Orphan Wisdom: Stephen Jenkinson’s writing and teaching work.
Stephen is a teacher, author, storyteller, spiritual activist, ceremonialist 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 a redemptive project that comes from where we come from. It is rooted in knowing history, being claimed by ancestry, working for a time we may not see. Read more about Orphan Wisdom and Stephen Jenkinson…
Village Making
Loneliness is not the reason to start a village. Being together does not extinguish the longing nor does it feed the desire to have your loneliness end. Your willingness to live as though you or the village may not live to see another day is the labour. The labour of village making doesn’t extinguish your longing. It’s the throne for your longing to sit upon. Read more about Stephen’s Village Making teachings…
Care of the Dying
A good dying is nothing less than cultural subversion. Advocating for, providing for, pursuing good dying for ourselves and for those we love is a political and a spiritual project. It is an act of love and of revolution. Knowing death well and being useful when it comes is a redemptive thing. It is a debt that we owe to those generations we will not live to see. Read more about Stephen’s The Care for the Dying teachings…
Hand Made Life
Humans aren’t beauty eaters, they are beauty makers. Creation longs to be seen, through the singing and response, or the gesture that you make, or your willingness to dress in your finest so that there’s no such thing as work clothes anymore. Rather than your gifts, call them capacities to make beauty. They are food for the world that gives you life. Read more about Stephen’s A Hand Made Life teachings…
The Meaning of Death
Many among us now are crazy for meanings, and crazed by seeking them out. The meanings of life aren’t inherited. What is inherited is the mandate to make meanings of life by how we live. The endings of life give life’s meanings a chance to show. The beginning of the end of our order, our way, is now in view. This isn’t punishment, any more than dying is a punishment for being born. Read more…
The Haiku Sessions
This three day teaching is part wonder, part battle cry and part strategy for the beginnings of a deeply wrought human life which makes peace with the ravaged world, finds a home along the old abandoned road, and honours the grief soaked longing for those things and those people we thought we lost. This is what generations to come deserve from us, this labour, and it might yet fashion from us a generation of ancestors worth coming from. Read more…
Griefwalker
Griefwalker is a National Film Board of Canada feature documentary film, directed by Tim Wilson. It is a lyrical, poetic portrait of Stephen Jenkinson’s work with dying people. Griefwalker shows Jenkinson in teaching sessions with doctors and nurses, in counselling sessions with dying people and their families, and in meditative and often frank exchanges with the film’s director. Read more…
The Haiku Sessions 
Money and the Soul’s Desires: A Meditation 
Angel and Executioner: Grief and the Love of Life 
Griefwalker and How it All Could Be (Combination DVD and Book) 
