Contemplate the deep poverties and profound possibilities of our time and re-establish the grief and love soaked ties to life, home and village. This is a two-year project of personal ancestral learning and cultural redemption for those who intend to leave a better day for those to come. It is a school that requires no previous experience with living people, dying people or dead people – though you do have experience with all of them – and no particular employment, religion, educational standard or way of life. It is open to every shape, persuasion, style, language and hue of person with a heart inclined for opening and learning. Each of us deserve the chance to learn something deep, alive, human, urgent and mandatory. This is at the heart of the Orphan Wisdom School. http://www.hollyhock.ca/cms/Orphan-Wisdom-School.html
Stephen Jenkinson, MTS, MSW, is a spiritual activist, teacher, author and subject of the NFB film Griefwalker.
TUITION: $585 CDN (meals & accommodation extra) / 4 nights at Hollyhock, Cortes Island, B.C., Canada
(Fall 2012, Spring and Fall 2013 and Spring 2014).
Meals and accommodation for this program are offered at 50% off regular rates and vary depending on room. Meals will feature a light breakfast (boiled eggs, porridge), lunch (soup, bread and salad) and dinner (stew or light entire’/main dish, vegetable side, condiment and salad). Desserts are not included in this meal plan. Morning yoga and nature walks are not part of Hollyhock programming during this time.
Due to the resources required for delivering this program, Multiple Workshop Discounts are not available.
“Getting older is inevitable, becoming an elder is a skill” Stephen Jenkinson
There is a long and jaunty list of admirable wrinkles, optimisms of all kinds, proud extolling of deep and cantankerous ancestries, and an uncommon willingness to go the full route which our present nervy and agile scholars, who in their faithful twice a year migration here to the shores of the Bonnechere River over the last few years have really called the Orphan Wisdom School out from the hesitant shadows of a mostly graceless and unpromising time such as our own and into the blaze and real ardour of what our time might still become, carry admirably and well, all blessings on their roads. But the unaccountable and old time grace of how they have set aside standard workshop expectations, rehabilitation requirements, home life impossibilities and fix-me-so-it-feels-better demands and entitlements for the sake of conjuring useful, antique details and learning unwelcome things about what they know would melt the hardest heart and revive the most collapsed of imaginations, and here and there they’ve done so.
Perhaps it is because this last oil spill has lapped up on the shores of this big island we live on, finally and irredeemably, or it is because there is water where there should be heat this summer, or because the divorces aren’t working out better than the marriages are, or because some have their noses in the wind, facing where their people should have been, with a feel of what the coming days will bring to them; whatever the purpose and reason for this mysterious thing, against all the odds and the fashion of the times enough scholars of sorrow have found their way to us that the Orphan Wisdom School’s first Master Class in the Care of Dying People is full. More mysteriously, the news of this seems not to have deterred many, so that there has appeared something like a waiting list for a second Master Class. This willingness to wait for such a thing has melted the kind of judgement that allows only one thing at a time to be done, and so we will not ask those with such a willingness to wait much. We will launch out into the tidal sway of life a new little boat of good intent and sweeping spiritual activism that will be a new harangue and meditation on the mandatory and crucial skills of deep living unto death.
It must be admitted that in the early days when we first dreamed of a college of the courtly and those agile of heart who might one day quit their homeless, uncertain and solitary fear for the future and take on the offer of gathering themselves up into a more antique kind of anti-school (if ‘school’ is only what happened when in your younger days you were obliged to trade in wonder for grey rules and your soul’s poetry for a real job), to learn in such a way that their lives might begin growing a real village-making skill, together, we did not really imagine that anyone would come to the cedar skirted red ger that is our little teaching house in the Ottawa Valley sitting proudly in a field beside the great river of abundance and time called La Bonnechere. Nor did we want to admit that we imagined and hoped for a group of high spirited lovers of the ancient and now scarce art of patience and persistence when facing something entirely new and worthy of learning, but imagine and hope for it we did.
