The Way of the Hermit: My 40 years in the Scottish wilderness

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Seventy-four-year-old Ken Smith has spent the past four decades in the Scottish Highlands. He lives alone, with no electricity or running water. His home is a log cabin nestled near Loch Treig, known as ‘the lonely loch’, where he lives off the land: he fishes for his supper, chops his own wood, and even brews his own tipple. He is, in the truest sense of the word, a hermit… The Way of the Hermitis a humourous, transcendant and life-affirming memoir.” PanMacmillan David: OK. “The evil is wide-spread and universal. No man, no woman, no household, is sacred or safe from this new Inquisition. No act is so pure or so praiseworthy, that the unscrupulous vender of lies who lives by pandering to a corrupt and morbid public appetite will not proclaim it as a crime…. Journalism pries into the interior of private houses, gloats over the details of domestic tragedies of sin and shame, and deliberately invents and industriously circulates the most unmitigated and baseless falsehoods.” Gene: Well, the Lecture starts off by saying “You are especially charged in this Degree to be modest and humble, not vain-glorious nor filled with self-conceit. Be not wiser in your own opinion than the Deity, nor find fault with His works, nor endeavor to improve upon what He has done. Be modest also in your intercourse with your fellows, and slow to entertain evil thoughts of them, and reluctant to ascribe to them evil intentions.”

Will writes with flawless charm, light humour and gentle authority – A major talent and the best writer of this type since I first discovered Bill Bryson” Heat Magazine David: That makes sense for a time before electricity, but there’s also lore about the day of the full moon being significant energetically. If you hanker for peace in all of its forms, do read this inspiring book with gorgeous wilderness descriptions and compelling anecdotes. Will Millard] writes with a genuine sense of humility (…) humour and reflection’ Kevin Parr, Countryfile

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The lives and hopes of all human beings are very similar as the Dalai Lama would reiterate. Thus, I have found a deep communion and friendship with others who seek the Absolute in India and Chile. Particularly in India I have met over the years Buddhist monks, Hindu Sadhus and Sikh scholars with whom we have shared not intellectual thoughts but our very souls, eating together, chanting, and laughing about the joys of being together. I must confess that I have found that many people who live a religious commitment tend to be sad, I do not understand that. On returning to see others at the Golden Temple or in the bathing areas of Varanasi I have always found a warm hand and a ready smile. God has given us a journey and it is great to do it with others even when in silence. Gene: Which leads to my last quote in this section which says - “Nor let him have any alliance with those theorists who… are wiser than Heaven; (and) know the aims and purposes of the Deity, and can see a short and more direct means of attaining them, than it pleases Him to employ: who would have no discords in the great harmony of the Universe… but equal distribution of property, no subjection of one man to the will of another, no compulsory labor, and still no starvation, nor destitution, nor pauperism.” In this heartfelt and personal account, Professor Aguilar takes the reader on a journey into the practice and ideas of the hermit across traditions and his or her understanding of life as a journey to a fulfillment in a higher reality. This is an engaging and highly readable account.

Drawing on his experience of travelling to some of India’s holy places, the life and work of writers like Thomas Merton, Charles de Foucauld and Abishaktanda and being himself a Benedictine hermit and Professor of Divinity at the University of St Andrews, Mario Aguilar opens up new possibilities for dialogue between three of the world’s major religions in today’s world. He shows how his own experience of an eremitic life has brought him into deep communion with pilgrims of other faiths, be it through shared silence or listening to each other’s experience, through reading sacred scriptures together, through poetry or interfaith worship that draws on practices and texts from Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity. Could you leave behind the bustle of modern society and spend your days immersed in nature? In The Way of the Hermit, seventy-four-year-old Ken Smith recounts a life he has chosen to spend alone with the wilderness. Ken Smith has spent the past four decades in the Scottish Highlands. He lives alone, with no electricity or running water. His home is a log cabin nestled near Loch Treig, known as 'the lonely loch', where he lives off the land: he fishes for his supper, chops his own wood, and even brews his own tipple. He is, in the truest sense of the word, a hermit. David: That’s right Sean. Monotheism is the formula being put forward. It says “Let him steer away from all those vain philosophies, which endeavor to account for all that is, without admitting that there is a God, separate and apart from the Universe which is his work: which erect Universal Nature into a God, and worship it alone: which annihilate Spirit, and believe no testimony except that of the bodily senses: which, by logical formulas and dextrous collocation of words, make the actual, living, guiding, and protecting God fade into the dim mistiness of a mere abstraction and unreality, itself a mere logical formula.”

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The writing is sharp and clever (…) I loved all of it and would as happily read it again as I would sit beside the river waiting for the evening rise of trout to begin’ Tom Fort, Literary Review David: Ooh… yeah. I’m sure it does denote that. The thing I noticed about both forms of the Jewel was that they both show representations of right triangles, with the shape formed by the arm and sword. and the two right triangles formed by the arrow bisecting the triangle in the second form of the Jewel.