Into gold

Along with thoughts of quarantine and masking as temporary hermitary, there's the permanent hermitary of difference. 

Imagine a bright assigned-male only-child, culled at a very early age by peers due to a tendency toward effeminacy, by means of stoning.

Imagine the same child, due to or at least shortly after this traumatic incident, losing half of her hearing, and then missing reams of school time due to measles, rubella, mumps, chicken pox, flu and what can only be called depression, surrounded by mumbling and diffident or even abusive adults (she wasn't supposed to have been born).

And then, at 56, having tried all her life to be "normal," transitioned, just in time for the beginnings of a slide of civilization toward authoritarian christonationalism and massive indifference toward human rights, in the midst of a historically isolating pandemic. At the same time, an emergent condition marked by seizures ends her driving years, separating her from society even more.

She's a hermit already by default, as are so many.

Every population identifiable by difference from the norm, as defined and elevated to a principle by the herd, is culled by refused services, redlining, "unemployability" -- all the acts of which a majority (or would-be majority) are capable -- up to and including genocide.

Some of one's time might be spent resisting such a tide. This is activism.

Some of the rest of one's time may be spent in recuperation. It's then that one notices the virtues of the hermitary.

I watch birds. The jays trumpet from the tops of the trees, but never stay in one spot long. They're autocratic in their actions toward the songbirds, but watch their backs. On branches lower than those of the jays, one finds the starlings. Prone to traveling in groups, locally their flight paths are direct and short, with objectives, all business. They defer to the jays but find and consume everything with gusto. Lower still, one finds towhees. They wait for the jays and starlings to suss out the safe and remunerative places, and investigate when the bigger birds are satiated.

I watch trees. Most, near the hut, are cottonwoods, and they warn me of approaching storms by turning up fluttering silvered leaves. When there is wind, they bend. When there is stillness, they cleverly compete with one another for a glimpse of the sun, but also share food and information through their buried feet.

Cottonwoods love water, and they are clustered near the seasonal creek. I watch the creek, too, but not as often. I'm told it makes lovely music all day and night, but for me it is silent, unless I bring a hearing device, and hearing devices are tiring. When it runs dry I pick blackberries. When it jumps its banks I abandon the hut for a time, marveling at the power of even a modest amount of flooding.

Here, alone, I am all of me -- observant, prudent, fascinated by my surroundings and increasingly aware of my own thoughts and condition.

Hermiting and meditation have a lot in common, and of course hermits are often meditators. They make a kind of wisdom progress, though that's putting it badly. Wisdom does not build or progress, it's simply revealed by the studied and applied omission of distractions. One peels away the unnecessary, and that which was wise but poorly understood remains. 

Buddhism teaches this explicitly.

The field of boundless emptiness is what exists from the very beginning. You must purify, cure, grind down, or brush away all the tendencies you have fabricated into apparent habits. Then you can reside in the clear circle of brightness -- Hongzhi, tr. Leighton.

Those excluded from the mainstream by difference often evince discovered, uncovered, revealed wisdom, and thereby can be exemplars to the very society that has excluded them. What has happened to them is still a crime, but at least it can transmute them into gold.