When you leave The Hermit energy, even if only for a brief moment, you almost always step into The World energy.

After solitude, introspection, wandering alone through the forest of your being, and diving into the cold lakes of your past, you emerge from your cocoon with a renewed curiosity—an openness to experience the mundane world, to meet people, to travel, to explore, to see what’s out there. You feel the pull to belong to something. You may not yet know what that something is, but you’re willing to find out. Without hurry.

This is a curiosity that knows patience, that moves with the flow. A curiosity that lingers in the waiting, in the not-knowing, in the quiet wonder of what comes next. A curiosity that embraces the process.

The World marks the completion of a cycle, the end of a journey. The Hermit takes you inward—to the unconscious, to the hidden parts of yourself, to the truths you reject, the wounds you don’t yet understand, the emotions that rise unbidden and, in suppressing them, you sometimes hurt yourself and others. The Hermit’s path is one of meeting these shadowy aspects of yourself, learning to recognize them, so that when they resurface, you can respond with awareness rather than reaction.

With this awareness, you begin to love yourself—or at least, stop hating the parts of you that are still you. You start to like yourself a little more. You feel more whole than when you began.

And that is another meaning of The World: wholeness. A sense of being complete within yourself. Not in a way that glorifies your strengths blindly, but in a way that celebrates them while also embracing your weaknesses. It is standing before the world and saying:

"This is who I am today. I am doing my best. I am learning. I am aware. Take me as I am."

And since I love poetry—especially Mary Oliver—I believe this poem fully expresses The Hermit’s energy transforming into The World, meeting, somewhere along the way, The Strength energy.

But that—The Strength—is another story, for another time.

WILD GEESE
by Mary Oliver

"You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things."