For a long time, I was more of a homeless nomad ...

 People say I am a hermit, but it isn’t really true in the strictest definition. My dictionary says a hermit is someone who lives alone (true in terms of people, untrue in terms of all the other living things I’m up here with), apart from the rest of society (mostly true, but not strictly so), and especially for religious reasons (depends on your definition of religion, I suppose, but it’s a bit of a stretch for me, I’d say).

I know what they really mean when they say I’m a hermit though, what with my scruffy “Wildman of the Woods” looks and apparent social isolation. I exist in the popular image of what you might think a hermit would look like and how a hermit would live. Probably, even how you imagine they’d talk, too.

I don’t mind being called a hermit, it makes me laugh, but am I really a hermit in the truest sense?

For a long time, I was more of a homeless nomad—“The Tramp of Treig” rather than “The Hermit of Treig.” A vagrant man who haunted the local mountain bothies and existed as legend in the visitors’ books that were kept in those isolated huts. Whisperings of this odd fellow written in pages sitting up on the shelf; the unofficial bothy history lying among the cobwebs, puddles of candle wax, empty gas cylinders, and all the other useless and unwanted crap that’s been left behind by generations of hikers.

It wasn’t till 1986, the year before my fortieth birthday, that I was finally granted permission to build this cabin in the woods. That was when I found my home, and my hermit identity evolved and grew arms and legs all on its own.

I don’t shun the outside world at all. I quite like most people and very much welcome the company of the few close friends and family who come here to stay and get away. Every few weeks I’ll hike out to the local shops for supplies, and get my post, too. I am no stranger to a pint or two at the pub either. It’s just that I prefer to meet people on my terms, or rather, I like to be in control of my own day; deferring only to what the weather wants to do or what the seasons have in store; how I feel, rather than bending to the wills and whims of other humanoids. If you can grant me that, then you can call me a hermit as much as you like and you’ll always be appreciated here, and that’s about it.

Well, it isn’t really. There are some obviously hermit-like behaviors in the way I choose to live. My log cabin in the woods has no clear pathway to its doorstep. It just emerges from the trees when you are only a few paces away from the gate. In fact, if you didn’t enter these woods already knowing I was hidden in here, you’d likely miss my place entirely; but again, none of that is because I don’t necessarily like people.

It is quite funny how incapable we are as a species of seeing anything from any other perspective than how it might directly relate to us. My decision to immerse myself in this place is not one based on pulling away from all of you, rather it is to give myself wholly to this wild space instead. To be a part of the nature here, not forever set apart from it in some sanitized domestic setting, with all its noise and problems.

I came here to find solace. A sanctuary of sorts. A deeper understanding of what this part of Scotland really is. Warts and all.

None of that means I’m necessarily armed with a higher wisdom or that I have developed some spiritual enlightenment or religious purpose—like that hermit fella from the dictionary definition. I don’t think I have a unique insight anyway, but I’ll let you decide that for yerself.

I may live alone, but I’m far from alone in the rich history of loners. The outsider, isolating themselves from the collective in some outlying place, is a consistent theme that stretches right back to the dawn of collective human civilization. For, as long as we have chosen to live together, there are always those who have chosen to live apart.

In ancient times, most populations would have had themselves a semi-professional hermit. Back then, they were celebrated as someone who sat outside of politics, corrupting influences and wider social ills. The hermit was the keeper of the stories, an important standard-bearer and comprehensive archivist of the history of a community. Most significant of all, they were taken as the ultimate barometer as to what was right and what was wrong. Their ability to live without reliance on anything, or anyone, meant they were the ultimate source of apolitical and acultural opinion. The only people truly on the moral high ground. In reality, their chosen lifestyle probably meant they struggled to give constructive advice on any social direction, anyway; as really, what’s the point of sparing any thought for all that rubbish if you’ve already seen how senseless it all is? I know that’s how I feel.

You don’t have to stick up a cabin in the woods and isolate yourself forever to feel the benefits of a little time alone. There are hundreds of thousands of religious scholars, thinkers, creatives and leaders who have headed to the wilderness part-time to form, reflect and refine their world views and ideas. In Christian belief, Jesus of Nazareth was said to have taken to the remote Jordanian desert for forty days and nights, as did Moses on Mount Sinai. Islamic tradition tells the story of the Prophet Muhammad receiving his first angelic revelation while living alone in a cave near Mecca, and Hinduism has seen millions of Sadhus, Hindu holy people, living a monastic existence, in a near-permanent state of prayer, whilst receiving trickles of well-wishers and worshippers.

Much art, science and literature has been produced by those people who chose to temporarily execute their ideas without interruption. Famous recluses, such as the scientist Charles Darwin, writer Emily Brontë, philanthropist Howard Hughes, director Stanley Kubrick, even the Beatles guitarist George Harrison, all found some form and presence through their occasional voluntary seclusion from society.

“Not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations,” American naturalist Henry Thoreau wrote back in the nineteenth century. Prophetic words, which might as well be inscribed into hermit law (if there were such a thing) because, honestly, there really is a little hermit waiting to be released out of us all (before they can promptly disappear for a while to figure it all out).

Protest at the direction of society is probably the biggest influence on the decision to go hermit full-time. A feeling that stretches from a general malaise, right through to a downright disgust, at wider mankind’s environmental destruction, our predilection for warfare, our generally regressive political directions and increasing disregard for others. All fair enough, I’d say, but in modern times I’m afraid its various manifestations have given the formerly good word of the hermit a very bad name indeed. More often than not, introversion and reclusion, the fundamental character traits of a hermit, have become closely associated with those who have a real visceral anger and forceful hostility towards humankind. I hear about them on my radio from time to time. People the news describe as “lone wolves.” These hate-filled fellas who get guns and knives and occasionally go out on these awful killing sprees.

This is absolutely not the way of the hermit, and is a dreadful smear on all those who prefer the quiet life—all introverts, as well as hermits and recluses. This violent phenomenon has taken the former idea that we are gentle, and gently enlightened people, quietly and peacefully engaged in seclusive thought, and then bastardized it as simply time for us to manifest our menace. According to that typecast, some of us are at best weirdos, and at worst potentially dangerous criminals. Today public opinion and press speculation too often paints the hermit, in all their guises, as someone who should be feared and avoided; no longer a person to venerate, and certainly not someone to emulate.

I hope this book helps undo some of the damage because, in truth, both the positions—either that we have some special mystical power or prowess, or that we pose a threat—fall well wide of the mark. It might be tempting to put us all in one convenient box, but ultimately I am afraid we are all individuals, with our own individual thoughts, feelings, and reasons for living as we do. Speaking for myself, I certainly don’t believe I’m particularly special. I’m not armed with some higher knowledge or a greater sense of purpose, nor do I possess a highly evolved set of survival skills, or harbor superhuman abilities to hang tough in terrible conditions. I am just Ken Smith, a man who prefers to do things his own way.

I hope in your reading, you might see some parts of this life that you may wish to adapt or adopt into your own. The freedom of a grand horizon, the taste of something gratefully and sensitively taken from the wild, the liberation to be had from discovering that not everything that is good has to cost you money.

I don’t want you to ever think that my way of life is unattainable and unique to me. It certainly isn’t, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with you seeking the metaphorical or physical wilderness every once in a while for yourself, too. If I can do it, you can do it. After all, as I’ve already said, people like me have existed within every culture on earth. We are just as much a part of human history as we are fundamental expressions of the human condition. We are not an oddity or curiosity that somehow sits enigmatically and inexplicably outside normal human society. We are as much a part of you, as you are of us.

Argh, maybe this beer is going to my head after all (and I can’t even sober up now that the bloody shrew has stolen my last Jaffa cake!), so let me finish on this, and then I’m letting the fire die out and climbing into my bed.

I’ve spent the majority of my life living outside the conventions of mainstream society, and I’ll tell you what I think is weird, and it ain’t the hermit. It’s how entire generations of people have been conned into believing that there is only one way to live, and that’s on-grid, in deepening debt, working on products you’ll probably never use, to line the pockets of people you’ll never meet, just so you might be able to get enough money together to buy a load of crap you don’t need, or, if you’re lucky, have a holiday that takes you to a place, like where I live, for a week of the happiness I feel every day. And then they have the bloody cheek to guilt you into somehow being grateful for it?

No. I’m pretty certain I’m not the weird one, and yet here we are, my friends. Let’s be honest, you didn’t buy this book just because you were curious about me, did you? You’re here because that small part of you, the hermit that sits within us all, wants to know if there is something more, and if it can be done.

Well, it can.

THE WAY OFvTHE HERMIT

MY INCREDIBLE 40 YEARSvLIVING IN THE WILDERNESS

KEN SMITH