As fluidly as water, Stephen Jenkinson uses the English language to disrupt clinging and confusion, and to make the ancient in us sit up, wide-eared and listen deeply. Part of his magic is in illuminating where we have come from by masterfully tracing language down dark burrows to ancient roots. He teaches for example, that etymologically, to be awake is to be gathered into the web of consequence. Where, “A” is an old English root for locating, as in “at,” or “of,” or “with.” And a wake is not only a ceremony to honor the dead, but also what precedes and extends out after you as you move through water. Thus, to be awake, is to recognize the consequences of the movement of your being. We are living through a time when there are more people, more creatures, more plants, more cultures, dying than ever before. Where we are forced to recognize that growth untethered to consequence is like cancer. The debts of generations past have accrued to us, but not the wisdom. Our inheritance of obligation, of reciprocity, has been broken and we are left with what is dying, but without any understanding of how to be with it. 

We are approaching now the reckoning of the human endeavor to outgrow our limits. It is in the nature of addiction to prescribe a solution for the addiction, Stephen says, which includes continuing to use. We are deeply addicted to the thing that got us here: a stratagem for relief. And what is it really that brought us to hunger, at almost any cost, for such relief? One of Stephen’s answers is the loss of elderhood. Elderhood is a consequence of life’s limits, following one of the original permaculture principles, that limits create abundance.

Longing can be seen as one of the manifestations of our ancestry. A consequence of the abandonment perpetrated by the dominant culture, is that we’ve lost all sense of connectivity to a time before us but we are left with the longing for home that comes from our ancestry calling to us, whether or not we are able to hear it singing.

Stephen Jenkinson, MTS, MSW, is a teacher, author, storyteller, spiritual activist, farmer and founder of the Orphan Wisdom School, a teaching house and learning house for the skills of deep living and making human culture. It is rooted in knowing history, being claimed by ancestry, working for a time yet to come. Stephen is a Harvard Educated Theologian and Author of Money and the Soul’s Desires, How It All Could Be: A Workbook for Dying People and Those Who Love Them, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul, and Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble. Stephen is also the subject of the National Film Board of Canada feature length film documentary, Griefwalker. Learn more on his website at https://orphanwisdom.com.

♫ The music featured in this episode is "I See the White" and "Awakening Baby” by Jess Williamson.