Conversations With A Hermit

Rachel Denton’s life is a purposeful routine of seclusion, contemplation and self-restraint.

dan brotzel
Human Parts
9 min readJan 22, 2025
Photo by Chris Buckwald on Unsplash

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…

Create an account to read the full story.

The author made this story available to Medium members only.
If you’re new to Medium, create a new account to read this story on us.

Or, continue in mobile web

Already have an account? Sign in

Human Parts
Human Parts
dan brotzel
dan brotzel

Written by dan brotzel

Funny-sad author of Thank You For The Days; order at amzn.to/40yOfXr | The Wolf in the Woods, Hotel du Jack, Work in Progress

Responses (8)

What are your thoughts?