Up: [[Hestia]] Created: 2023-09-10 Updated: 2024-12-26 Hestia was the first of Cronus’s children to be swallowed and the last to be rescued. See [[Hestia’s Mythology]]. She was the only of her siblings who spent time in the darkness alone. She asked to remain one-in-herself, never partnering. And then she remained alone in the house of the gods, tending the eternal fire. All of this speaks to Hestia having an introverted temperament, being centred on her inner spiritual world, and a love of solitude. Hestia is grounded and self-contained. She doesn’t lose her centre by pleasing others in order to be accepted. She has [[The Courage to Be Disliked]] She is stabilizing and foundational because she isn’t caught up in erotic life. She walks her own path. Jean Shinoda Bolen, in *Goddesses in Older Women*, says she is the archetype of the meditative woman. There’s one more reason I find Hestia’s solitude so appealing. As Louise Bourgeois says, it feeds art making! > [!Orbit] Louise Bourgeois > Our capacity for what psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has termed ‘fertile solitude’ is absolutely essential not only for our creativity but for the basic fabric of our happiness — without time and space unburdened from external input and social strain, we’d be unable to fully inhabit our interior life, which is the raw material of all art.