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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…
