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Conversations With A Hermit
Rachel Denton’s life is a purposeful routine of seclusion, contemplation and self-restraint.
When Rachel Denton developed cancer in 2015, she was advised to create a bucket list. Her list had one item on it — to live as a hermit, something she’d already been doing since 2002. This puts me in mind of that saying I’ve often heard but only recent learnt are attributed to Rabbi Hyman Schachtel: ‘Happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have.’
In 2006, Rachel made a formal lifelong commitment to live out her days in ‘simplicity, solitude and silence’. For the first 20 years her hermitage was a little cottage in a Lincolnshire, UK village, but ‘my health got a bit dodgy [she has had non-Hodgkins lymphoma] so I need to be near the hospitals now.’ She now lives in Sheffield, England.
Rachel ran an online calligraphy business selling greeting cards that she illuminated by hand (fabulously on-brand for a religious hermit) but has now had to scale back from work. ‘I can’t design but I can still print out.’ Proceeds from the cards, still available from her website, go to a local food bank.
But then as now, her life is a purposeful routine of contemplation and self-restraint. She spends time in silence, she reads scripture and devotional works, she meditates, she leads online pilgrimages. She gets on with the business of living — medicines, groceries, sorting her Clubcard points. She shares her life with Mr Bingley, a Chihuaha cross. She has the internet but no TV. She likes to listen to The Archers and will drink an occasional glass of shandy.
How is her health now? ‘It’s up and down. It’s manageable. One of the odd things is that it suits this way of life. It’s like that whole mindfulness thing, which everybody’s doing these days. Being unwell or finding things a bit difficult means you can’t but be mindful; you don’t have a choice really. Like a lot of people who have to deal with physical impairments, things do take a lot more time. If I was a mother with three kids running around, then this would be a nightmare. But actually it doesn’t hamper being a hermit in any way.’
Rachel is quite a media-friendly sort of hermit, in that she is open to interview requests, has a modest…
