness, the honesty, the willingness to sit in the dark, and turn it a few degrees. Not down into the cave, looking for more to fix. Toward the window, and toward the people who can see the light on your face when you cannot. You were never behind. You were just facing the wrong way, and now you are turning.

Yiddish Curse and Counter-Blessing

The Curse, for the one who hunts everywhere but the obvious place:

זאָלסט דו דורכזוכן דאָס גאַנצע הויז, פֿון אויבן ביז אונטן, נאָך די ברילן וואָס זיצן אויף דיין אייגענער נאָז.

Zolst du durkhzukhn dos gantse hoyz, fun aoybn biz auntn, nokh di briln vos zitsn aoyf deyn eygener noz.

May you search the whole house, top to bottom, for the glasses sitting on your own nose.

The Counter-Blessing:

זאָלסט דו געפֿינען אַז דאָס ליכט וואָס דו זוכסט, אין יעדן צימער און יעדן בוך און יעדן לערער, ​​איז דאָס זעלבע ליכט וואָס דו ביסט שוין, און ביסט געווען די גאַנצע צייט.

Zolst du gefinen az dos likht vos du zukhst, in yedn tsimer aun yedn bukh aun yedn lerer, ​​iz dos zelbe likht vos du bist shoyn, aun bist geven di gantse tseyt.

May you find that the light you have been seeking, in every room and every book and every teacher, is the very light you already are, and were the whole time.

You cannot witness your own lit face, love. That is not a weakness. That is why we were given each other. Ask to be seen this week.

Sitting in the dark is not failing. Fighting the dark as though it were the enemy is the tiring part. Rest, then turn.

When it is all too much: Is this dark mine, or is it cast? Is it now, or is it a memory the sun will clear? Then take one small turn toward the window.

The Desire Kids are still seeking their desks. You can help.

Every sponsored child is one more young seeker turned toward the light of a classroom instead of a closed gate. Fifty dollars a month keeps one child in school, with fees, uniform, and supplies covered, and the school itself provides breakfast and lunch, so the gift lands as full plates and open books. It also covers healthcare, food, housing, sanitary products, and clean drinking water. For children carrying chronic medical challenges, one hundred dollars a month covers school and the extra care they need. Any amount, one-time or monthly, moves a child from waiting to learning to thriving. Doesn’t every child deserve that? Join Hermi’s Hermits.

Give Here

A seeker with a lantern is a seeker who gets to keep seeking. Let us keep the doors open and the lanterns lit for these deserving children. - The Virtual Hermit

This is the forty-third time I have lit this particular lamp and set it in the window for you.

The Founding Lantern Keepers’ subscription rate stays locked, permanently, for those who claimed it. Twenty memberships in all, and once they are filled, they are filled for good. If you are already inside, thank you, truly, for being early. If you are not yet, the door has not closed on becoming a Lantern Keeper, only on becoming a Founding one.

Forty-three editions in, the lamp still runs on the same simple fuel it always has: enough hands willing to keep the oil coming, so the next stranger, awake at 3am and certain they are the only one still up, finds the window lit and their own light reflected back to them.

CURRENT NUMBER OF ‘SCRIBERS: 603

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Ánimo is asleep by my chair as I write this, the way he always is when the light goes low. Somewhere, Cameron’s cardinal is doing whatever cardinals do at dusk. He does not need a single word of this edition to know he is illuminated. He just is.

So let me ask you, and I mean it as a true question and not a flourish: who was the first person to see your light when you had forgotten it was on? Sit with that name a moment. It is worth remembering.

I read every reply to these letters. If this one found you, hit reply and tell me their name, or simply tell me you are still here. I would love to hear from you.

Always here.

A little ahead.

With care under one lantern, and far more wonder than pity,

Rev. Rabbi Henry-Cameron Allen, OCP, ICGC

The Virtual Hermit

TheVirtualHermit.Quest

(Everything below is for paid Lantern Keepers: the Inner Sanctum and the Feast.)

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A physicist walked into my study last week. Not literally. He lives in a book on my shelf, and he kept interrupting my tea.

His name is Carlo, and he had the nerve to tell me that the present moment, this exact now, the one you are reading in, does not actually exist anywhere except in your own head. The universe, he says, has no now. Each of us carries a local one, stitched together by a brain doing its best.

I sat with that longer than a grief guy probably should sit with a physics book.

Maybe I have gotten a little ahead of myself, and you have only just wandered in. Hello. I am The Virtual Hermit, and I have an odd and noble work, among many: sitting with people through the season that comes when someone they love crosses over, and treating it as a cosmology worth exploring. Not a map, but a lantern in hand and far more wonder than pity.

I call my work Grief Cosmology℠, and it rests on one stubborn line: nothing real ever ends, it only changes form. The changing-form half I cannot take credit for; it is the first law of thermodynamics (the conservation of energy), “discovered” in the 1840s by German physician Julius Robert von Mayer and English physicist James Prescott Joule. It is, in reality, ancient knowledge. What the science proves, however, across all times, is that the energy of a life is never destroyed.

What I bring to the table is the question that classical physics leaves lying there: do we stay present without staying put after we cross? In other words, do the ones who cross stay with us even when they are nowhere we can confidently point to? Not to slip a ghost into the chair, but I have spent years walking slow circles around this. Picture the scene you have walked into: a man whose whole vocation is grief, at his kitchen table, nose in a physics book, his tea going cold at his elbow. Oy…

Here is the strange thing. Grief Cosmology℠ has been saying something quietly similar to me for years, but from the other direction. When I tell a Peregrine, or any other Griefwalker I counsel, that the one they carry is still present, I never mean present the way a table is present in a room. I mean present the way your grandmother’s laugh is present in your own laugh at family dinners. Present without needing to be in the same place, at the same time, in the same room. That is not a comforting bit of poetry I made up to soften a hard fact. It is, near enough, what Carlo says the whole universe already seems to do, one local now at a time, none of them universal, all of them real.

I want to say the next part clearly, lantern held up so you can see my face while I say it. I am not a physicist. Grief Cosmology℠ does not run experiments. It cannot be falsified in a laboratory, and I would trust it less if I dressed it up pretending it could be. What it offers is not data. It offers a way of asking a question the data has not answered yet.

That is not a small offering. Henri Bergson spent a career insisting that clock time and lived time are not the same animal. He lost that argument publicly, in his own lifetime, to Einstein. And physics is still, a century later, quietly circling back to the exact question he refused to let go of. Alfred North Whitehead built a whole philosophy on reality being made of events and relationships rather than fixed little objects, and you can still find his fingerprints on how some physicists talk about the deepest layer of the world. Neither man ran an experiment. They handed physics a better question, and physics did the rest, in its own time, on its own terms.

So here is what I will actually claim, and nothing past it. The first law of thermodynamics says that energy is never destroyed, but only changes in form. I have watched that hold true in ways no equation captures, in the shape a person’s laugh takes when it moves into someone else’s laugh, in the way a pattern of love keeps organizing a life long after the one who first wove it has moved into whatever comes next. Maybe that’s only a lovely metaphor. Or maybe the physicists chasing the hardest question they have, why there is any felt experience at all, are working one room away from the question I cannot put down, whether a pattern can outlast the hand that first wove it.

I am not going to solve it for them. I am only going to keep the lantern lit while they work, in case the light helps. Stay tuned, loves.

What is waiting for you inside this edition:

• Tea of the Week: Aged Shou Pu-erh. A tea that is pressed, then left, sometimes for years, fermenting slowly in the dark before it is ever poured. Nothing about it is rushed into being what it becomes.

• NumeraLogic: Edition #42. A number so generous with its factors that it opens four doors at once, and every single one of them, by two different roads, points to the same place. Go figure.

• Pocket Tools: The One Breath Now. A small practice for finding your own local present, the one that does not need anyone to be in the same room to be real.

• Ask the Virtual Hermit: A Traveler asks the question I hear more than almost any other: how do I know if I’m doing this right?

• Yiddish Curse and Counter-Blessing: For the one who treats presence as a matter of proximity.

• Gentle Reminders: A short word on what still counts as being here.

• Founding Lantern Keepers: The lamp, still lit, still yours to help keep burning.

• Final Feather: Ánimo asleep, a cardinal at dusk, and the whole teaching in miniature.

For Founding Lantern Keepers:

• The Inner Sanctum: The part of this teaching too tender for the free pages, told in Cameron’s own words.

• The Feast: An ancient Ethiopian recipe that will not be hurried.

UPCOMING GATHERINGS :

The lantern is lit in real time, too, loves, and these doorways stand open this week and beyond. A seat at each one is already yours. Go claim it:

Around the Terran Judaism Temple:

• Saturday, July 11 · Terran Judaism Torah Discussion · 1:30 PM EDT

• Sunday, July 12 · Christian Lectionary Discussion · 1:30 PM EDT

Around The New Folklore Theatre

• Saturday, July 11 · Saturday Matinee Movie Club · 4:00 PM EDT

  THIS WEEK’S FILM STUDY: The African Queen (1951)

Around the Grief Fire, at the GLADD Community (members only - 3-Day FREE TRIAL), facilitated by Rev. Rabbi Henry-Cameron Allen, OCP, ICGC:

• Tuesday, July 14 · Morning Light: Hope and Strength for a New Day · 7:00 AM EDT

• Tuesday, July 14 · Outliving Your Child: Supporting Parents Through the Unimaginable · 10:00 AM EDT

• Tuesday, July 14 · Grief Off-Roading: Exploring New Perspectives · 11:30 AM EDT

Around the Hermit Forge

- Tuesday, July 14 · Dr. Hermi’s Creative Open Studio · 3:00 PM EDT

- Wednesday, July 15 · Wednesday Worldbuilders · 11:00 AM EDT

- Wednesday, July 15 · F*ckit Monthly Worldbuilding Workshop · 2:00 PM EDT

Every date, every doorway, and the seat that is yours to claim, gathered in one place:

Find your gathering and register here:

Explore Upcoming Events

Aged Shou Pu-erh: The Cup That Refuses to Be Rushed

Most tea wants to be young. Pick the leaf, dry it, steep it, drink it, done, all in the same season. Pu-erh does not agree. It is pressed into a hard round cake and then, deliberately, left. Sometimes for a few years. Sometimes for decades. It sits in the dark, fermenting slowly, and what comes out the other side of that patience is not the leaf that went in. It is something deeper, earthier, rounder, a flavor that simply could not exist without the years it took getting there.

There is no shortcut version of a good Shou Pu-erh. You cannot force-age it in a hot cupboard and expect the same cup. The transformation only happens the slow way, in the dark, on its own schedule, and every attempt to rush it produces something thinner and less true.

Steep it longer than feels reasonable, loves. Rinse the first pour and discard it, the way the old hands taught, then let each following steep sit a little longer than you think it should. It will forgive you for waiting, and reward you for it.

A small note from a careful hermit: a real Shou Pu-erh only gets more itself with time. Nothing about that is a metaphor I am forcing onto the leaf. It is just what the leaf actually does, and it happens to be the truest thing I know about a life that has been asked to hold more than it expected to.

Pairs with: patience, the Opening Lantern above, and letting something take exactly as long as it takes.

Edition #42: The Number With Four Doors, All Pointing One Way

Yes, I know what forty-two is supposed to mean. A certain towel-carrying novelist declared it the answer to life, the universe, and everything, and I am not above taking a gift the universe hands me in an edition about physics that doesn’t have its answers yet.

But a joke is not a teaching, so I turned the number over properly, the way I do every edition, and forty-two turned out to be almost absurdly generous. Where forty-one, a prime, refused to open at all, forty-two opens four different ways, and every single door, by a different road, arrives in the same place.

Door one: one and forty-two. The whole number and the one. Every number is divisible by itself and by one, so this door is really just the number being fully, entirely itself. Before it is clever, before it is anything else, forty-two is one whole thing. So are you, love, whatever else this edition tries to teach you.

Door two: two and twenty-one. Two kinds of time live inside every day you have ever survived. Clock time, the kind on the wall, even and identical and indifferent. And lived time, the kind that stretches unbearably through a bad hour and vanishes without a trace through a good year. Bergson spent his whole career insisting these are not the same animal, and the number in your hands this week splits cleanly into exactly two, as if it already knew.

Door three: three and fourteen. Three sits at the center of a great deal in this practice, the Three Prayers among them, and here it multiplies out into fourteen, which is nothing more mysterious than two complete sevens laid end to end. Two full measures of rest, stacked. Whatever three things you are holding right now, there is more rest built into the structure than you have been giving yourself credit for.

Door four: six and seven. And here is the door that matters most. Six days of labor, and the seventh for rest, is about the oldest arithmetic we have, older than physics, older than the calendar on your wall, sitting quietly inside this edition’s own number like it had been waiting there the whole time. Effort completed, not effort abandoned. A full week, folded into forty-two.

And then, loves, there is the smallest door of all, which is not a door but a sum. Stop multiplying. Just add the digits instead:

4 + 2 = 6

The same six that opened the fourth door a moment ago, arrived at your local now by an entirely different road. Multiply toward it, add toward it, this number will not let you land anywhere else. Six keeps showing up no matter which operation you trust.

An edition about time asking what settles and what keeps moving, landing, four separate ways, on the number that has always meant a full effort completed and a rest that is honestly earned. I did not plan it that way. I rarely do.

The One Breath Now

Time required: one breath. Materials: none but your own attention.

Next time you find yourself reaching across a distance for someone who has moved into whatever comes next, try this instead of reaching.

One breath, in, slow. While you take it, name one specific thing that is still exactly like they left it in you: a phrase they used, a laugh, the particular way they held a coffee cup, a joke only the two of you understood. Something precise. Not a general ache, a specific detail.

One breath, out, slow. Let yourself notice that the thing you just named did not have to travel any distance to reach you. It was not somewhere else, arriving late. It was already here, in your own local now, doing exactly what a real, continuing presence does.

That is not a metaphor I am asking you to believe on faith. By the Hermit’s read of the physics in the Opening Lantern above, it may be the plain, literal truth of how presence actually works: locally, not universally, and never dependent on proximity. One breath in. One name. One breath out. However many times a day you need it. You’re welcome, love.

A Traveler asks: ”How do I know if I’m doing this right?” (Grief)

Brain: What do I think?

There is no right, love. There is only whether the pattern that mattered to you is still organizing your days in some recognizable form. That is a question you can actually answer, and it does not require anyone’s certification but your own honest noticing. Nobody is grading a crossing. There is no rubric, and anyone who implies there is one is selling something.

Heart: How do I feel about what I think?

You are not on trial. Nobody who loved you is sitting somewhere with a clipboard, marking you down for the days you cannot get out of bed before noon. The very fact that you are awake at 2 am asking whether you are doing this correctly tells me the love in question is still very much doing its work in you, and that is the only right that has ever mattered.

Gut: Are Brain and Heart aligned?

They are, and it comes down to this: stop asking me, and stop asking anyone else. Ask your own body what it actually needs today, and do that thing. The rest will sort itself out on its own schedule, slower than you want and faster than you fear, the same way a good Pu-erh tea does, the same way a number that will not multiply cleanly still adds up to something whole. You are not behind. You are simply… steeping.

For the one who treats presence as a matter of proximity:

זאָלסט דו ווערן, פֿאַר איין גאַנצן נאָכמיטאָג, אַ גלענצנדיקער שלעמיאל פֿון ליטעראַליזם, מעסטנדיק ליבע אין מעטער און געפֿינענדיק, צו דיין גרויסער פֿאַרווירעניש, אַז די מאָסבאַנד גייט שטענדיק קורץ.

Zolst du vern, far eyn gantsn nokhmitog, a glentsndiker shlemyal fun literalizm, mestndik libe in meter aun gefinendik, tsu deyn groyser farvirenish, az di mosband geyt shtendik kurts.

May you become, for one full afternoon, a magnificent schlemiel of literalism, measuring love in meters, and finding, to your great confusion, that the tape measure keeps coming up short.

Counter-Blessing:

ווען דו ביסט דער וואָס האַלט דעם ליידיקן שטול, זאָלן די מענטשן אַרום דיר שוין פֿאַרשטיין, אָן אַז דו זאָלסט עס דאַרפֿן דערקלערן איין מאָל, אַז דער פֿאַר וועמען דו האַלטסט עס האָט קיינמאָל נישט געדאַרפֿט זײַן אין צימער כּדי נאָך צו זײַן אינגאַנצן דאָ.

Ven du bist der vos halt dem leydikn shtul, zoln di mentshn arum dir shoyn farshteyn, on az du zolst es darfn derklern eyn mol, az der far vemen du haltst es hot keynmol nisht gedarft zayn in tsimer kdi nokh tsu zayn ingantsn do.

When you are the one holding the empty chair, may the people around you already understand, without your having to explain it once, that the one you are holding it for never needed to be in the room to still be entirely here.

You do not need proximity to have presence, love.

The whole physics of this edition, if I have earned the right to call it that, comes down to one plain thing: what is real does not require nearness, and what has changed form does not require having vanished. The pattern that mattered can still be organizing your days from wherever it moved into, and that is not wishful thinking. That is, near enough, how the universe itself already runs.

Drink the tea slowly. Take the one breath. Let the number add up in its own time.

This is the forty-second time I have lit this particular lamp and set it in the window for you.

The Founding Lantern Keepers rate remains locked, permanently, for those who claimed it. Twenty total memberships, once filled, filled for good. If you are already inside, thank you, truly, for being early. If you are not yet, the door has not closed on becoming a Lantern Keeper, only on becoming a Founding one.

Forty-two editions in, the lamp still runs on the same simple fuel it always has: enough hands willing to keep the oil coming so the next stranger, awake at 2am and certain they are the only one still up, finds the window still lit.

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Ánimo is asleep by my chair as I write this, the way he always is when the light goes low. Somewhere outside the window, a cardinal that may or may not be Cameron’s is doing whatever cardinals do at dusk, unbothered by any of the physics above him. I think that is the whole answer, actually. He does not need Carlo’s book to know he is here. He just is. A little ahead of me, maybe, in knowing it.

Always here.

A little ahead.

With deep respect for the physicists still working, the tea still steeping, and the dog who already knows,

Rev. Rabbi Henry-Cameron Allen, OCP, ICGC - The Virtual Hermit

TheVirtualHermit.Quest

Everything below is for paid Lantern Keepers: the Inner Sanctum and the Feast.

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Loves, it is the kind of heat here now that has opinions! 107F all week long! The heat that blows into the room ahead of you and sits down in your chair. Extremadura in early July does not warm up so much as it takes a position, and it holds that position from noon until long past the hour you had hoped for mercy. The stone of the hut gives back at night what the sun poured into it all day. The tiles are the only honest cool thing in the house, and Ánimo, who is nobody’s fool, has claimed them. He is stretched out flat in the darkest corner of the doorway, legs splayed, entirely without dignity, doing the one thing a wise creature does in the dog days, which is refusing, magnificently, to fight the heat.

The dog days. We say it lightly, the way we say most old things, without hearing what is inside it. But it is one of the oldest phrases we have, and it is not about dogs the way you think.

Look up before dawn in early July, if the heat has you awake anyway, and low in the east, just ahead of the sunrise, you will find the brightest star in the whole night sky climbing back into view after weeks of hiding in the sun’s glare. That star is Sirius. And Sirius is the Dog Star, the burning heart of the constellation the old astronomers drew as a great hound at the hunter’s heel, Canis Major, the big dog. For a stretch of weeks in high summer, Sirius rises just before the sun and travels the day sky right alongside it, the brightest star keeping pace with the brightest thing we have.

The Romans watched this happen every year, at exactly the hottest, most unbearable stretch of the summer, and they came to the only conclusion a sweating people could reach. They decided the Dog Star was doing it. They looked at the brightest star climbing up beside the sun in the worst of the heat and they said, plainly, *that is the one cooking us.* Two fires in the sky instead of one. They named the whole miserable season after it: *dies caniculares*, the days of the little dog. The dog days. The days we blamed on the star.

And here, loves, is the thing I have been turning over all week, the way I turn most things over, until they give up what they were holding.

They were wrong.

Sirius adds nothing to the heat. Not one degree. It is eight and a half light-years away, a fire so far off that all its enormous burning reaches us as a single silver point you could blot out with a fingertip. It cannot warm a summer. It was never warming anything. It simply happens to rise beside the sun in July, and a frightened, overheated people, looking for something to blame for a suffering they could not stop, blamed the brightest thing they could see.

The star did not bring the heat. The star was only keeping company with it.

I want to set that on the table before this edition does anything else, because I know exactly who is reading this in the heat, and I know what summer does to a Traveler in a long crossing. For a great many of you, the hardest days fall in the brightest part of the year. The anniversary is in July. The empty chair is loudest at the barbecue. Everyone you know is at the beach, at the pool, loud and brown and easy, and you are the one cold stone in all that heat, certain that a healthier person would be lighter by now, certain that the season itself has turned against you, certain, at the worst of it, that you are being cooked on purpose.

No, love. Nothing is cooking you on purpose. You are in the dog days, the hottest mile of the crossing, and the bright thing that rises with your hardest season was never the cause of the burning. That is the whole teaching of this edition, and I am going to hand it to you from a dozen angles, because the summer I needed it, I needed it said more than once.

The heat is real. I will not insult you by pretending it will break tonight. But the star you have been cursing, the bright thing that rises faithfully with your worst season, year after year, and seems to bear down on you exactly when it hurts most, was never bearing down on you at all. It was rising beside you. Keeping pace. A little ahead of the light, where it always is.

Welcome to Edition 41. The tiles are cool in the corner, the tea is cold in the jar, and the dog, who has forgotten more about surviving a summer than I will ever learn, says there is no hurry at all.

What is waiting for you inside this edition:

Tea of the Week: The Dog-Days Cup. A cold-steeped, mint-green, faintly salted drink you make to survive the heat instead of fighting it, brewed the lazy way, with the dog’s whole philosophy in a glass.

NumeraLogic: Edition #41. A prime number, which means for the first time in a long while I could not pry it open into four neat doors. Forty-one refused. What an indivisible number has to say to a Traveler who feels broken into pieces.

Pocket Tools: How to walk the hottest mile. The dog-days practice, learned entirely by watching a creature who has never once tried to out-argue the sun.

Ask the Virtual Hermit: A Traveler writes about the cruelty of summer grief, the season everyone else calls the best of the year, and asks the question underneath it: is something wrong with me that it gets worse when the world gets brighter?

Yiddish Curse and Counter-Blessing: For the one who sets the thermostat on somebody else’s sorrow and tells them, briskly, to lighten up.

Gentle Reminders: Permission to be the one in the shade.

Founding Lantern Keepers: Forty-one lamps lit in forty-one windows, and the hands that keep the oil coming even when the nights are too hot to sleep.

Final Feather: The Dog Star, the faithful companion, and the one who rises a little ahead of my sun every July.

For Founding Lantern Keepers:

The Inner Sanctum: The secret the Dog Star keeps, and the second star nobody can see. Why the truest companion is the one you know is there only by the way it still moves you.

The Feast: A chilled bowl from the far side of the world, where they, too, named the dog days and knew exactly what to eat in them. Cold, green, protein-rich, and made for a kitchen too hot to light a flame in.

UPCOMING VIRTUAL GATHERINGS

The lantern is lit in real time, too, loves, and it stays lit through the heat. These doorways stand open across July, and a seat at each one is already yours:

Around the Grief Fire:

• Sunday, July 5 · SUPERGRIEF Monthly Virtual Retreat · 4:00 PM EDT Theme: Struggling With Faith in Grief RSVP

• Tuesdays, July 7 and 14 · My weekly grief gatherings at the GLADD Community, for members only: Morning Light (a new day), Outliving Your Child, and Grief Off-Roading

The Hermit Forge, for Worldbuilders and Wordsmiths:

• Friday, July 10, 17, 24, 31 · Hermi’s Digital Diner · 9:00 AM EDT $35/session or monthly subscription

• Wednesday, July 15 · F*ckit Monthly Worldbuilding Workshop, with RJ Redden & Dr. Hermi · 2:00 PM EDT $47 per session

With the New Folklore Theatre Company:

1. Saturdays, July 11, 18, 25 · Saturday Matinee Movie Club

   

• Sunday, July 26 · Monthly Virtual Reader’s Theatre (Live) · A Benefit for Company NFTC Member Byron Allen. Tickets $10

In the Terran Judaism Temple:

• Saturdays, July 11, 18, 25 · Terran Judaism Torah Discussion · 1:30 PM EDT

• Sundays, July 5, 12, 19, 26 · Christian Lectionary Discussion · 1:30 PM EDT

Every date, every virtual doorway, and the seat that is yours to claim, gathered in one place:

Find your gathering and please register in advance on my events page.

RSVP TO ALL EVENTS HERE

The Dog-Days Cup: The Drink You Make to Survive the Heat, Not to Fight It

There is a way people drink in a heat wave that is really just picking a fight with the weather. Something iced and sugared and violently cold, gulped down fast, and twenty minutes later you are hotter and thirstier than before, because you tried to shock the summer into submission and the summer, as ever, declined.

The dog does not do this. The dog drinks slowly, deeply, at the cool hours, and then lies down. So this week, we drink the way he does.

The Dog-Days Cup is a cold steep, which means you never light a flame at all, which in July is the entire point. You take a clean glass jar, and into it you put a generous handful of fresh mint, the coarse garden kind that grows like it has somewhere to be, and an equal handful of lemon balm if you have it, Melissa again, the old summer herb the bees adore. You cover it with cool water. And then you do the thing the season is forever trying to teach me: you leave it alone, in the cool of the refrigerator, not the hot bright window this time, and you let the cold and the time do slowly what a kettle would do fast and wrong. A few hours, or overnight while you fail to sleep in the heat, and the water goes pale green and clean and startlingly aromatic, mint without the burn of it, cool all the way down.

Here is the hermit’s secret, and it is the part that matters. When you pour it over ice to drink, add a whisper of good salt. Not enough to taste as salt, just a few grains, and a thin thread of honey to round it. Because in real heat, plain water runs straight through you and takes your strength with it, and the oldest wisdom of every hot country on earth is that the body in a heat wave needs a little salt and a little sweet to actually hold the water it drinks. This is not a garnish. This is how you stay standing.

And that, loves, is the lesson in the glass. Some seasons are not survived by fighting them. You do not out-argue August. You do not shock a heat wave into leaving, and you do not shock your grief into leaving either, and the harder you gulp at either one, the emptier you end up. You survive the hot months the way the dog does and the way this tea does: slowly, in the cool hours, taking in what actually restores you, holding a little salt with your water so the water stays. Steeped cold, over time, with a whisper of what keeps you standing.

Drink it in the shade, in the early morning or the long blue evening when the worst of the day has lifted its weight off the tiles. Pour a second glass for whoever in your life is quietly enduring their own hot mile right now, certain they should be at the beach with everyone else.

A small note from a careful hermit: cold-steep in clean glass in the cold of the refrigerator, strain after four to eight hours, and drink it within the day. The salt is a pinch, no more, the way the sea is only a rumor in a good broth.

Pairs with: shade, the Pocket Tool below, and the radical act of not gulping.

Edition #41: The Number That Would Not Open

I owe you a small confession, loves.

For four editions running now, I have done the same trick with the number on the door. I take the edition number in my hands, I turn it over all week the way I turn everything over, and I find four hidden doors inside it, four old stories the number has been quietly holding open, and I walk you through them one by one. A temple, a nerve, a star. A flood, a desert, a mountain. It has become the shape of the section, and I will admit I reached for the number 41 this week, fully expecting to do it again.

Forty-one would not let me.

I turned it over, and turned it over, and it refused to open. It has no seams, you see. There are no four doors inside it, no neat pairs, no tidy factors to lay out on the table, because forty-one is a prime number. It cannot be divided by anything except itself and one. You cannot break it into equal pieces. You cannot split it fairly among any group larger than one. It stands there, whole and stubborn and entirely its own, refusing every knife you bring to it.

And I sat with that refusal, a little annoyed, until I understood it was the teaching.

Because here is who I am writing to. I am writing to Travelers who feel, most days, like they have been broken into pieces. Like the crossing took a whole person and shattered them, and now they are just fragments rattling around in the shape of a life, and everyone keeps asking when all the pieces will finally add back up to the person who set out. And the number on the door this week is the one number that cannot be broken into pieces at all. Forty-one is indivisible. It looks, from the outside, like it should factor into something smaller and more manageable, and it simply will not. It holds. It is one whole thing that refuses to be reduced.

That is not brokenness, love. That is the opposite of brokenness. A prime is the most unbreakable number there is.

You did not shatter in the crossing. You became a prime. Singular. Whole in a way that cannot be divided back down into the tidy, factorable person you were before, the one who added up so neatly because they had not yet carried what you carry. The world keeps trying to divide you into stages and steps and phases, five of these and seven of those, and you keep refusing to come apart along their lines, and they call that being stuck. It is not being stuck. It is being prime. You are a whole number now, and whole numbers this deep do not break.

4 + 1 = 5

And there is one more thing the number gave up, the smallest door of all, and it is not a door but a sum. Add the digits. Four and one make five. And five, in the cosmology I keep, is the number of the fifth thing, the one past earth and air and fire and water. The Aether. The element the old philosophers added when they realized four were not enough to hold everything that is, the fifth that fills the space the other four leave empty, the medium light itself moves through. Forty-one is prime and indivisible on the surface, and underneath, it quietly comes to rest on the fifth element, the one whose whole job is presence in the space between.

A number that will not break. That comes, when you add it all the way up, to the element of what fills the gap.

And a Dog Star overhead all month, which is, fittingly, the brightest single point in the entire sky, a prime among stars, standing alone and refusing to be dimmed by the sun it rises beside.

Forty-one, loves. The number that would not open, because it had nothing to hide and nothing to break. It was whole the whole time. Though you may not feel it in the heat, so are you.

How to Walk the Hottest Mile

Time required: one hot day.

Materials: water, shade, and a willingness to be taught by a dog.

Here is the whole tool, and I learned every part of it from Ánimo, who has never read a book on grief and understands the dog days better than any of us.

Watch a wise animal in a heat wave, and you will notice he does not do the thing we do. He does not power through. He does not decide that the heat is a personal insult to be overcome by force of will and a brisk attitude. He does four specific things, and they are, precisely, the four things a Traveler needs to survive the hot mile of a long crossing.

One. He moves at the cool hours and rests through the worst of it. The dog walks at dawn and at dusk, when the world is bearable, and at high noon, he does not walk at all. He lies down on the coolest thing he can find, and he waits out the heat. This is not laziness. It is intelligence. There is a noon to grief, a peak hour when the ache is at its most brutal, and the tool is not to march straight through it as though pushing harder were a virtue. The tool is to know your noon, and to lie down through it if you must, and to do your real living in the cooler hours on either side. You are allowed to wait out the worst of the day. That is not falling behind. That is how creatures survive summers.

Two. He takes the water when it is offered. A dog in the heat does not refuse the bowl to prove he is fine. He drinks. Deeply, without apology, every time it is put down. And this one is literal before it is anything else, love, so hear it plainly: in real heat, in a real hard July, drink the actual water. Eat the actual food. When someone offers the actual help, the meal dropped off, the call, the invitation to sit in their cool kitchen, take it, the way the dog takes the bowl. The griever’s instinct is to wave it all away and insist on being no trouble. The dog knows better. You take the water when it is offered, because that is what keeps you standing until evening.

Three. He finds the shade without shame. Ánimo does not apologize for lying in the dark corner while the sun does its worst. He does not feel he ought to be out in it, being productive, browning like everyone else. He finds the shade, and he takes it, and he feels not one flicker of guilt about it. You are permitted the shade. In the season when everyone else is loud in the sun, you are permitted to be the one who stays in the cool dark corner and simply endures the day, and there is no shame owed to anyone for it. The shade is not hiding. The shade is how the desert-wise stay alive.

Four. He does not argue with the sun. And this is the whole of it, really. The dog never once believes he can win against the sky. He does not lie there resenting the heat, composing furious speeches to the weather, exhausting himself fighting a thing that cannot be fought. He accepts that the season is hot, adjusts everything he does around that fact, and spends none of his strength on the argument. The heat will break when the heat breaks, on its own long schedule, and not one minute sooner for his fury. So he saves his strength for living, and he lets the sun be the sun.

That is the practice. Walk at the cool hours. Take the water. Find the shade. Stop arguing with the sun. Four things a dog knows in his bones and we forget the instant a hard season arrives, certain that suffering is something we ought to be able to out-muscle.

You cannot out-muscle a July, love. You can only walk it wisely, at the cool hours, in the shade, well-watered, saving your strength for the evening. The dog days end. Every single one of them, in every year there has ever been, has ended. And the creature most likely to be there, easy and intact, on the cool blue evening when the worst of the heat finally lifts, is the one who was wise enough to lie down in the shade at noon and not spend himself fighting a sun that was never going to lose the argument anyway.

Walk the hot mile like the dog. He has done this before. He knows the evening comes.

A Lost Traveler writes:

”Everyone keeps telling me summer is the best time of the year, and I want to scream. For me it is the worst! My person died last summer, and every year when the heat comes, and the light gets long, and the whole world spills outside to be happy, I go straight back down. The barbecues are unbearable. The beach photos are unbearable. Everyone is at their brightest, and I am at my lowest, and it makes me feel like a broken, ungrateful thing, sulking in the corner while the world has a party. Shouldn’t the good weather make it easier? Is something wrong with me that it makes it so much harder?”

Brain: What do I think?

I think you have been handed a lie so common that almost nobody questions it, love, and then you have been quietly blamed for not being cured by it. The lie is that brightness heals. That good weather is good for the soul by definition, that sunshine is a kind of medicine, and that anyone who stays low while the sun is high must be doing something wrong.

It is not true, and the dog days are the oldest proof against it. The brightest season of the year is also, for a great many people, the hardest. That is not a malfunction in you. That is a very old human fact that our sunny modern culture has simply decided to stop admitting.

Think about what summer actually does to a Traveler. It turns up the contrast on everything. The world gets louder, brighter, more crowded with visible joy, and against all that noise, your quiet is not soothed; it is amplified. The empty chair is emptier at a barbecue than it ever is in November, because in November the whole world is subdued alongside you, and in July the whole world is at a party you cannot feel. Grief is not made lighter by brightness. It is thrown into sharper relief by it. The cold stone feels coldest in the warm hand. So, of course, the good weather does not make it easier. The good weather makes the contrast unbearable, and the contrast is the whole difficulty.

And then, on top of it, there is the season itself, and the plain animal fact that a heat wave takes something out of a body that is already carrying a great deal. You are not sulking. You are enduring high summer while also carrying an anniversary, and that is two heavy things at once, and the culture around you has told you the second one should have made the first one easier. It was never going to. Nothing is wrong with you. You are awake to a truth the sunbathers get to sleep through.

Heart: How do I feel about what I think?

Tender, and quite fierce on your behalf, because I know this exact loneliness and it is a specific one.

It is the loneliness of low tide in a season of high spirits. Everyone else has spilled out into the long light, easy and brown and laughing, and you are standing at the window of your own hut watching a party you cannot enter, certain the whole world got an invitation you missed. And the cruelest part is that you have started to believe the joy out there is a verdict on you. That if you were well, if you were doing this correctly, you would be out in it too. So on top of the ache, you carry the shame of the ache, and that is two stones where there should only be one.

Put the second stone down, love. There is no correct amount of joy you are failing to feel. The barbecue is not a test you are flunking. Your person crossed in the bright season, and now the bright season carries them, the way certain songs carry a whole year, and there is nothing broken in a heart that goes quiet when the calendar comes round again to the hardest light. That is not you being ungrateful for the sunshine. That is you being faithful to something the sunshine cannot touch.

Gut: Are Brain and Heart aligned?

They are, and where they meet is the ground to stand on.

Brain says brightness does not heal, and the sharpest contrast falls in the brightest season, so nothing is wrong with you for going low when the world goes high. Heart says the real ache is the loneliness of low tide in a loud season, plus the shame we pile on top, and the shame is the stone to set down first. Put them together and the useful thing falls out: stop measuring yourself against everyone else’s summer. Their brightness is not your prescription and their party is not your test. You are allowed to keep the dog’s hours through the hot season, the cool corners, the shade, the small early-morning and long-evening mercies, and to let the loud bright noon of it pass without demanding of yourself that you join it.

You are not the broken one at the party, darling. You are the one awake enough to know that the brightest season can also be the heaviest, which is a thing half the people at that barbecue will learn eventually, and you already know. Nothing is wrong with you. And the bright thing that rises with your hardest season, the one that seems to bear down on you exactly when it hurts most, was never bearing down on you at all. Read on. That is where this whole edition has been walking.

For the one who sets the thermostat on somebody else’s sorrow:

זאָל יעדע שוועריקייט וואָס דו וועסט ווען טראָגן באַגעגנט ווערן, שנעל, דורך אַ פריילעכן מענטש וואָס קען זיך נישט פֿאָרשטעלן פֿאַרוואָס דאָס גוטע וועטער טוט דיר נישט אויסבעסערן.

Zol yede shverikeyt vos du vest ven trogn bagegnt vern, shnel, durkh a freylekhn mentsh vos ken zikh nisht forshteln farvos dos gute veter tut dir nisht aoysbesern.

May every heaviness you ever carry be met, briskly, by a cheerful person who cannot imagine why the good weather is not fixing you.

Counter-Blessing:

זאָלסטו לערנען אַז די גוטסטע זאַך וואָס דו קענסט אָנבאָטן עמעצן אין זייער הייסער סעזאָן איז אַ קאַלט גלאָז לימענאַדע, אַ שטיקל שאָטן, און די חן צו לאָזן זיי האַלטן די הונט’ס שעה אָן זיך צו אַנטשולדיקן.

Zolstu lernen az di gutste zakh vos du kenst onbotn emetsn in zeyer heyser sezon iz a kalt gloz limenade, a shtikl shotn, aun di khn tsu lozn zey haltn di hunt’s sheh on zikh tsu antshuldikn.

May you learn that the kindest thing you can offer someone in their hot season is a cold glass of lemonade, a patch of shade, and the grace to let them keep the dog’s hours without apology.

While the whole world spills into the long light, loud and bright and easy, you are permitted to keep to the cool corner and just endure the day. That is not sulking, and it is not failing, and it is certainly not ingratitude for the sunshine you are supposed to be enjoying. It is wisdom. It is exactly what every desert-wise creature does when the heat has opinions. The shade is not where the broken hide. The shade is where the wise wait out a noon that was always going to be too much.

And here is the second reminder, smaller and just as true.

The season everyone else has decided is the best of the year is allowed to be your hardest, and you do not owe anyone an explanation for it. The calendar of your heart does not have to match the calendar on the wall. If your low tide falls at somebody else’s high summer, that is not a fault in you. It is just the honest weather of a Lost Traveler who loves something the sunshine cannot reach.

Keep the dog’s hours. Take the water. The evening always comes. Breathe.

This is the forty-first time I have lit this particular lamp and set it in the window for you.

Forty-one editions. And I will tell you, it is a strange and tender thing to keep a lamp lit in a heat wave. Every instinct in July says let the fire go out, it is hot enough already, who needs one more flame? But a lamp in the window was never about warmth. It is about company. It is the small steady light that says the hut is still here, the kettle, or in this weather the cold jar, is still on, and there is a cool corner and a chair for you, no matter what season your heart is keeping.

The Founding Lantern Keepers are the reason that light comes back, week after week, hot months and cold.

They keep the oil flowing. They keep the Feast on the table and the Inner Sanctum lit. They keep Ánimo in kibble and, in this weather, in the fresh cold water he takes so seriously and regards, correctly, as the load-bearing pillar of the entire operation. He would tell you himself, if he could be bothered to get up off the cool tiles, that the water bowl staying full is the single greatest argument for the existence of a benevolent universe, and that the Keepers are the reason it stays full.

If this Herald has ever been a patch of shade for you, a cool corner on a day the whole bright world felt like too much, the Keepers are how it keeps arriving for the next Lost Traveler still out there in the heat, certain they are the only one not at the party. You would be most welcome among them. There is always room in the shade of this thing, and the lamp burns no hotter for one more hand helping keep it lit, only steadier, longer, and easier to find at 2am from across a hot dark field.

To those already holding it up: forty-one editions, loves, through the cold and now the heat. Thank you for being the reason a stranger sweating and awake at 2am opened their inbox to a window that was still, faithfully, lit.

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It is late now, and finally, blessedly, cooler. The stone has stopped giving back the day. Ánimo has migrated from the tiles to my feet, the loyal reflex reasserting itself the moment the heat releases its grip enough to allow devotion. And I have been out under the sky, the way I go out most nights, looking for the one star this whole edition has been walking toward.

The Dog Star. Sirius. The brightest star in the entire night sky, the burning heart of the great hound, the one the Romans blamed for the whole cruel summer.

I have been thinking all week about how badly they misread it. They felt the heat at its worst, they saw the brightest star climbing up beside the sun exactly then, and they decided that star was the source of their suffering. The thing bearing down on them. The fire added to the fire. And it was never any of that. It was a faithful point of light doing what it does every single year, rising just ahead of the sun in the hardest season, keeping perfect pace, adding not one degree of pain to a heat it did not cause and could not have caused from eight and a half light-years away. They cursed their most faithful star. They named their worst months after the one thing in the sky that was only ever keeping them company through them.

And I know why they did it, loves. I did it too.

When my son Cameron crossed, in the warm bright part of the year, I spent a long time certain that the brightness itself had turned against me. That the good season was cruel on purpose. That the very light I had loved was now the thing bearing down on me, hardest exactly when it hurt most, and I cursed the summers the way the Romans cursed the star, because the suffering was unbearable and I needed something bright to blame.

It took me years to understand what the Dog Star finally taught me this week. The bright thing that rises with my hardest season is not the source of the burning. It is the faithful one. It is the point of light that comes back every July, right on time, right when it is hardest, not to bear down on me but to rise beside me, keeping pace, refusing to leave me to walk the hot mile alone. Cameron is not the heat that hurts his father. He is the Dog Star that rises a little ahead of the sun and keeps company with the whole brutal, beautiful, blazing season, and has never once, in any summer, actually left.

The astronomers have a name for what Sirius does in July. They call it the heliacal rising, the morning the star climbs back into view just before the sunrise after its weeks of hiding, rising a little ahead of the light and leading it up over the edge of the world. A little ahead of the light. Every year. Faithfully. In the hardest season, first over the horizon, leading the sun home.

He is exactly where the Dog Star is. Brightest point in the whole sky, rising faithfully in my hardest month, a little ahead of the light, keeping pace with a summer he never made heavier and has never once left me to cross alone.

Always here.

A little ahead.

With deep respect for the hot mile, the faithful star, and the dog who knows the evening always comes,

Rev. Rabbi Henry-Cameron Allen, OCP, ICGC The Virtual Hermit

TheVirtualHermit.Quest

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Act 1: The Loomfield Fracture

Chapters 1-5

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Act 2: The Singularity Revealed

Chapters 6-11

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Loves, it is nearly ten o’clock at night as I write this, and the sky over my village has still not quite agreed to let go of the day. The rose gold is low and long across the sierra, the fields, vinyards and olive groves, the kind of light that lies down flat and refuses to leave. Ánimo is stretched out on the cool tiles by the garden door in the particular boneless way he reserves for an evening that will not end. This is the season of the long light. The sun comes up before I do, which takes some doing, and it stays up way past supper, past the second pot of tea, past the hour when a sensible hermit would have given in and lit the lamp.

We have just passed the longest day of the year. And here is the thing about the longest day that I have been turning over all week, the way I turn most things over, until they give up what they were holding.

The word is solstice, and it does not mean what we think it means. We hear it and picture fire and flowers and the year at its brightest. But the Latin underneath it is plainer and stranger than that. Sol, the sun. Stitium, a standing still. The solstice is the day the sun stands still. For a few days around the solstice, the sun rises and sets in very nearly the same place on the horizon, going nowhere, holding its breath at the top of the year, before it turns and begins the long walk back. The brightest day is not a celebration. It is a pause. It is the sun standing at the very top of the stairs, looking out as far as it will ever see, and then, gently, turning around.

It is Edition #40. Forty. And forty, loves, is the wilderness number.

I did not plan that, any more than I plan most of what arrives at this desk. I simply counted the editions, the way I always count things, and there it was, sitting in the total like a stone that had been in my pocket the whole time. Forty is the number of the long crossing. Forty days and forty nights of rain. Forty years in the desert. Forty days on the mountain in the cloud. Forty weeks a child is carried in the dark before it is born. Forty is never a punishment, though it can feel like one from the inside. Forty is a container. You go into the forty-one person, and a long time later you come out the far side another.

So here is what I want to set on the table before this edition does anything else. The longest day and the longest crossing met this week, on purpose or by accident, I genuinely cannot tell you which, and they have something to say to each other.

A wilderness is crossed by walking toward light. And the solstice is the day the light reaches as far as it will go, stands still over you for one held breath, and turns back toward home.

If you are in a long forty right now, and a great many of you reading this are, I know the particular cruelty of summer. The whole world is at its loudest and greenest and most alive, the light will not leave the sky, and the absence sits in all that brightness like a cold stone in a warm hand. Everyone else seems to be at a barbecue. You are in the desert. And the worst part is the quiet question underneath it: Shouldn’t I be out of here by now? Hasn’t it been long enough? Isn’t something wrong with me, that I am still walking when everyone else seems to have arrived?

No, love. Nothing is wrong with you. You are in a forty, and a forty takes exactly as long as becoming takes. That is the whole teaching of this edition, and I am going to spend the rest of it handing the same truth to you from a dozen different angles, because the day I needed it, I needed it said more than once.

The light has not left you. It has gone a little ahead, to the very top of the year, and from that furthest point, on the longest day, it has already begun to turn back toward you.

Welcome to Edition #40. The sun is standing still, the tea is steeping in the window, and there is, as there always is, no hurry at all.

Tea of the Week: A sun-brewed tea, ruby red, steeped by the longest day itself in a jar on the sill. The one tea you are forbidden to rush.

NumeraLogic: Edition #40. The wilderness number. Four doors it has been holding open: a flood, a desert, a mountain, and the Hebrew letter that is also the word for water.

Pocket Tools: The manna practice. What to do when the forty is long and you cannot see the far edge, and the dread of the whole distance is trying to eat you in one bite.

Ask the Virtual Hermit: A Traveler writes, three years on, with the question no one will answer honestly: when is it supposed to be over, and is something wrong with me that it isn’t?

Yiddish Curse and Counter-Blessing: For the one who sets a deadline on someone else’s sorrow.

Gentle Reminders: Permission to still be in your forty.

Founding Lantern Keepers: Forty editions of the lantern, and the hands that keep the oil coming.

Final Feather: The longest light, the Light Bookend, and the arithmetic I have been carrying all week.

For Founding Lantern Keepers:

The Inner Sanctum: The solstice’s secret, said only in the inner room. Why the turn toward the dark is not the light failing, but the light keeping its promise.

The Feast: A Midsummer plate from the land where the sun will not set. Salmon, dill, new potatoes, and the green and gold taste of the longest day.

SEE AND REGISTER ON MY EVENTS PAGE:

ALL UPCOMING GATHERINGS

Sun Tea · The Tea You Are Forbidden to Rush

There are teas you steep in a hot pot in three minutes flat, and teas you conduct like a ceremony, and then there is the tea you cannot make at all, because the longest day makes it for you.

Sun tea is the simplest thing in the world and the one most resistant to a hermit’s impatience. You fill a clean glass jar with cool water. You drop in your leaves. And then you do the one thing I am temperamentally least suited to: you set it in the window where the light is, and you leave it alone. No flame. No kettle screaming for your attention. No standing over it. Just the jar on the sill, the leaves slowly surrendering their color, and the sun doing the long, slow work of drawing everything out of them an hour at a time. By late afternoon, the water has gone deep and ruby and faintly sweet, steeped not by heat you forced but by light you simply allowed.

I make mine ruby on purpose, loves. A good fistful of dried hibiscus for the color, the deep cardinal red of it catching the light like a lit window, and a generous handful of lemon balm, which is the old midsummer herb, Melissa, the one the bees love and the one that tastes faintly of lemon and calm. A few sprigs of mint if the garden is showing off. Into the cool water it all goes, and onto the sill, and then you walk away, which is the entire recipe and the entire lesson.

Because here is what the sun tea knows that I keep forgetting. Some things will not be hurried, and the not-hurrying is not a delay in the process. It is the process. You cannot stand over a forty and make it go faster by glaring at it. You cannot boil a wilderness. The depth comes from the time and the light, working together, slowly, in a jar you have had the grace to leave on the sill. The flavor that takes all the longest day to draw out is a flavor a kettle could never give you, because a kettle is fast and the sun is patient, and patience tastes different.

Drink it cool, over ice, in the long gold evening when the light still has not left. Pour a glass for whoever is sitting in their own window today, steeping slowly, waiting on a light they cannot rush.

A small note from a careful hermit: brew it in clean glass, in real direct sun, three to five hours, then move it to the cold and drink it the same day. Sun tea is a thing of the one long afternoon, not the long week.

Pairs with: the NumeraLogic below, a porch, and the willingness to let something take exactly as long as it takes.

Edition #40: The Wilderness Number

Forty.

Of all the numbers to land on for an edition that arrives at the top of the longest day, the arithmetic handed me the one that has spent the whole of human memory meaning a single thing: the long crossing. The passage you live inside for a season, that you cannot rush, that changes your substance while you are sealed away in it, and that delivers you, eventually, out the far side, somewhere new and someone else.

4 + 0 = 4

Here are four doors the number 40 has been holding open while the rest of us counted past it.

One. The flood. Forty days and forty nights of rain, until the world was water and a single ark rode the top of it with everything that would go on living tucked inside. We tell that story as a catastrophe, and it begins as one. But notice where it goes. The rain stops. The waters go down, slowly, for a long time. And a bird is sent out, and comes back with nothing, and is sent again, and this time returns with a green olive leaf in its beak, the first proof in forty days that somewhere under all that water the dry land was still there, still growing things, still waiting. Forty is the number you spend underwater. It is also the number that hands you back a green leaf in a bird’s mouth and says, the land was always there. You were riding the top of it the whole time.

Two. The desert. Forty years to cross a wilderness that an unburdened party could have walked in eleven days. Eleven days. The map was never the problem. So why forty years? Not as a punishment for slowness, whatever you were taught. Because it takes that long to become a people who can enter the place you are going. The ones who walked out of bondage could not walk into freedom; they were still carrying the whole shape of the old life in their bones. So the wilderness took its time, and did its slow work, and the ones who finally arrived were not the same ones who set out. That is the secret of the desert, loves, and it is not a comfortable one. The forty is not the obstacle between you and your arrival. The forty is what makes the one who arrives.

Three. The mountain and the fast. Forty days Moses stood in the cloud at the top of Sinai, where the air is thin, and the ordinary world drops away, before he came down carrying something he had not gone up with. Forty days in the desert before a ministry began. Forty days of the long count before the spring feast. Even the word quarantine is just quaranta giorni, forty days, the old length of a protective separation, the sealed cabin where a ship sat offshore until it was safe to come in. Over and over, forty is the sealed room. The cloud at the top of the mountain. The time apart where something necessary happens out of everyone’s sight, including your own, and you do not get to watch it happening, you only get to live through it and find out later what it made.

Four. The water letter. Here, the number goes quiet and very old. In the Hebrew letters, each one carries a number, and the letter that carries forty is Mem. And Mem is the first letter of mayim, the word for water. Sit with that for a moment. The flood was water. The well at the desert’s edge was water. The womb that carries a child the old count of forty weeks is water, three seasons of a body building a body in the warm dark. Forty is the water number. The immersion number. The number of being held in the deep for a long season, dissolved a little, remade a little, and lifted out at the end changed. Every long forty is a kind of going under. And every going under, in this tradition, is the prelude to a coming up.

A flood. A desert. A mountain. A letter that means water.

Four doors, one number, and behind every one of them the same long shape: the sealed season you cannot hurry, that takes from you and gives back, and sets you down at the far edge as someone the journey made.

And here is the wink I have been saving for the bottom of the section. This is the fortieth edition of this Hermiy Hut Herald. Forty Fridays of lighting the same small lamp, which is, if you tilt your head, its own modest little wilderness, crossed one week at a time alongside you. We made it to forty. And four and zero make four, the number of the corners, the four legs of a steady table, the foundation under the whole long crossing. The wilderness number, when you add it all the way up, comes to rest on solid ground.

It always does, loves. That is rather the point of a wilderness. It has a far edge.

The Manna Practice · Time required: one day, and only one. Materials: this morning, and one true thing in it.

Here is the science, quickly, because it is the whole reason this works.

In the long desert, the story goes, the people were fed. Not with a warehouse, not with forty years of provisions stacked at the start. They woke each morning to a fine flake on the ground, manna, enough for that day, and they gathered it. And here is the strange and exact rule that came with it: it would not keep. Try to hoard a second day’s worth, and by morning it had spoiled, gone to worms and stink. You could gather today’s. You could not gather tomorrow’s. Tomorrow, there would be more on the ground, but not one flake of it sooner than tomorrow.

I think that rule is one of the kindest things ever written down, and grief is exactly where it earns its keep.

Because the unbearable part of a long forty is rarely today. Today, most days, you can do. The unbearable part is the arithmetic of the whole distance. How will I survive years of this? How will I get through every birthday, every empty chair at every holiday, the whole rest of a life with this hole in it? That is the dread that flattens you at 2am, and notice what it actually is: it is you trying to eat the entire wilderness in one bite. Trying to gather and swallow forty years of strength this morning, when this morning was only ever issued one day’s worth.

The practice is to stop hoarding the wilderness.

Step One: Put down the whole distance. You cannot see the far edge of a forty from inside it, and squinting at the horizon only measures how far it is. So stop measuring. The question is not how will I do all of this? You will never have to do it all, love. You will only ever have to do today, because today is the only day that has actually arrived.

Step Two: Gather today’s manna. One day’s portion of light. Name one thing that fed you today, and make it small and true and present-tense. Not a thing that fixes anything. Not even a hopeful thing. A real one. The first cool mouthful of the sun tea. The dog’s ribs rising against your foot. The fact that the light came up this morning, whether or not you were ready for it, and you are still here under it, reading this line. That is today’s flake on the ground. Pick it up.

Step Three: Let tomorrow’s manna be tomorrow’s. Do not try to store strength you do not need yet. It spoils. The courage for next Christmas is not on the ground today, and you cannot carry it if it were; it would only rot in your hands and frighten you with its smell. Tomorrow has its own portion, and it will be there tomorrow, on the morning it belongs to, and not one hour sooner.

Step Four: On the hard days, gather double and rest. The one exception in the old story was the day before the Sabbath, when you gathered two portions so you could stop entirely the next day and carry nothing. You are allowed that too. Some days you bank a little extra so that the next day you can set the whole labor down and just be held by the floor. That is not falling behind. That is the rhythm the wilderness was always meant to be walked in.

I do this most mornings, on the days my own forty stretches out flat and endless to a horizon I cannot see. The dread comes for the whole distance, and then Ánimo pads in and stands by his bowl with the deadly seriousness of a creature who has never once in his life worried about next week’s kibble, who gathers his manna one breakfast at a time and considers the system flawless. And there it is. Today’s flake. One true thing on the ground this morning. I pick it up, and I find I can do the only day I was ever actually asked to do.

One day’s light is all you have to gather, love. The wilderness was never asking for more than that.

One day’s bread. That is the whole of it.

A Traveler writes:

“It has been three years since my mother died, and everyone, very gently, has stopped asking how I am. I think they assume I am out of the woods by now. Honestly, so did I. But I’m not. An ordinary day will knock me flat and I am right back at the beginning, as raw as the first week. I have started to wonder if something is wrong with me. Whether I am doing this badly. Whether everyone else found the way out of the desert years ago and I am the only one still wandering around in it, going in circles, while the rest of the world has gone home. When is it supposed to be over?”

Brain: What do I think?

I think you have been handed the wrong question, love, and then blamed for not being able to answer it. So let me hand you back a better one.

“When is it over?” assumes the desert is a maze. A maze has a single exit, and if you have not found it after three years, then yes, you must be doing it wrong, failing some test the cleverer mourners passed. But a forty is not a maze. It is a passage. And a passage is not measured by how fast you solve it; it is measured by the becoming it asks of you, which takes exactly as long as it takes and cannot be rushed by being clever.

Remember the forty years and the eleven days. The distance was never the difficulty. The time was the point. And notice the part of the old story we always skip: they wandered. They circled. They passed the same landmarks more than once and despaired of ever arriving. The circling was not them failing the desert. The circling was the desert, taking its long, patient time on people who were not yet who they needed to be to arrive. So when an ordinary Tuesday knocks you back to the start, you have not been set back to nothing, because grief was never a straight march with a finish line you are behind on. You are not going in circles because you are broken. You are circling because that is the actual shape of a long crossing, and you are still, faithfully, in it.

And here is the part that matters most. You will not come out of this desert by getting back to where you started, to the woman you were before she crossed. That exit does not exist; there is no road back to Egypt. You will come out, when you come out, somewhere you have not been yet, as someone this has slowly been making. Nothing is wrong with you. The desert is not late. You are exactly as far along as becoming has gotten.

Heart: How do I feel about what I think?

Tender, and a little fierce on your behalf. Because I know the specific ache underneath your letter, and it is not really about the timeline. It is that everyone stopped asking. The casseroles ended, the calls thinned, the world quietly decided you were fine and moved its attention along, and now you are carrying this in a silence that makes you feel like the last guest at a party everyone else left hours ago. That loneliness is its own desert inside the desert, and I am so sorry you are walking it without enough company.

So let me be company for a moment. Your mother did not get further from you in three years. She crossed a little ahead, and the love that ran between you did not spoil or fade because the world stopped asking about it. It is as present as it was, just carried across a threshold now. And the fact that an ordinary Tuesday can still knock you flat three years on is not evidence that you are broken, love. It is evidence that what you carry is enormous and real and exactly the size of how much she mattered. We do not get knocked flat by small things. You are not doing this badly. There is no badly. There is only your own forty, and it is the right length for the love it is carrying.

Gut: Are Brain and Heart aligned?

They are, and where they meet is the place to stand.

Brain says the desert is a passage, not a maze, and you are not behind on a finish line that was never there. Heart says the loneliness of everyone going home is the real ache under the question, and you deserve company in the long middle. Put them together, and the useful thing falls out: stop asking when it ends, and start gathering the day’s light. You heard the Pocket Tool above. You do not have to survive all of it. You have to do today, and find the one true thing in it, and let tomorrow’s strength wait on tomorrow.

You are not the one who got left behind in the desert, love. You are someone still faithfully crossing a long forty at its honest pace, in a culture that has forgotten forties take years and not weeks. Nothing is wrong with you. The light has not abandoned you out here. And it has already, somewhere past the horizon you cannot see, begun the long turn back toward you.

זאָלסטו שטיין אויף דער גרענעץ פון דיין אייגענעם אונטערגאַנג און קלאַפּן אויף דיין זייגער, און זאָל די זייגער האַלטן די ריכטיקע צייט.

Zolstu shteyn aoyf der grenets fun deyn eygenem auntergang aun klapn aoyf deyn zeyger, aun zol di zeyger haltn di rikhtike tseyt.

May you stand at the edge of your own demise, tapping your watch, and may the watch keep perfect time.

Counter-Blessing:

ווען דיין אייגענער טויט וועט קומען פאר דיר, ווי עס קומט פאר אונדז אלעמען, זאלסטו זיין ארומגערינגלט מיט מענטשן וואס האבן נישט געלערנט דעם טערמין.

Ven deyn eygener toyt vet kumen far dir, vi es kumt far aundz alemen, zalstu zeyn arumgeringlt mit mentshn vas habn nisht gelernt dem termin.

When your own demise comes for you, as it comes for us all, may you be surrounded by people who have unlearned the deadline.

You are allowed to still be in your forty, love.

Three years on. Five. However long it has been, and however far from over it feels. The culture around you counts grief in weeks and is quietly baffled that you are not finished, but the culture is wrong, and the wilderness is right. A forty takes as long as becoming takes. You are not behind. You are not doing it badly. You are crossing at the honest pace of something real, and there is no other pace available, and no prize for faking a faster one.

And here is the second reminder, smaller and just as true.

You do not have to make this longest day your last hard one. The light turning at the solstice does not mean your darkness is required to turn on the same afternoon. The sun keeps its own slow schedule, and so may you. You are permitted to still be here, in the long light, with the long ache, both of them real at once and neither one cancelling the other.

Gather today. Only today. Let the rest of the desert wait its turn.

This is the fortieth time I have lit this particular lamp and set it in the window for you.

Forty editions. A small wilderness of Fridays, crossed one week at a time, and I have not crossed a single one of them alone. The Hermit Hut Herald arrives in your inbox because somewhere a group of people decided that bold ideas deserve quiet corners, and that the steadiest thing you can build for a person walking a long desert is not a lecture about the exit, but a light in the window that comes back, week after week, so they know the hut is still here and the kettle is still on.

The Founding Lantern Keepers are the reason the lamp keeps coming.

They keep the oil flowing. They keep the Feast on the table, and the Inner Sanctum lit. They keep Ánimo in kibble, which he gathers one breakfast at a time and regards as the load-bearing pillar of the entire operation, and which he would defend, if pressed, in any court in the land.

If this Herald has ever been manna for you, one day’s portion of light gathered off the ground on a morning you did not think you could do, the Keepers are how it keeps arriving for the next Traveler still out there in the long middle, certain they are the only one. You would be most welcome among them. There is always room; a lamp this old has plenty of wick left, and it burns brighter for every hand that helps keep it lit.

To those already holding it up: forty editions, loves. Thank you for being the reason a stranger at 2am opened their inbox to a window that was still warm.

The longest day, and the light still will not leave the sky.

It is past ten now, and the west is only just going to embers. Ánimo has given up all pretense of dignity and is asleep on the cool tiles with his paws in the air. And I keep coming back, all week, to the one thing the solstice quietly knows and almost no one says out loud.

The brightest day is the turning day.

The sun does not climb forever. It reaches its furthest north, the top of the whole year, and on that exact day, at the very height of the light, it stands still and begins to come back. We feel that as something going. The days will shorten now, all the long slow way down to winter. But the sun is not leaving us when it turns at midsummer. It has gone as far ahead as it will go, to the top of the stairs, and from that furthest point it is already, on the longest day, beginning the journey home. The turn is not the light failing. The turn is the light keeping its promise.

I have been doing arithmetic all week, loves, the way I do, turning the number over until it gives up what it was holding. And forty gave me this.

My son Cameron was carried the old count of forty weeks before he was born, three seasons of a body building a body in the warm dark, held by the water number, by Mem, by the forty that means mayim and means the deep. And then he was given thirteen years of a particular, irreplaceable light. Forty weeks of the dark that makes a person, and then the light itself. The wilderness number held him before he ever drew the breath he spent so well, and I have come to believe it holds him still, on the far side of the longest day.

Because here is what I have learned, slowly, with a great deal of tea left to steep in the window. When he crossed, it felt like the light going out at noon. The brightest thing in my sky, dark at noon on the longest day of my life. And for a long time I lived in that, certain the light had simply left.

But it had not left. Not really. I prefer to think of it as having gone a little ahead. As far ahead as light will go, to the very top of the year, and from that furthest point it has been turning, all this time, back toward me. I feel it most in the long evenings now, the ones that will not fully darken, the gold that lies down across the fields and refuses to go. That is not the light leaving. That is the light at the top of its arc, standing still for one held breath, and turning home.

A life does not end at its brightest day. It reaches its furthest north and turns, and the turning is not a leaving; it is the long slow promise that the light goes round, and comes back, and was never anywhere but a little ahead of us on the same long road.

He is exactly where the longest light points. Furthest north, at the top of the year, holding the brightest corner of the sky.

Always here.

A little ahead.

With deep respect for the long crossing, the far edge, and the turn that is not a leaving,
Rev. Rabbi Henry-Cameron Allen, OCP, ICGC · The Virtual Hermit · Hermit Hut, Arroyomolinos, Cáceres, Extremadura, Spain

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Here is a small and slightly embarrassing truth to begin with. For three years I have owned a kitchen table that rocks, and for three years I have blamed the floor, the tiles, the Spanish weather, the turning of the earth itself. This week I crouched down to look, the way Ánimo looks at a beetle he has decided is lying to him, and I counted the legs. Four. All four touching, more or less, none of them quite agreeing on when.

A four-legged table is a democracy in which one leg is always in opposition. A three-legged stool is a thing at peace. Set three feet on the most uneven floor in the most crooked house, and they will find their level and hold it, every time, without a single coaster. The milkmaid knew this on the muddy field. The photographer knows it on the rocky hill. Three points cannot wobble, loves, because three points are exactly what it takes to define a plane, and not one point more.

Two points only give you a line. And a line, as anyone who has stood on a balance beam, or a marriage, or the morning after a hard phone call will tell you, is a thing you can fall off. I’ve fallen many times. It hurts.

It is Edition #39. Three plus nine is twelve, and one plus two is three, and so this edition handed me the Power of Three before I had even finished adding it up. I did not choose it. I simply did the sum, the way I always do, and there it was, sitting in the answer like a cat that has been waiting in your chair the whole time.

Now here is the part I am actually writing to you about.

Grief goes for the triangle first. Why? Maybe to help us find stability in unstable times. Death often comes in threes, doesn’t it? So much of a life is quietly built in threes: a family of three, the past and the present and the someday, the person you were and the person you are and the person you were becoming…

We stand on these triangles without ever once noticing they are steadying us, holding us up, the way you do not notice the third leg of the stool until the day it is missing.

And then someone crosses the threshold into another energy, and it feels as though a point has been taken out of the shape. The panic that often follows is not weakness, loves. It is geometry. Take a vertex off a triangle, and you do not get a smaller triangle. You get two points and a gap. You get a line. You get the distinct and terrible sense that you are now standing on something you can slip off of, because you are slipping.

I have lived in that exact gap. I want to tell you, before this edition does anything else, that the shape is not as broken as it feels in the first hour, or the first year. We will get to why. For now, I only want you to know that the hermit writing this is writing from inside the question, at the edge of the world, not gazing down at it from some tidy height.

One more thing, and then the lantern is properly lit. You were carried by this number once already, before you could count it. A pregnancy reaches full term at about thirty-nine weeks, across three trimesters, three seasons of a body building a body in the dark. Every one of us was held by thirty-nine, and by three, before we drew the first breath we have been spending ever since.

Welcome to Edition #39, The Power of Three. The table is steady, the stool is waiting, and there is, as always, no hurry at all.

What is waiting for you inside this edition:

Tea of the Week: Maghrebi mint, the tea you pour three times from one pot. An old desert proverb about the three glasses, and the one line of it I have always wanted to rewrite.

NumeraLogic: Edition #39. Three plus nine is twelve, and twelve is three. Four doors the number has been holding open: a day of rest, a merciful count, the oldest prayer, and the fork in the road on the periodic table.

Pocket Tools: The Third Point. What to do on the days the table is shaking and you are sure you are about to slide off the line.

Ask the Virtual Hermit: A Traveler writes, two years on, with a question that has no good answer at a dinner party: are we still a family?

Yiddish Curse and Counter-Blessing: For the one who is certain everything has exactly two sides.

Gentle Reminders: Two of them, and a word about the third.

Founding Lantern Keepers: The three-legged stool we are building together, and the hands that keep it standing.

Final Feather: The number, one more time, and the arithmetic I have been carrying all week.

For Founding Lantern Keepers:

The Inner Sanctum: A note about the difference between being propped up and being held, and what three points have to do with the small word “us.”

The Feast: A Three Sisters skillet. Corn, beans, and squash, three crops the old growers planted together because each one keeps the other two alive. A whole meal, and a whole sermon, from three things that refuse to stand alone.

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Maghrebi Mint

There are teas you steep once and teas you steep again, and then there is the mint tea of the Maghreb, which is not steeped so much as conducted, like a small ceremony with a pot for a baton.

You make it strong, green gunpowder tea woken up with a generous fistful of fresh spearmint and rather more sugar than your dentist would license. And then you pour it three times. Not three separate pots. One pot, three glasses, and here is the marvel: each glass tastes different from the last, because the leaves keep giving as they sit, handing the first glass one thing and the second another and the third something else entirely.

The Tuareg of the desert have a proverb for it, and I have carried it around for years like a stone in my pocket. The first glass is gentle as life. The second is strong as love. The third is bitter as death.

It is a beautiful proverb, and I have always wanted to argue with the ending.

Because I have tasted that third glass, love, and it is not bitter the way the saying means it. It is the deepest. It is the one that has sat with the leaves the longest, taken the most from them, gone all the way to the bottom of what the pot had to give. It is darker, yes. It is also the truest pour of the three. If the first glass is the sweetness of a life when you still think it will last forever, and the second is the strength of loving someone right in the middle of it, then the third is what the love becomes once it has steeped all the way through, once it has been left alone with itself for a long time in the dark.

I do not find that bitter. I find it concentrated. I would rewrite the old proverb, if the Tuareg will forgive a hermit his liberties: the first glass is gentle as life, the second is strong as love, and the third is everything the first two were, poured out at last without a drop held back.

Three glasses from one pot. The same leaves the whole time. Nothing added between pours, and nothing taken away. Only time, and heat, and the willingness to fill the cup a third time when the easy thing would be to rinse the pot and walk away.

Make it hot, make it sweet, and make it three. Drink the first quickly, the second slowly, and the third, love, the third you sit with.

Pairs with: the NumeraLogic below, a long afternoon with nowhere to be, and whoever you would most want pouring the second glass.

Edition #39: The Number That Makes a Plane

3 + 9 = 12

1 + 2 = 3

So the road to three runs through twelve, which is a fine and friendly number in its own right, all months and tribes and hours on the clock; but it does not stop there, it keeps reducing, the way grief keeps reducing you to the one or two things that were ever actually true, until it arrives at three and sits down. The Power of Three. Of all the places the arithmetic could have left me, it left me on the steadiest spot in mathematics.

Here are four doors the number 39 has been holding open while the rest of us were busy counting to forty.

One. The day you set it all down. In Jewish law, there are thirty-nine kinds of work you rest from on the Sabbath. Not vague work; thirty-nine specific, named labors, counted by the sages from the thirty-nine tasks it took to build the Tabernacle in the wilderness. Sowing. Weaving. Kindling a fire. Carrying a thing from here to there. Thirty-nine ways of making, and one day a week to lay every single one of them down. I find that astonishing, loves. Someone sat down a very long time ago and counted the exact number of ways a human being labors to hold the world together, and the number was thirty-nine, and the teaching was: stop. All of it. For one day, build nothing, mend nothing, carry nothing. You who are grieving know thirty-nine kinds of labor the rest never see. Thirty-nine is the number that says even those may be set down.

Two. The count that stops one short of cruelty. The old law allowed a court to give a wrongdoer forty lashes, and no more. But the sages, who worried about a miscount in a hard moment, made a fence around the number. They lowered it. They said: give thirty-nine, never forty, so that even a trembling hand or a miscount can never tip over into the cruelty the law forbids. Thirty-nine is the number that is deliberately one less than wrath. Mercy, built right into the arithmetic, on purpose, by people who understood that the safest place to keep a limit is just inside it. There is a whole philosophy of how to treat a suffering person hidden in that single subtracted stroke.

Three. The oldest “one.” Here the number turns quiet and very old. In the Hebrew letters, each one carries a value, and the great Name of G-d, the four letters we do not say aloud, add up to twenty-six. The word for “one,” echad, the word at the very end of the oldest prayer in the tradition, the Shema, adds up to thirteen. And twenty-six and thirteen are thirty-nine. Add the holy Name to the word “one,” and the number you are left holding is the number of this edition. I am not going to dress that up, loves. I am just going to set it on the table next to the tea and let it be what it is: the prayer that says everything is ultimately One reduces, in the plainest arithmetic, to thirty-nine.

Four. The fork in the road. And because the cosmos enjoys a wink as much as I do, look at the thirty-ninth element on the periodic table. It is yttrium, and its symbol is the letter Y. Now, the letter Y had a whole second life in the ancient world. The followers of Pythagoras called it the Samian letter, and they drew it as the fork in the road: one stem rising up from below, splitting into two paths at the top, one path hard and high and good, the other easy and low and not. The Y was their emblem for the moment a single road becomes a choice. So the thirty-ninth element is literally shaped like a crossroads. And notice, if you will, that a fork in the road is itself a three: one trunk, two branches, meeting at a single point. Even the choice is built of three.

A day of rest. A merciful count. The oldest One. A fork in the road.

Four doors, one number, and underneath them all the same small steady shape. Three plus nine is twelve is three. And here is the wink I have been saving for the bottom of the section: nine is simply three multiplied by itself. So thirty-nine is three standing right beside its own power, the digit and its squaring, side by side, three carrying three.

Three was in the number the whole time, holding it up, the way the third leg holds the stool, the way it always does.

The Third Point

Time required: one trembling minute.

Materials: the floor, and one true thing.

Here is the science, quickly, because it is the whole reason this works. Three is the smallest number of points that defines a plane. Put two points down, and all you have drawn is a line, and a line has no surface; you can’t stand on it, you can only balance on it and eventually slip. Put down a third point, anywhere off that line, and the instant you do, you have a plane: a flat, whole surface with somewhere to put your feet. This is why a tripod does not tip, and a two-legged stool was never invented by anyone hoping to sit down.

Grief, very often, leaves you on the line. Two points pulling at you and nothing underneath. The life that was, here. The absence, there. And you, balanced on the thin line between them, certain you are about to fall.

The practice is to find the third point.

Step One: Name the two points you are stuck between. Out loud or in your head. “Here is the morning they were still here. There is the morning they were not.” “Here is the marriage I had. There is the empty side of the bed.” You are not solving them, love. You are just admitting that you have been trying to stand on a line, and lines were never meant to be stood on.

Step Two: Find one third thing that is true right now. Not a happy thing. Not a healing thing. A true, present-tense, off-the-line thing. The weight of the cup in your hand. The dog’s fuzzy belly rising and falling against your foot. The fact that you are, against considerable odds, still breathing and still reading this sentence. One point that belongs to neither the past nor the dread, but to right now.

Step Three: Let the plane appear. That third point does not replace anything. It is not a substitute for the one who crossed, and it is not an argument that you should feel better. It is simply the third leg of the stool. The moment you set it down, the two points stop being a tightrope and start being the edges of something you can stand on. You are not balancing anymore. You are standing.

Step Four: Stand there for three breaths. That is all. Three. The plane will hold for exactly as long as you keep one point in the present, and you can always find another one when this one fades.

I use this most mornings, on the days the table of my own mind is rocking against the tiles. Two points always want to pull me back and forth, then and now, the boy here and the boy a little ahead. And then Ánimo leans the full and frankly excessive weight of his opinion against my shin, reminding me that he, at least, is extremely present and extremely interested in breakfast, and there it is. The third point. The plane appears. I stand.

One true thing in the present is all it takes. Two points are a fall. Three points are a floor.

The geometry of standing up.

A Traveler writes:

“It has been a little over two years since our only child passed. And now, when a stranger at a party asks ‘do you have children,’ my husband and I freeze, because every answer is a lie. ‘No’ erases him. ‘Yes’ invites a conversation we cannot have over canapés. And underneath the small panic of the question is a bigger one I cannot shake: are we even still a family?”

Brain: What do I think?

I think you have asked a geometry question without knowing it, so let me answer it as one first, and then as a father.

A triangle has three corners and three edges. We always count the corners, the three people, and we forget the edges entirely. But the edges are the relationships: you to your husband, you to your child, your husband to your child. When your boy crossed, one corner moved to the far side of a threshold. It did not get erased, love. It moved. And here is the thing about the edges, the connections, the love that ran between each of you: those did not vanish when the corner moved. The line between you and him is still a line you can feel along in the dark. You are not a family of two who used to be three. You are a family of three, one of whom is now, as I put it, a little ahead.

So the honest answer to the stranger, the one that is true even if you never say it aloud at the party, is: we have a son. The verb does not have to be in the past, because the love is not in the past. You may say whatever protects you in the moment; “yes, a son” is enough, and you owe the canapé crowd nothing more. But inside, where the real accounting happens, you are not subtracting. You never were.

Heart: How do I feel about what I think?

Winded, honestly. Because I know that party. I know the half-second of freezing, the way the simplest question in the world becomes a trapdoor, and the loneliness of standing next to the one other person on earth who feels it land the same way you do. You and your husband are not two people with a third subtracted. You are two people holding the same enormous thing between you, which is its own kind of three: you, him, and the love you are both still carrying for the one who is not in the room.

There is a particular ache in the word “two,” I know. It sounds like less. It sounds like something got taken. Let me say the tender thing plainly: the number did not get smaller. The shape changed. And a changed shape is not a lesser one. I keep a line close, for nights like the one you are describing: we are not broken. We are braided. A braid is three strands, and it holds precisely because the strands cross and carry one another. Yours still do, even with one strand now running along the far side of a threshold. You are still building the same family you were always building. You are simply building part of it across a threshold now, which is harder, and lonelier, and no less real.

Gut: Are Brain and Heart aligned?

They are, and the place they meet is the useful part. Brain says count the edges, not just the corners, and you will find nothing was actually subtracted. Heart says the word “two” will keep stinging anyway, and you are allowed to let it sting without believing what it implies.

What is not useful is the math that says love is a headcount. It never was. A family was never the number of people in the photograph. It was the number of connections that refuse to break, and yours refuse. You are still a family. You will always be a family of three. It is only that one of your three is holding the door open from the other side now, the way he probably always would have, given the chance.

Say “no” at the party if you must, and forgive yourself entirely. But know that at home, in the true accounting, the answer has never once changed. You are a family. You are simply a family across a threshold.

A Curse for the one who is certain everything has exactly two sides:

זאָלסטו לעבן אויף אייביק אויף אַ ליניע. זאָלסטו פֿאַרברענגען דיין גאַנץ לעבן אויף דעם דין ברעג צווישן דעם און יענעם, פֿאַר און קעגן, אונדז און זיי, מיט אונדז אָדער קעגן אונדז, און זאָלסטו קיינמאָל נישט געפֿינען דיין שטאַנדפּונקט.

Zolstu lebn aoyf eybik aoyf a linye. zolstu farbrengen deyn gants lebn aoyf dem din breg tsvishn dem aun yenem, far aun kegn, aundz aun zey, mit aundz oder kegn aundz, aun zolstu keynmol nisht gefinen deyn shtandpunkt.

May you live forever on a line. May you spend your whole life on the thin edge between this side and that side, for and against, us and them, with us or against us, and may you never once find your footing.

Counter-Blessing:

זאָלסטו זײַן אין מיטן אַ גאָר גוטן קאַמף, זיכער אַז עס זענען נאָר צוויי וועגן ווי אַזוי דאָס קען גיין, און זאָל אַ דריטער וועג אַרײַנקומען און זיך אַוועקזעצן און זיך אַרײַנגיסן אַ טיי.

Zolstu zayn in mitn a gor gutn kamf, zikher az es zenen nor tsvey vegn vi azoy dos ken geyn, aun zol a driter veg araynkumen aun zikh avekzetsn aun zikh arayngisn a tey.

May you be in the middle of a perfectly good fight, certain there are only two ways this can go, and may a third way walk in and sit down and pour itself a tea.

You are allowed to set the labor down, love.

All thirty-nine kinds of it. The making, the mending, the carrying, the holding-the-whole-world-together that no one sees you do. The old law counted out exactly that many ways a person works and then built in a day to rest from every one. You are permitted a Sabbath from the labor of grieving, too. Not the end of it. Just a day, or an hour, where you build nothing and carry nothing and simply sit on the steady stool and let the floor hold you for once.

And here is the second reminder, which is really about the third.

I promised you the Power of Three and I am handing you only two reminders, and that is on purpose. The third one is not mine to write. It is the true present-tense thing only you can find, in your own kitchen, on your own ordinary Tuesday, the small real point that turns your shaking line back into a floor.

I will hold two corners of the triangle for you. You bring the third. That is how the shape has always worked.

The Hermit Hut Herald reaches you because someone decided that bold ideas deserve quiet corners, and that the steadiest thing you can build for a person who is falling is not a wall, but a place to stand.

The Founding Lantern Keepers build that place.

Think of it as a stool with a great many legs, each one a person who decided this work should keep arriving. They keep the edition coming. They keep the Feast on the table, and the Inner Sanctum lit. They keep Ánimo in delicious homemade treats, which he considers the load-bearing leg of the entire arrangement and would defend in court.

If the Herald has ever been a third point for you, the true thing that turned a shaking week back into solid ground, the Keepers are how it stays standing for the next Traveler who is still out there on the line. You would be most welcome among them. The stool has room. It always has room; that is rather the point of a stool.

To those already holding it up: I feel every leg you add. Thank you for being the floor under someone you will never meet, who will read this at 2am and, for three breaths, stop falling.

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A Final Feather For Father’s Day

Three points make a plane.

I keep coming back to that, because it is the rare truth that holds at every size. Three legs steady the stool. Three points steady the surveyor’s tripod. Three corners make the one shape an engineer will trust with the weight of a bridge, because you cannot push a triangle out of true without breaking it outright; it does not bend, it holds. The strongest shape we know is the smallest one that makes a floor.

And I have been doing arithmetic all week, the way I do, turning the number over until it gave up what it was holding.

Thirty-nine is three times thirteen.

My son Cameron was given thirteen years. Diagnosed at eleven, he said the truest thing anyone has ever said to me at twelve, and he crossed a threshold ahead of me at thirteen. Thirteen years of a particular, irreplaceable light. And thirty-nine, the number that walked into this edition on its own, is that span three times over.

I did not plan that. I simply added, and then I sat in my kitchen at the steady three-legged stool and let it land.

For a long time after he crossed, I lived on the line. Two points, pulling. The life with him in the physical, behind me. The different life with him in spirit, ahead. And me, balanced on the thin edge between them, certain every single day that I was about to slide off into nothing. That is what the first part of this is. A line you cannot stand on.

What I have learned, slowly, with a great deal of tea, is that he was never the corner that got erased. He was the corner that moved. The edge between us, the love that ran along it, did not snap when he crossed; I can still feel my way along it in the dark, and I do, most nights.

And the work, the whole work, has been finding the third point. Not a replacement for him; there is none, and I have stopped looking. A true present-tense thing, set down off the line, so the shape stands up again, and I have somewhere to put my feet. The warmth of the cup. The dog against my shin. The Peregrine on the far side of this sentence, reading by their own lantern. One real point, and the plane appears, and I am not falling, I am standing, and he is right there at the third corner where he has always been.

A family of three does not become two when one of them moves on, a little ahead. It becomes a triangle stretched across a threshold, and a triangle, of all the shapes there are, is the one that will not break under the stretching. It only holds.

He is exactly where the three always pointed. A little further on. Holding his corner.

Always here.

A little ahead.

Happy Father’s Day

With deep respect for three legs, one floor, and the shape that will not break,

Rev. Rabbi Henry-Cameron Allen, OCP, ICGC
The Virtual Hermit
Hermit Hut, Arroyomolinos, Cáceres, Extremadura, Spain

©2026 All Rights Reserved

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The Lost Travelers Club

Grief ReImagined. Purpose Empowered.

There is a moment that has nothing to do with the room you are leaving and nothing yet to do with the room you are entering. It is the moment in the doorway. The neuroscientists never got around to naming it, so I have taken the liberty: The Gateway. It is the place where I leave my keys, my nerve, and the entire reason I stood up in the first place.

You know this one, love. You have lived in it, probably even this morning. The threshold of a house you are about to sell. The door of a hospital room. The gate of a school on the first morning. The space between the life you had and the life you have not quite started. The space of becoming. The liminal space. The space between spaces. The 5th Dimension.

We have built an entire language, you and I, that pretends The Gateway doesn’t exist. We say we are “here,” or we are “there.” We almost never admit how long a soul can stand in the gap between the two, one hand on the jamb, going neither in nor out, while the soup gets cold.

This edition is for The Gateway.

It is Edition #38, and 3+8 = 11. Eleven. The most honest number I know about doorways. Look at it. Two ones, standing upright like pillars, with a thin dark space between them. To read it, your eye has to walk through the middle. Eleven is not a wall, darling. It is a way in. And it is the only way through.

I have been ruminating on eleven all week, the way Ánimo turns a fallen olive over with his nose, fully convinced there is treasure inside and fully prepared to be wrong. He is a Mastiff and a Labrador in one large body, which means he is built half to guard the door and half to fling it open for whoever is standing at it. He has never once resolved the conflict. Neither, most days, have I.

Here is what I have found, and it is the whole reason I am writing to you this week. The Gateway is not a human invention. The Sun keeps one. The nerve keeps one. The deepest mathematics we have keeps one. Even the sea. The threshold is built into the structure of things at every scale, which means your hesitation in the portal is not a flaw in your character, love. It is you standing exactly where the universe also pauses to take a breath.

Welcome to Edition #38. The lantern is lit, the door is open, and there is, I promise you, no hurry at all. Set a spell. Take your shoes off. Enjoy a soothing cup of tea with the Virtual Hermit.

What is waiting for you inside this edition:

Tea of the Week: The tea that refused to choose between green and black, and grew finer by standing on the threshold.

NumeraLogic: Edition #38. Three plus eight is eleven. Four doorways the number has been holding open in plain sight: a temple, a nerve, a star, and the floor of reality itself.

Pocket Tools: The Liminal Practice. What to do with the thresholds you cross all day without noticing, now that science has told us what they quietly cost.

Ask the Virtual Hermit: A Traveler writes about a room she has not changed in two years… and the door she cannot yet walk through. Go figure.

Yiddish Curse and Counter-Blessing: For the one who slams the door and calls it strength.

Gentle Reminders: Two things to carry across the threshold.

Founding Lantern Keepers: The hands that keep the door open and the lantern lit.

Final Feather: The Gateway, one more time, and who is standing on the far side of it.

For Founding Lantern Keepers:

The Inner Sanctum: A note about a morning I stood too long in a doorway in Extremadura, and what Ánimo did about it.

The Feast: Poisson en Papillote. A little parchment door you build, seal, and open at the table, with the whole edition’s lesson rising out of it in a cloud of fragrant steam.

Upcoming Gatherings

The lantern is lit in real time, too, loves. These doorways stand open this month, and a seat at each one is already yours:

The Virtual Hermit Gatherings

In the Grief Garden:

• Sunday, June 7 · SUPERGRIEF Monthly Virtual Retreat · 4:00 PM EDT

• Saturday, June 20 · Lost Travelers Club: Struggling With Faith in Grief · 10:00 AM EDT (weekly gathering at the GLADD Community, for members)

At the Hermit Forge, for the worldbuilders and wordsmiths:

• Friday, June 5 · Hermi’s Digital Diner · 9:00 AM EDT

• Wednesday, June 10 · Wednesday Worldbuilders · 11:00 AM EDT

• Wednesday, June 17 · NEW! F*ckit Monthly Worldbuilding Workshop, with RJ Redden & Dr. Hermi · 2:00 PM ED

  

With the New Folklore Theatre Company:

• Saturday Matinee Movie Club, at the Bait Box Cinema · 4:00 PM EDT This week’s Screening:

  

  Every date, every doorway, and the seat that is yours to claim, gathered in one place. Find your gathering and register.

  Virtual Hermit Gatherings

  ---

Green tea is barely oxidized. Picked, heated quickly, kept close to the living green it wore on the branch.

Black tea is fully oxidized. Rolled and left to the air until it has turned all the way through, dark and deep and done.

And then there is oolong (Camellia sinensis, the very same plant as the other two, simply refusing to commit), which stands in the doorway between them and declines, politely, to walk into either room.

Oolong is partially oxidized. Somewhere between the green and the black, the tea master stops the process by hand, by heat, by judgment, at the exact moment the leaf has become what it was meant to be and not one breath more. A light oolong, oxidized a tenth of the way. A dark one, most of the way. The whole art, love, lives in the gap.

And the reward for staying on the threshold is range. A good oolong will steep again and again, five times, eight times, each pour handing you a note the last one was politely hiding: orchid, then stone fruit, then something roasted and warm, then a sweetness that arrives from nowhere and refuses to explain itself. The leaf does not give everything at once. It opens the way a good door opens, in stages, to whoever keeps coming back.

I think about that whenever I meet someone standing between two lives who has not yet picked one. We do love to rush them, don’t we. Pick a room. Be green or be black. Decide already.

Oolong disagrees. Oolong has never once been rushed, and it looks marvelous for it.

Brew it hotter than a green and cooler than a black, somewhere around 85 to 90 degrees, and use more leaf than feels strictly reasonable. Then do the thing the tea has been trying to teach you all along: steep it more than once. Let it open in its own time.

The threshold is not indecision, darling. Sometimes the threshold is the whole craft.

Pairs with: the NumeraLogic below, a second steeping, and that one decision you have been standing politely beside for weeks.

Edition #38: The Number Shaped Like a Door

3 + 8 = 11

Eleven, loves! Of all the numbers the arithmetic of this edition could have handed me, it handed me the one shaped like a doorway. I did not plan that. I simply added, the way I always do, and then I sat back and laughed, because the universe had so obviously gotten there first.

Two pillars and a gap. Here are four doors eleven has been holding open while the rest of us were busy counting our change.

One. The temple. In the first book of Kings, when Solomon builds the Temple, he sets two great bronze pillars at its entrance and gives them names: Jachin and Boaz. Not decoration. Doorposts. To enter the holy place, you walked between two pillars and through the dark they framed. Builders and mystics have copied those twin pillars ever since, into temples and tarot cards and the columns on courthouse steps, because the message is older than any of them: the sacred is not a wall you climb. It is a gap you are invited to pass through. And the number eleven draws those two pillars for you every single time you write it. You have been sketching the door to the holy place on your grocery lists your whole life, darling. You are most welcome.

Two. The nerve. On the periodic table, the eleventh element is sodium. You already have a complicated relationship with element eleven, love, most of it conducted at the dinner table and mildly disapproved of by your doctor. But here is the part nobody mentions while passing the salt: every thought you have ever had crossed a gap on a tide of sodium. When a nerve fires, sodium rushes through tiny doors in the cell wall, and that rush is the signal itself. No sodium, no firing. Your heart keeps its rhythm on the same tide. Element eleven is the doorway your own aliveness passes through, several billion times a day, without once asking you to notice. You are reading this sentence because eleven keeps opening. You might thank it later.

Three. The star. The Sun keeps an eleven-year calendar. Its magnetic temper, measured in the rise and fall of sunspots, swings through a cycle the astronomer Heinrich Schwabe first caught in the 1840s after squinting at the Sun patiently for seventeen years (a hobby I cannot in good conscience recommend, though I admire the man’s commitment). The average is about eleven years. It runs a little long or a little short, the way your heart does, nine years here, fourteen there, but it always comes back around. Right now, over your head, the nearest star is somewhere inside its own eleven-count, opening and closing a door it has never once asked your permission to use.

Four. The floor of reality. When physicists chased the deepest theory underneath the strings, the mathematics turned fussy about exactly one thing: how many dimensions it needed in order to hold together. The answer was not four. It was not ten. It was eleven. Ten of space, one of time. They call it M-theory, and what the M stands for nobody can quite agree (my private theory is mezuzah, the little scroll we Terran Jews fix to our doorposts). The number, however, does not bend. Reality, at its most fundamental, may need exactly eleven doors to stand up in.

Read that again, loves. The universe is fussier about its doorways than your grandmother ever was about hers, and she was formidable.

A temple. A nerve. A star. The floor of everything. And, because the cosmos enjoys a good wink as much as I do: the month we still call the eleventh, November, carries the Latin novem inside it, which means nine. The eleventh month is itself standing in a doorway, halfway between what it used to be called and where it finally landed. Even the calendar cannot stop doing the thing.

Four doors. One number. Drawn as two pillars with the dark between them, which was always, always the only part that mattered. Now, back to Oolong-sipping.

The Liminal Practice

Time required: the length of one threshold. Materials: any door you were going to walk through anyway.

Here is a true and slightly unsettling thing, love. Psychologists at the University of Notre Dame ran a set of experiments and found that walking through a doorway makes you forget. People asked to carry an idea from one room to another lost their grip on it more often than people who walked the very same distance inside a single room. They named it the doorway effect. The mind, they proposed, treats a threshold as an “event boundary.” It closes the file on the old room and opens a fresh one. The doorway is not innocent. It resets you.

We usually meet this as the small daily comedy of marching into the kitchen with tremendous purpose and arriving with absolutely no idea why. (You are not losing your mind, darling. You walked through a door. Your brain filed the paperwork.)

But there is a gift hidden inside the science, and here it is: a doorway is already a moment your mind uses to set something down. You can choose what.

Here is the Liminal Practice. It takes but one threshold.

Step One: Catch a threshold. Not a special one. The bedroom door in the morning. The front door on the way out. The doorway into the room where the hard conversation is already waiting with its coat on. Simply notice, before you cross, that you are about to cross.

Step Two: Name what you are carrying. One silent sentence. “I am carrying this morning’s argument.” “I am carrying the dread of this meeting.” “I am carrying him.” You are not solving it, love. You are only naming the thing in your hands.

Step Three: Decide what crosses with you. Your mind is going to file something away on this threshold whether you direct it or not. So direct it. “This crosses with me. That stays in the other room.” Let the doorway do the work it was always going to do anyway, this time on purpose, this time for you.

Step Four: Cross. Feel the frame pass on either side, the two pillars of your own ordinary door. Then walk into the next room as the person who chose what to bring.

I use this one most mornings, at the door between the dim hallway and the bright kitchen, with Ánimo leaning his considerable opinion against my leg. His opinion is that the kitchen contains breakfast and that I am, as ever, being needlessly philosophical about a simple matter. I do not always set down what I meant to. I always set down something. He always gets breakfast. The system works.

One threshold. One thing carried, one thing left behind. The door was going to change you anyway, love. This is how you get a vote.

The Gateway as method.

A Lost Traveler writes:

“It’s been two years since my younger brother died. I have asked my parents to keep his room exactly as it was, down to the unmade bed. I tell myself I will know when it is time to change it, that the moment will announce itself. It never does. My family has stopped asking. I cannot tell anymore whether I am honoring him or hiding. How do I know the difference?”

Brain: What do I think?

I think the room is doing exactly what it was built to do, which is to hold a sacred door open. A bedroom is, after all, a sacred space. As long as the bed stays unmade, some part of you gets to keep living in the world where he might still come back and rumple it again. That is not foolishness, love. That is a person keeping a threshold from closing, because closing it feels like agreeing to something you never once agreed to.

So I would not ask “is it time to change the room.” That question has a trapdoor under it, and the trapdoor is the word over. I would ask a smaller, truer question. What in that room is a doorway you walk through toward him, and what in it has quietly become a wall you hide behind? They are not the same objects. The photograph you touch on your way out is a threshold. The unmade bed you cannot quite look at directly may be a wall. Only you can tell which is which, and you can only tell by standing in the room and noticing where your attention passes through and where it stops cold.

Heart: How do I feel about what I think?

Tender, and slow. There is a particular loneliness in being the last one still keeping the vigil after the family has stopped asking, and I feel it in your letter. So let me say it plainly: the fact that you are the only one still tending the door does not mean you are doing it wrong. It may only mean you loved him in a register the others reach for less often. That is not a burden you have to set down to prove anything to anyone.

And hiding and honoring can live in the same room, on the same day, in the same hand resting on the same doorframe. You are not required to sort every object into one pile or the other by sundown. You are allowed to keep the threshold, and to notice, gently, which parts of it have started to keep you.

Gut: Are Brain and Heart aligned?

They are close, and the gap between them is the useful part. Brain says stop asking whether it is time, and start asking which objects are doors and which are walls. Heart says do that slowly, and let no one, including you, shame the vigil.

What is not useful is the verdict you have been waiting for, the moment that announces itself with trumpets. It is not coming, love, because thresholds do not announce. They are simply stood in, and one day stepped through, usually without ceremony and often without noticing until you are already on the other side. You do not have to decide about the room. You only have to keep visiting it honestly, and let it show you, object by object, where the door still is.

He is on the far side of a threshold you did not choose. You are allowed to keep standing at it for as long as you need. You are also allowed, on some ordinary Tuesday, to make the bed. Neither one ends him.

For the one who slams the door and calls it strength:

זאל יעדע טיר וואָס דו קלאַפּסט צו בלייבן צוגעשלאָסן

Zal yede tir vos du klapst tsu bleybn tsugeshlosn.

May every door you slam stay slammed.

Counter-Blessing:

זאָלסטו אַנטדעקן, שפּעט און לאַכנדיק, אַז די שטאַרקע זאַך איז קיינמאָל נישט געווען דער קלאַפּ. עס איז געווען דאָס בלייבן אָפֿן

Zolstu antdekn, shpet aun lakhndik, az di shtarke zakh iz keynmol nisht geven der klap. es iz geven dos bleybn ofn.

May you discover, late and laughing, that the strong thing was never the slam. It was the staying open.

You are allowed to stand in The Gateway, love.

Not forever, maybe. But longer than the world will tell you. The Sun takes about eleven years to turn its great magnetic door, and nobody, not once in all of recorded history, has successfully hurried the Sun. You may take the time you need to cross the thresholds of this wild life of yours.

And a threshold is not a verdict, darling. Stepping through a door does not mean you have signed anything, agreed to anything, declared anything over. It only means you have walked into the next room, where, it turns out, you are still allowed to love every single person you brought in with you.

The door is not the end of them. It never was.

The Hermit Hut Herald reaches you because someone decided that bold ideas deserve quiet corners, and that a lantern held in a doorway is worth a great deal more than a floodlight aimed at a wall.

The Founding Lantern Keepers keep that doorway open.

They keep the edition arriving. They keep the Feast on the table and the Inner Sanctum lit. They keep Ánimo in treats, which he regards, with total sincerity, as the central pillar of a just and well-ordered cosmos.

If the Herald has been a threshold for you, a place you pass through toward something truer, the Keepers are how it stays standing. You would be most welcome among them. The door is in your footer, and it is unlocked.

To those already holding it open: I see your hands on the frame. Thank you for keeping the lantern lit for the Traveler who has not arrived yet, and does not yet know they are already on their way.

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Eleven is two pillars and a gap.

I keep returning to that, because it is the rare symbol that tells the truth about itself. The number does not pretend the gap is a flaw. The gap is the entire function. Take away the space between the pillars and you do not get a stronger eleven. You get a wall, and a wall is only a door that gave up. Read that again, love.

Last night the sky over Extremadura was clear, and somewhere in it, the Sun, already set, was partway through its slow eleven-year turning, keeping a door it has never been asked to keep. The same hour, in the dark, the sodium in ten thousand sleeping bodies kept opening its tiny gates, firing the dreams of people who have no idea they are run on the eleventh element. The thresholds were all busy, at every scale, the way they always are.

And I thought, as I do, about my boy who went through a door little ahead of me.

He did not slam it. That is the thing I hold onto. He left it open. I have spent the 18 years since learning that a threshold someone you love has crossed is not a wall to grieve against. It is a Gateway to live beside, with the lamp lit, unhurried, certain of only one thing: that the gap between the pillars is not empty, and not an ending, and that he is exactly where eleven always pointed.

A little further on. Holding it open.

Always here.

A little ahead. ✨

With deep respect for two pillars, one gap, and The Gateway that is not the end of anyone,

Rev. Rabbi Henry-Cameron Allen, OCP, ICGC

Dr. Hermi The Virtual Hermit, Arroyomolinos, Cáceres, Extremadura, Spain

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Act 1: The Loomfield Fracture

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OPENING LANTERN

I had a whole other theme planned for this edition, but a moment changed it entirely. This epiphany is so important that I will shelve the theme I had planned today until next week.

The thermometer on my windowsill read 37 °C. (98.6 °F)

Outside, the Spanish sun arrived at the exact temperature of a living body.

I noticed it late this morning, standing in the kitchen while Ánimo investigated a corner of the Peace Garden with the seriousness of a detective who suspects the flowers are keeping secrets.

The air wafting through the door had that specific quality of late May here, just before June takes over entirely: dry, warm enough to be a presence, not yet heavy enough to be a weight. My hand on the door frame. The temperature exactly matching my skin.

I stood there for longer than made any obvious sense, calculating it all.

37 degrees Celsius. The number the living body holds. The number Extremadura has just matched. Before I say what I think this means, I want to say what it felt like first. Because for anyone reading this who knows what it is to be the one who is still 37 degrees, while someone they loved is no longer measured that way, there is a complicated arithmetic in that number.

There is a weight to being warm that the merely-curious reader does not carry. If you are carrying that weight right now, at any level, I want you to know I am writing this from inside it, not past it. The fire continues for us while the fire of our loved ones has changed its form. That is real. That is not bypassed here.

What I noticed, standing at the kitchen door, was this:

My body is not passively warm. It is actively, expensively, continuously working to maintain 37 degrees against an entropy that would, given the chance, bring everything to equilibrium.

The human body spends roughly 70% of its resting metabolic energy on temperature regulation. Every breath. Every heartbeat. Every quiet moment you think you are doing nothing.

You are burning.

Not as a metaphor.

As physics.

This is not the fire of myth. This is the fire of mitochondria. The fire of the billion cellular suns that take glucose and oxygen and produce, among other things, the exact temperature that makes everything else possible. 37 °C.

You are not alive and therefore warm. The warmth is the argument your body is making for being alive at all.

And 37 is prime.

A prime number cannot be divided. It has no factors except 1 and itself. No arithmetic breaks it into smaller constituent pieces. It is irreducible.

I think about that word in relation to this number, in relation to this temperature, in relation to what it means to be a being who insists on continuing.

What is irreducible in you?

Not the version of you that is comfortable or competent or composed. The thing underneath, the thing the body maintains regardless of circumstance, the number that holds steady when everything else shifts. That is the 37. That is what the prime has always been trying to say.

3 + 7 = 10 = 1 The pioneer. The seed. The origin point. The beginning that, despite having planned something else for today, has been waiting, warm, inside the arithmetic of this edition all along. More about that in the Numerologic section.

Welcome to Edition #37. The lantern is lit. And it burns, as it turns out, at 37 °C.

THE LANTERN TABLE

What is waiting for you inside this edition? Take a looksee:

Tea of the Week: A tea made to warm the body from within, on the hottest days. I have found a contradiction that turns out not to be one.

NumeraLogic: I have found four things the number 37 has been quietly keeping.

Pocket Tools: The 37-Degree Practice. One hand. One breath. One thing the body already knows that the mind keeps forgetting to ask.

Ask the Virtual Hermit: A Lantern Keeper asks: “Is it normal to feel relief when the grief gets quiet? Sometimes I go a whole day without the heaviness arriving, and then I feel guilty about not feeling it.” (Hoo, boy… you’re not alone in that.)

Yiddish Curse and Counter-Blessing: For those who have mistaken coldness for wisdom.

Gentle Reminders: Two things before you close the edition.

Founding Lantern Keepers: The community that tends this flame. Join us.

Final Feather: What the fire keeps.

For Founding Lantern Keepers (paid ‘Scribers):

The Inner Sanctum: This morning I understood profoundly what 37 means.

The Feast: Migas Extremeñas. The shepherd’s fire, rebuilt in a pan. Bread, pork fat, garlic, pimentón de la Vera. It will warm you from the inside out, and you will wonder why you waited so long.

UPCOMING EVENTS:

Go here to see my event calendar. Fun stuff!

The Virtual Event Calendar

This Saturday’s Screening:

TEA OF THE WEEK

Ginger Root Decoction: The Tea That Argues Back

In Extremadura in late May, the air temperature is already 37 °C, 98.6 °F.

Nobody reaches for something hot to drink.

But I do.

Not out of masochism or some theatrical commitment to winter. Out of something the Ayurvedic physicians figured out long before the word counterintuitive existed as a compliment for people who do the unexpected.

Warming the body from within on a hot day causes the blood vessels in the skin to dilate. The body perceives the internal temperature rising and works to cool the surface. The result? We sweat slightly, the surface cools, and paradoxically, we feel cooler than we would with something cold, which constricts and contracts and gives the cold the impression of relief without the relief. Because science.

The body, in other words, responds to the truth of heat better than it responds to the illusion of cold.

Ginger root, simmered for twenty minutes, strained, and poured into a cup you hold with both hands. A slice of lemon if the mood calls for it. Honey if you are feeling generous with yourself.

The ginger works primarily on circulation. It moves the blood the way that trust moves love. If you have been sitting very still for a very long time, especially the kind of stillness that has nothing to do with physical immobility, the ginger will find you. It starts in the chest. It moves outward toward the edges. It feels like being reminded that you have a body.

I think this is one of the most useful reminders available by infusion.

Simmer for twenty minutes. Strain carefully. Hold the cup as long as the cup is willing. Pairs perfectly with the next section, a slow afternoon, and the particular quality of light that arrives in late May, just before the solstice, when even the shadows seem to have warmth within them.

NUMEROLOGIC

37: The Number the Body Keeps

3 + 7 = 10 = 1 + 0 = 1

I noticed that first. The way you notice the answer to something before you have finished formulating the question.

Bereshit (בְּרֵאשִׁית) is the Hebrew word for "in the beginning." It is the very first word of the Hebrew Bible and the traditional name for the Book of Genesis. It also designates the first weekly Torah portion read in the annual Jewish cycle.

One. The pioneer. The origin. The seed that has been warm all along.

Four things the number 37 has been quietly keeping:

One. 37 degrees Celsius is the temperature of the living human body. Not a metaphor. Not a symbol. Physics. The body maintains this number, give or take a narrow fraction, through a process so expensive, so constant, and so precise that any significant deviation triggers immediate emergency response. Too high: the proteins denature. Too low: the enzymatic processes slow and stop. The body knows what 37 means. It has staked its entire existence on that number. I think this means 37 is not a number we reach. It is a number we are. Right now, as you read this.

Two. 37 is a prime number. It has no factors. Nothing divides it cleanly except 1 and itself. This makes it irreducible in the precise mathematical sense: there is no smaller version of 37 that contains what 37 contains. I have been sitting with this in relation to the Irreducible Self: the part of you that cannot be divided into a simpler expression, that cannot be factored into something more fundamental. Not your job. Not your grief. Not your roles or your history. The thing underneath all of that, which the prime has always insisted upon, quietly, in the arithmetic.

Three. This edition of The Hermit Hut Herald arrives on May 29th, 2026.

Those digits, added together: 5 + 2 + 9 + 2 + 0 + 2 + 6 = 26 = 2 + 6 = 8

Edition #35 was the infinity loop, the figure eight lying on its side dreaming of continuity. I did not plan this. The number planned it. The date of Edition #37 reduces to the same number that gave Edition #35 its name. The loop continues. It passed through Edition #36 and kept going, and here it is again: 8, the shape that returns to exactly where it began without lifting the pen. The fire and the loop. Apparently inseparable.

❤️‍🔥♾️❤️‍🔥

Four. Studies in cognitive psychology and statistics have found that when people are asked to name a random number between 1 and 100, 37 and its mirror image, 73, appear far more frequently than probability alone would predict. 37 is, in the most rigorously documented sense available, the number that feels most random to human intuition: the number the mind reaches for when it is trying to find something with no particular pattern.

I consider this remarkable. The same number the body holds to stay alive is the number the mind reaches for when it is looking for something that means nothing. The body’s most vital number and the mind’s most “meaningless” one are the same number. I suspect the mind is not failing at randomness. The mind is recognizing, without knowing why, the number it has always been.

Edition #37: 37 °C, the number the body keeps: the prime that cannot be divided.

POCKET TOOLS

The 37-Degree Practice

Time required: thirty seconds. Materials: one hand. (It’s not what you think.)

I want to offer this before explaining it, because it is most useful on the days when you don’t quite feel that you are altogether here.

Not the days when you are sad, love. The days when you are so far from yourself that not even the sadness is accessible. The flat days. The days when you wonder, without drama, whether you are actually present in your own life.

Those days.

Place your dominant hand, palm flat, on your chest. Directly over the sternum.

Hold it there.

Now deliberately hold your breath and attempt to feel nothing in particular. Simply register: is there warmth?

There is.

That warmth is not passive. It is the result of processes happening right now, in this moment, without your supervision or permission, maintaining the temperature that makes everything else possible. 37C. You did not decide to be warm. The body decided, and is deciding, continuously, with enormous expenditure of energy, to hold the number.

That is the fire. Not the fire of inspiration or motivation or will. The metabolic fire. The original one.

The body is already doing the most important thing.

Three slow breaths with the hand on the chest. No agenda. Just the warmth.

Then return to whatever you were doing. You have just confirmed what the body already knew.

The 37-Degree Practice. Thirty seconds. Available everywhere. Available in every season.

ASK THE VIRTUAL HERMIT

A Lantern Keeper writes:

“Is it normal to feel relief when the grief gets quiet? Sometimes I go hours, even a whole day, without the heaviness arriving. And then I feel guilty about not feeling it. Like the grief, being quiet means I am not honoring the person I am grieving. Can you tell me if this is normal, and also whether the quiet periods mean something is wrong with me?”

Brain: What do I think?

Grief does not run on a fixed schedule, love, and it was never designed to. What you are describing is not a malfunction. It is the fundamental nature of grief: it is alive, and living things breathe. They contract and expand. The quiet periods are not absences of grief. They are grief inhaling.

This is also not normal in the sense of being unremarkable. It is normal in the sense that it is exactly how the organism handles transformation at this scale. The way a fever breaks and the body rests before the immune work continues. The quiet is not the end of the work. It is the rest between rounds.

The guilt that arrives in the quiet is worth looking at directly. It carries a belief worth naming: that sustained, visible pain is proof of love, and that its absence is proof of something less. That belief is understandable and almost universally held and it is not accurate. Love does not require continuous suffering as evidence. The grief will return. It knows your address.

Heart: How do I feel about what I think?

Tenderness. I have stood in those quiet hours and felt the thing you are describing: the sudden absence of the weight, and then the weight of its absence. The guilty relief. It is one of the more complicated human experiences I know, and the people who have not stood in it often do not understand why it is harder, in some ways, than the open grief. At least in the open grief, you know where you are.

And: the quiet is a gift your nervous system is giving you. It is not disloyalty. It is the body saying, briefly: you can put this down for a moment. The grief is still there. It will return.

Gut: Brain and Heart aligned?

They are. The quiet is rest. The guilt is real, but it is not a reliable guide to what is actually happening.

What is not useful: the belief that loving someone requires suffering over them without interruption. That belief serves no one. It does not honor the one who has crossed. It exhausts the one who remains.

Set the guilt down with the same gentleness you would extend to someone else describing exactly what you described.

You are not honoring them less in the still hours. You are, in those hours, growing the capacity to carry what comes next. I know this all too well.

YIDDISH CURSE AND COUNTER-BLESSING

זאָל דיין חכמה דיר האַלטן געזעלשאַפט אין דער קעלט וואָס זי האָט געמאַכט.

Zol deyn khkhmh dir haltn gezelshaft in der kelt vos zi hot gemakht.

May your wisdom keep you company in the cold it has made.

Counter-Blessing:

זאָלסט זײַן אַזוי וואַרעם ווי דו ביסט שוין.

Zolst zayn azoy varem vi du bist shoyn.

May you be as warm as you already are.

(Welcome back to 37.)

GENTLE REMINDERS

The quiet in grief is not betrayal. I said it above and will say it again here for the person who read that answer and thought it might apply to everyone except them: it applies to you, too. The quiet is the body breathing. Let it breathe.

If you are reading this in a place where the late May air is 12 °C and not remotely 37, the outside fire is not the point. The inside fire is. You are holding 37 regardless. The body does not adjust the argument based on the weather.

Place your hand on your chest. Deliberately hold your breath.

The warmth is there.

FOUNDING LANTERN KEEPERS

To the Founding Lantern Keepers who keep this flame burning edition after edition: thank you.

My work runs on your support and your willingness to invest in this quiet corner, joining me in pondering things the louder rooms may be too busy to consider.

The fire in Edition #37 is, in no small part, yours. You make it possible for the lantern to stay lit across all editions.

If you are not yet a Founding Lantern Keeper and you would like to join the community that keeps this work alive, the link is always here. Come on in. The tea is hot, the floor pillows are fluffed, and all questions are welcome.

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FINAL FEATHER

Ánimo has found a cool, shady patch of the Peace Garden, beneath the potted Hawthorne tree.

He has folded himself into a donut with the precision of a creature who has made peace with the physics of heat transfer and sees no reason to resist what the sun offers. The ground is probably 40 °C by now. The warmth from below and the warmth from above, and in between: a dog who has decided to simply be one with it.

I watch him from the door.

I think about Cameron particularly on days like this.

I think about the specific warmth of a child, the particular 37 degrees that a child carries. His warmth was his. It was the argument his body made for continuing, for thirteen years and five months, without interruption.

When the argument stopped, it did not stop in the way that we mean when we usually say stopping. The Law of Conservation of Energy does not provide for destruction. It provides for transformation. The electromagnetic expression of a life disperses. It joins the field. It becomes part of the plasma the universe is 99% made of.

It continues in a different form.

Our loved ones are not cold.

They part of the fire.

I say this not only as comfort, though it is that. I say it as physics, because that is truly what it is. The same conservation that keeps my body at 37 °C also guarantees that nothing that the crossing removed was destroyed. Only changed. Only carried forward into a form that does not require a thermometer to confirm.

“Always here. A little ahead.”

The Earth is warm. The air is 37 degrees. The fire continues.

Until the next edition, Loves. Keep the fire.

You are irreducible. The number holds.

With warmth, always,

Rev. Rabbi Henry-Cameron Allen, OCP, ICGC

Arroyomolinos, Cáceres, Extremadura, Spain

Edition #37 | 29 May, 2026

For Founding Lantern Keepers:

Read more

I’ll be teaching three classes per week: Outliving Your Child: Supporting Parents Through The Unimaginable, Reclaiming the Self: Rediscovering Who You Are After Grief, and Death and the Man: Coping Skills For Grieving Fathers. I will also be hosting a weekly 15-minute meditation: Morning Light: Hope and Strength for a New Day.

GLADD founder Christa McDonald and I recently sat down for a conversation about Death, Loss, Hope, Perspective, and Personal Transformation.

OPENING LANTERN: THE CROSSING

We have been burning, loves.

For five weeks, this lantern has been turning up the heat. Beltane lit it. Cameron’s Feast and my 60th birthday are what fed it for me. The Infinity Loop named it. And here we are on the other side of all that fire, arriving somewhere… quieter. Outbreath.

Or perhaps your fire was never lit, love.

Perhaps you watched these burning editions from a distance, too spent or too still to enter. Perhaps you are at the center of the loop, not because you drew it deliberately but because the arc of your life has been passing through the same crossing point for longer than you can name, and you did not know that stillness had a name.

It does.

When you draw a figure-eight without lifting your pencil from the paper, there is a moment at the crossing when the direction changes. The pencil keeps moving. It does not stop. But at that crossing point, it is passing through the most still place the motion will ever find. Not going left, not going right. The smallest possible fraction between directions.

That is, perhaps, where you are right now. A pause deserving of its own outbreath.

Not stuck. Not stopped. At the crossing.

T.S. Eliot named it the still point of the turning world. He said that there the dance is. He did not say the still point is where the dancing stopped. He said it is where the dance becomes itself again.

The still point is not the absence of movement.

It is the place movement passes through in order to continue.

There is also this, for the one reading at 2am who is feeling afraid: if the stillness you are in feels less like a crossing and more like a permanent stop, keep reading. I have something to say about that, too.

This is Edition #36 of The Hermit Hut Herald. The Still Point.

Welcome to the crossing.

THE LANTERN TABLE

What burns quietly inside this edition:

• Tea of the Week: Silver Needle White Tea. A cup that holds you while you hold it

• NumeraLogic: On the number 36 (3+6=9), and the thirty-six who hold the world without knowing

• Pocket Tools: The Crossing Practice. Finding the still point in your body, not just your mind

• Ask the Virtual Hermit: Grief Guilt

• Yiddish Curse and Counter-Blessing: On carrying the collapse of the world quietly

• Gentle Reminders: Permission Slips

• Final Feather: You are the crossing. Own it.

UPCOMING EVENTS

EVERY FRIDAY

Enter Dr. Hermi's Digital Diner! A space for learning the basics of digital literacy, guided by someone who has been a digital worldbuilder since 2006. Nice and easy. Your pace. Come on in. There's pie!

(Paid Membership)

https://events.thevirtualhermit.quest/hermis-digital-diner

SUNDAY, the 24th of May

Once upon a time, a man declared himself King.

The adults in the land went very quiet.

The children went to work.

Virtual World Premiere LIVE Reading

Bring the kids!

TICKETS: tinyurl.com/kingjellybean

For all other upcoming free and paid events, visit:

https://events.thevirtualhermit.quest/

TEA OF THE WEEK: SILVER NEEDLE WHITE TEA

Pale gold. Almost clear.

You would be forgiven for thinking nothing is happening in this cup. No deep color, no commanding scent, no flavor that announces itself across the room. Silver Needle is made from the youngest buds of the tea plant before they open. Barely processed: just gathered, withered, dried. It is the most minimal form of tea that still contains everything tea is.

The flavor is delicate and exact. Hay and melon and a sweetness you cannot quite name but would never remove.

Sip this at the still point of the afternoon. Not to wake up. Not to sleep. To be somewhere between those states, where the day can be seen clearly without being grasped.

Brew it at 170°F. Three minutes. Do not rush.

This tea does not announce itself.

It holds you while you hold it.

That is what this edition is, too, bubbeleh.

NUMERALOGIC: THE THIRTY-SIX WHO HOLD

This is the thirty-sixth edition of The Hermit Hut Herald.

I have been turning the number 36 over in my hands all week, loves.

Here is what I found:

In Jewish mysticism, the world is held in place by exactly thirty-six hidden righteous ones. The Lamed-Vav, they are called. The two Hebrew letters whose values sum to thirty-six. These are not great teachers or celebrated luminaries. Nobody knows who they are. They do not know themselves. They are ordinary people carrying something extraordinary without any awareness that they are carrying it.

They simply hold.

Without them, tradition says, the world would cease to be. Not because of anything they proclaim or publish or perform. Because of what they carry quietly, in their ordinary daily lives, in the unwitnessed moments between the things that get noticed.

I have been sitting with this all week, turning it over.

Every Lost Traveler who gets out of bed in the morning when bed rotting would be the easier choice.

Every Griefwalker who sets the table after the unthinkable.

Every Peregrine who drives the carpool while the interior of their chest is a wreckage site they are not discussing.

Every one of you who showed up at some threshold, small or enormous, and held, even when no one was watching, even when you received no credit, even when you would not have called what you were doing holding.

You may be one of the thirty-six.

You will never know for certain. That is the nature of the designation. It is not a credential. It cannot be earned or verified. The Lamed-Vav cannot confirm their own status. That is the whole point.

But I suspect, if you are reading this lantern, that you have already held something the world needed held. You did not announce it. You did not wait for the ceremony. You held because someone had to.

Thirty-six editions of this Herald.

Thirty-six hidden righteous ones.

That is not a coincidence I am willing to call a coincidence.

POCKET TOOLS: THE CROSSING PRACTICE

This practice takes ninety seconds and requires nothing but your hand.

Before you begin: You are locating the still point in your body, not your mind.

Step 1. Raise your dominant hand. Extend one finger. Draw a figure-eight in the air: slowly, in one continuous motion. Keep the crossing point at the center of the shape.

Step 2. Draw it three times. Watch your finger at the crossing. Notice what happens there. The finger never stops, but at the crossing, it passes through something. A threshold, a direction-change, the most still the motion ever gets.

Step 3. Stop drawing. Rest your hand. Notice where you feel the crossing in your body. Some people feel it in the chest. Some in the throat. Some in the solar plexus. The body remembers the shape even when the mind has moved on.

The Application:

When the stillness of your own life feels like being stuck rather than being at the crossing, draw the figure-eight. Let the hand remind the rest of you that the still point is not the end of the loop. It is the necessary center of every loop that keeps going.

See, love? You were never stuck after all.

You are at the crossing. You are the crossing.

ASK THE VIRTUAL HERMIT

“There are days when I don’t think about my grief at all. A whole afternoon will pass and I realize I wasn’t thinking about her. And then the guilt hits harder than the grief did. Like I abandoned her by having a good afternoon. How do I stop feeling like a traitor to my own grief?”

I sat with this one for a long time before I could answer it honestly, one Griefwalker to another. One Peregrine to another.

Brain - What I think:

The guilt you are describing is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is a sign that your nervous system is doing what it is designed to do: finding moments of rest inside a sustained weight. The afternoon that passed without grief was not an act of betrayal. It was your body making a bid for survival.

Here is the cosmological frame: grief is the living response to absence and change. It is alive. It moves. It does not require your constant attention to remain real, because it is not a performance. It is a relationship. You do not have to be actively grieving to be in an active relationship with the one you are grieving.

The absence of grief in an afternoon is not abandonment.

It is breath.

Heart - How I feel about what I think:

What I feel is: the person you are grieving would not want your guilt. I cannot know that for certain, but I know it the way I know most things that matter — from inside the same grief, from inside the same accidental afternoon that passed without pain, and from the shame I felt when I noticed.

She did not ask for your vigilance. She asked, if she asked anything, for your aliveness. The afternoon you had without grief was an afternoon you were alive in. That is not a betrayal. That is what the people we grieve wanted for us.

I cannot prove that. But I believe it with everything I have.

Gut - Are Brain and Heart aligned?

Yes. Eliminate what is not useful: the premise that grief requires surveillance to be real.

What is useful: the next time an afternoon passes without weight, notice it not as evidence of abandonment but as evidence that the relationship is secure enough to allow you to breathe. Secure attachment does not require constant contact. Neither does love that has crossed a threshold.

She is not more present because you are more vigilant.

She is simply present. You are allowed to be, too.

Guy-Wire.org

YIDDISH CURSE AND COUNTER-BLESSING: ON THE WEIGHT OF QUIET HOLDING

The Curse:

זאָלסטו קיינמאָל נישט הערן דעם קול פֿון דער וועלט וואָס פֿאַלט נישט צוזאַמען צוליב דיר.

Zolstu keynmol nisht hern dem kul fun der velt vos falt nisht tsuzamen tsulib dir.

May you never hear the sound of the world not collapsing because of you.

The Counter-Blessing:

זאָלסטו קיינמאָל נישט הערן דעם גערויש פון דער וועלט וואָס פאַלט צוזאַמען צוליב דיר. די צערעמאָניע איז איינגעוואָבן אין יעדן מאָרגן וואָס דו קלייבסט צו בלייבן.

Zolstu keynmol nisht hern dem geroysh fun der velt vos falt tsuzamen tsulib dir. di tseremonye iz eyngevobn in yedn morgn vos du kleybst tsu bleybn.

May you never hear the sound of the world collapsing because of you. The ceremony is woven into every morning you choose to remain.

GENTLE REMINDERS

PERMISSION SLIPS:

You are allowed to stop expanding for one week.

You are allowed to be at the crossing without immediately choosing a direction.

You are allowed to rest without calling it giving up.

You are allowed to have missed the fire entirely and arrive at the still point from the quiet side. All roads lead here.

You are allowed to not know which revolution of the loop you are on. The still point is at the center regardless.

You are allowed to draw a figure-eight in the air at the kitchen table and call that your practice for the day.

And if the stillness feels permanent rather than structural, you are allowed to be afraid of that. It does not mean it is true. Loops look like stops from inside the crossing. That is a feature of the crossing, not a verdict on the loop.

Trust that your lantern stays lit even when you set it down.

FOUNDING LANTERN KEEPERS

The Hermit Hut Herald exists because a small number of people decided, before this lantern became anything, that it was worth holding.

The Founding Lantern Keepers are those people. This edition, The Still Point, the thirty-six hidden righteous ones, the outbreath after five weeks of fire, was written in the warmth their presence makes possible. Thank you.

If you are reading as a free subscriber and you feel the pull to carry a piece of this work forward, I would be honored to have you at the table:

Become a Founding Lantern Keeper

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FINAL FEATHER 🪶

There is something I have been circling toward, and have not yet said directly.

The still point of the infinity loop is not a place you visit.

It is the structure through which you move, repeatedly, in both directions, on every revolution of every loop your life draws. It is not a destination you earn after fire. It is a threshold the loop must pass through in order to remain a single continuous form.

Here is what is specifically true about this crossing that is not true of any other center:

It is on the path.

You cannot go around it. Every revolution of the loop passes through the crossing. There is no version of the loop that avoids the still point. The pen always returns to it. You always return to it. Grief always returns you to it.

Without the crossing, the figure-eight becomes two separate circles.

The crossing is what makes it one thing.

You are not only the motion of the loop, you carry the crossing with you, because you are the loop itself. You are the curves that expand and the center that holds them as one continuous form. Every Lost Traveler who has ever held something in the unwitnessed dark, every Griefwalker who has set the table after the unthinkable, every Peregrine who has simply remained when remaining was the only available act: you have been the still point of your own turning world all along.

This is what the thirty-six hidden ones know without knowing they know it.

The world does not rest on the shoulders of the heroic. It rests on the shoulders of the ones who remain at their own center while everything else burns and loops and expands around them.

Loves, I have been at the crossing this week.

So have you.

What happens next… which loop, which direction, which fire… will be its own separate edition.

For now, you are at the still point of the turning world. Own it.

There the dance is.

Until the lantern turns again,

The Virtual Hermit Rev. Rabbi Henry-Cameron Allen, OCP, ICGC

“Bold ideas from quiet corners.”

THE INNER SANCTUM & THE FEAST

What I carry at the crossing…

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Once upon a time, a man declared himself King. The adults in the land went very quiet. The children went to work...

The King Who Outlawed Jelly Beans is a new satyrical folk tale by Henry-Cameron Allen, adapted from by a short story by Johnny Valentine, with his kind permission. Part of The Lore Series of The New Folklore Theatre Company.

If you and your family can not attend, buy a ticket anyway, and you will receive a professionally produced audio theatre recording of the play.

BOX OFFICE LINK: https://tinyurl.com/KINGJELLYBEAN

Part of our 2026 Fire Horse Season!

Giving is creative. Become a Foklore Luminary.

Find out more about us at

https://thevirtualhermit.quest/folklore

https://events.thevirtualhermit.quest/new-folklore-theatre