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Hermaic Encouragement

Once, while making an offering to the god Hermēs early on in the pandemic, I got a whisper of insight:

Weep not at the times or their affliction, break not your hearts open by beating them out of lamentation. Cries disturb the silence, and in silence will you best be guided. Do not fear what comes, because it will not come to you—it is you who will go to it.

There's a reason why grief and sorrow is the tormentor of the sphere of Mercury from book XIII of the Corpus Hermeticum: it makes us fearful of what may come, and the lack of what we feel broken without causes us to beg, borrow, and steal what is not rightly ours to have—or otherwise, we wouldn't have lacked it at all. Grief and sorrow stifles curiosity and wonder, and it's this that best spurs us along our Way. Daring and courage is nice, but it's the fundamental need to Know that underlies even that. But there's a proper way to go about it, too, and fearfully cheating the system isn't it.

The show must go on, and there are such sights for us to see, such wonders for us to witness. Do not let self-sorrow or fearful grief machinating wickedness chain you to a place that has no place for you. The Work beckons, and the Work is the Way. Go on your Way, come what may.