The Last Hermit | Brian Castellani

Tim O’brien paints a captivating painting about the importance solitude, experiencing your own path and understanding your own relationship to nature.  Being a hermit is something that every person goes through.

It doesn’t matter if you have friends, lovers, partners or any other type of relationship… at some point you will feel disenfranchised, disillusioned and most likely despondent.

The Last Hermit to me is about choosing to be a recluse.

They can be described in the following terms: recluse, solitary, loner, ascetic, marabout, troglodyte

My definition of the last Hermit is allowing the importance of natural solitude  to evolve and experiencing your own relationship to nature.  You are not necessarily a hermit just because you’re a person living with a devout discipline of solitude.

If a person is a hermit in the adjectival form of the word (hermitic), they are a person who lives in seclusion, away from society.

Sometimes I feel that way naturally, even around people.  Maybe we all do. People could enjoy the time by themselves, without feeling guilty.  Life is not meant to be torturous.

Common reasons for becoming a hermit are often linked to things occuring in a persons life.  When I get agitated, or full of anxiety over events or things happening in my life, I automatically want to be alone.  These incorrectly seem like something a person can control, but the fact of the matter is that dramatic life changes manifest in many different ways:

eating, sleeping, extreme day to day fatigue, feeling completely worthless, helpless to change anything about your current situation, displaying an inability to concentrate, make significant decisions, think clearly, an unsurmountable lack of interest in activities, extreme weight loss or weight gain and/or thoughts of death or suicide.

People are human beings.