The Lantern Only Lights the Next Step

I've said the same line in nearly every episode of this series. The lantern only lights the next step. This week I want to take it apart, because I think most of us hear it wrong. The way it usually lands is as consolation. Poor you, out in the dark with your inadequate wee light, never mind, you only need the next bit. That reading has the Hermit stumbling about lost. So go and look at the card. He isn't lost. He's standing on the top of a mountain he already climbed, with a staff in his hand because he walked up there and there's nothing in his face wishing the lamp were bigger. Last week we spent an hour chasing a light that kept its distance. Here's the answer to it, which is that you stop chasing lights when you're carrying one. The folklore this week is the shieling, the àirigh, the summer town up on the high grazing. Every year from around Beltane, a large share of the women and girls of a township went up the hill with the cattle and stayed for six weeks to fourteen. They milked, made butter and cheese, and made a startling amount of the Gaelic song tradition while they were at it, because you don't get that volume of song out of people who are busy. Around this time of August they came back down, and the township turned out to meet them, and nobody debated whether she had been entitled to go, because the butter was walking down the hill in front of her. Then the part that might sting a little. Solitude and loneliness are separated by one thing, which is whether you chose it. And most capable women aren't short of time alone. They're short of chosen time alone. The commute, the lunch at your desk, the fifteen minutes between meetings, whatever falls between the phone calls. Those are gaps between duties that you were issued rather than picked, and the missing ingredient is the only one that does any work. And the Hermit, whose arm is up. He's holding that lantern out over the edge of the peak as a beacon for whoever is still climbing. It isn't lighting his feet at all. He didn't find it either. He made it up there on his own, which is the only reason it's small, and small turns out to be plenty. There's a practice at the end about picking your own shieling and putting it in the calendar the way the cows needed the grass. **This week's card:** the Hermit. He isn't lost, he's arrived, and the light in his hand is one he made. **Take the quiz** **You already know. So what are you waiting for?** There's something you've been circling. You can describe it accurately, and still it sits where it sat. That isn't indecision, it's a pattern, and it has an old shape. Nine questions will name yours and each result is a figure out of Scottish folklore. About three minutes, at sageinthesky.com. Answer as you are, not as you intend to be.