Artist: Kitty Kahane

Booklet: Lilo Schwartz
 
Interpretation: “Follow your Star. // Be true to yourself and follow your own way. You alone know where your star is leading you, therefore do not let yourself be distracted by outside influences and well-meaning counsel…”
 
The hermit seems to have left the house in his bathrobe. Perhaps it is supposed to be an overcoat, but it looks fuzzy. So does his chin. May be he just got up out of bed, threw on a robe and went for a hike. Either way, no one is looking. He’s got a start to light his way and a little birdie on his shoulder.
 
The hermit is the old-man-self. Incorporating more of the past into one’s self allows us to understand what may come of the future. Knowing what may come of the future allows us to see where we are going, to allow time itself to become starlight that shows some roots and rocks in an otherwise shadowy path.
 
I am shy. I like the hermit. I have dreams that I keep hidden in fear of failure, or in fear that others will think them too strange. Perhaps sometimes my star’s a bit dim, because I should have learned by now that the few people I allow to my hermitage do not judge me nearly so harshly as I judge myself.
 
I spend hours alone, reading or doing yoga or wandering around outside and thinking, just looking. I like to see how one thing connects to another— becomes another— is fully and completely inseparate from another. Eventually, nothing that I want to be important seems important at all, and I feel helpless in the face of what is truly important. Whatever that is. At this point, it’s time I call a friend on the phone and talk pure silliness that certainly means nothing but is nonetheless quite crucial.
 
I am the hermit right now in Quebec. Martin is speaking French on the phone. His son refuses to accept that English might be a language of civilized people and suddenly insists he understands none of it: he doesn’t want it spoken in the house. Outside it is raining or snowing something awfully wet. Down the street is a bike path that leads in one direction or the other but veers little and never forks. There are people on the path sometimes. If they spoke to me, I would not understand them. In the sprawling local suburbs there is one box-shaped store after another selling things that we are foolish enough to think might make us happy. A star is a very large, very heavy thing to carry. I want to go home so I can put the star on its shelf for a while and sleep in my own bed.