Photo: Ian Mackenzie

Which is to say that food is the mother of our school, in every way that can be meant, and the few of us that run the place are servant priest cooks, and those who come to learn are patrons of the old mystery religions of the hearth. That is a lot of heritage to burden our rickety enterprise with, but that is the truth of the thing. At the hearth, all manner of attention and devotion is given to the direction the broth is stirred, and with what spoon (there are left and right handed spoons), to the sequence of cool and warm additions to the slurry, dry and moistened. There are chalices of vitrified micaceous clay (that is what the cooking pots become), squatty ones, fulsome ones, statuesque ones, each of them resembling faithfully the soon to be full bellies that await them and the working bellies of the scullery royalty whose hands do the conjuring. These pots are handled gently, warmed before use and after cleaning, soothed into rest between meals. Stone mortars and metates each have a place of honour in the kitchen. To one side is a shrine, wherein live all the spirits of the place, overseeing the work, blessing the plates.

Which brings us to the food. When we began the school we knew it had to be planted deeply in it’s place. I myself had years of being parachuted into homeless, generic conference centres and retreat halls behind me, and I knew that the school would only live as a home for learning the mandatory human arts of living deeply and dying well if we made a home for it by employing those same mandatory arts. This meant knowing all we could about the food we were to serve those who were to labour so devotedly to learn. Learning is always learning unwelcome things about what you know, and the travail in learning about your food in our day and age is epic, truly. As many of you probably suspect, there are considerable barriers standing in the way of finding out about the food that keeps you alive, and the food that might be compromising your life. After seeing that struggle to get underneath the machinery of the food service industry for what it was, we knew that we had to grow the food to feed the people.

And so we began to farm. Which meant, as I’ve written here before, we had to grow dirt from sand and soil sanity from the chemical enterprise that farming has largely become in North America. It meant fences, furrows, broken tools. Without a tractor, a pump, electricity or running water, we were running an Iron Age operation. We had to enter into holy negotiations with the creek that roars down the mountain behind our place in spring and threatens to disappear into the ground by mid summer, in hopes that we could take some of that snow melt and beaver swill as the summer wore on and the rains tapered off. Each year our spring and our fall included a gathering of Orphan Wisdom scholars into the precinct of our fields for ceremonies of opening and closing, pleading and thanking, taking and offering. And we gathered, bought and traded for seeds and weaned animals.

All of this delivered us, as it would deliver you, to the irreducible, unnerving and mandatory altar of who plants and animals, seeds and soil are to us, and who we are to them.

I live and work in a culture where food is fuel. Pleasant fuel or not, tasty fuel or not, satisfying fuel or not, but fuel nonetheless. It is there to get us to the next monthly payment, the next appointment, the next day. It’s purpose in the world is to propel us through the world. When food becomes fuel – when anything becomes fuel – we lose sight of whatever once tethered it to the ground that gave it life, and we proceed as if it were in the world because our way of life requires it, as if it is an extension of us, part of the great need gratification engine that serves our relentless presence in the world. It becomes a homeless gorm of potential that carries cost but not indebtedness. Whenever we turn something into fuel, we make another slave in the world.

It will take a mighty and unlikely turn in our every habit for food to reacquire the old alchemical and hierophanic power that once bound your ancestors and mine to the land they lived upon and to the deepening mysteries that gave that land life. In those times and places food was medicine. That means that all sources of food were known to be doctors to life. Not slaves of the living, but doctors to life, and they were courted, cared for, fed, recompensed and prayed over accordingly. Once, food was known to be the elder, wiser brother and sister of those who gathered and grew and prepared and ate it. That means that plants, and the animals who fed upon them, were all the proof anyone ever needed of Gods in the world. The plant medicine people still alive and working today are a thin thread of practice wisdom and dedication which make the understanding of that older time a reliable, if remote, possibility for us still. This devotional wisdom is what is at risk in the ruthless global machinations of Big Pharma and Big Agra to replicate and synthesize forest and jungle medicine.

So for the last five years we’ve stood at the crossroads that people probably first stood at in the late Bronze Age or early Iron Age in Mesopotamia, China and Mesoamerica. Is it possible to grow plants and animals, kill them and eat them, propagate them, without enslaving them? Has it ever been possible?

Our way of cooking, feeding, farming and teaching the school is how we try to answer the question. The priesthood of farming, as Martin Prechtel has called it, is practiced and achieved by knowing, admitting to and trying to pay the inescapable debt incurred by farming, owed directly to the plants and animals, seeds and soil which together make the farm, and to Those which give life to seeds and soil … and by failing to bring the debt to zero. Ever. You cannot break even. There is a lot of grief in this way of farming, I assure you. But you cannot as a farmer buy your freedom from the spiritual debt of that enterprise by enslaving animals and plants and making them pay their way. Your debt accrues crushing interest in that enterprise, and that is exacted from your soul’s life.

So ours is a small mixed farm, which might be a part of the answer to the question. We don’t grow too much of anything, nor raise too much of anything. We rotate animals through pastures, plant in their wake, grow some of the food they will eat in winter, feed their aged dung to the plants, one eye on the sky and the other on the calendar, and from that endeavour feed the scholars and ourselves, and neighbours. The animals are fed organically and all the rest, but that doesn’t bring any human alertness to bear on the debt we owe to what gives us life. People concerned with food safety are generally mollified by the word ‘organic’ on the label. I am talking here about bringing honour to our deal with plants and animals; I’m not talking about food insurance for humans. This concern with food safety ushers us into a hall of barbershop mirrors, where every concern we get resolved brings another, more systemic concern forward, requiring another agri-solution, and so on without end: the system that enslaved the plants and animals sealing the moral fissures with more robust application of the enslavement system. ‘Organic’ likely has as much animal and plant indenturedness incurred as whatever it was intended to replace.

I don’t say that we’ve sorted any of this out; I say that we’re trying, every day, from the field to the plate and back again. It seems that what surrounds us here has some inkling of our effort. We’re not rewarded so much as we’re tolerated. So far, the plants and the animals have agreed to mate and bear their young close to our door, which might be their part of this deal we seem to have entered, a sign of some kind of fledgeling good faith on their part, a willingness to proceed towards a holy and honourable partnership with us despite the odds that civilized history demonstrates are against it all.

Early this spring, after some warm weather, the temperature plummeted again to -12C and lower, and these, as foretold by a farmer friend of ours, would be the nights (not the days) when the ewes would give birth. Up until those frigid nights the sheep kept well away from us, tolerating our presence during feeding time and otherwise bolting if we stood in one place in their pasture too long. But during those long nights, while emerald crystals hung in a cold black sky, our dogs assumed an uncommon calm and stood guard at the pasture gate, and the ewes seemed to give in to our intent to help the birthing. There was no skittishness. Nathalie rearranged those not yet born lambs that needed hooves pointed or legs straightened or heads pulled through. All the lambs lived, all the mothers lived. For two weeks or more, whenever we moved we could smell the ambrosial amniotic funk rise up from our clothes. It was in our pores, our noses, in the straw of the birthing stalls, everywhere, and it brought instant memories of those cold, holy nights.

It strikes me now that this was a kind of incense sparked by the Gods, a sign of recognition that we appeared willing to uncertainly, faithfully and at least this spring keep up our end of this riotous, grief soaked endeavour called caring for living things in the name of life. Life is fed by death, the world over, and animals and plants do die on our farm. Death is fed by noble, indebted treatment of what gives life, not by making sure that nobody dies. That scent of life, spilled over us and over a little corner of our farm, is a gift to those who keep the farm going day in and day out, and a bit of it hovers over the cooking pots of The Orphan Wisdom hearth. This is where the nourishment, the real medicine, is made.

Photo: Christopher Roy

Lately I’ve been remembering the early 1980′s. Not the music. The shit storms that were blowing in central America, in central Europe, the ardent, obscene larceny they called NAFTA that was being conjured in Washington and Ottawa and Mexico City. I recall those good people of conscience with their nose in the wind – some of them – were beginning to bury their hopes in the backyard bomb shelters. In my little corner of the world I returned home in the midst of a recession of sorts and work was hard to find. I took a stint teaching in an ESL school, with a room full of kids from Guatemala, El Salvador and Chiapas. Ostensibly they were having their finishing year abroad, but really their parents had purchased for them a year of lonely safety from the terrible machinations of the right and the left, to keep them from the armies, the militias and the guerrillas.

The class had kids who the year before had flirted with guns in the countryside, with pamphlet writing and street demonstrations, with liberation theology and death squads back home. They were tormented by wanting to be with their families and by being grateful they didn’t have to be. Most of them weren’t nearly as politicized as they were scared. As kids do, they were trying on opinions and stances the way they’d do jeans in a clothing store, but the gravity of the scene at home strung out into the current of their days an undertow of guilt and urgency, and it made them unrecognizably substantial and too adult in the eyes of the Canadian kids they’d see on the street or in the bus. What was happening at home was so close to the bone, so painful to consider, that we rarely talked about it in class. They would lapse into unresponsiveness. There was just too much fear and loneliness, too much haunted uncertainty. Finding the words was hard enough in their mother tongue; it was impossible in the language they were learning.

And so we ended up talking about what was happening during those very same days in Poland. None of us knew anything about Poland, but the struggles in Gdansk and elsewhere and the marital law and goon squad street justice were in the news every day. The great gift of those struggles for my class was that they gave the kids a surrogate language to talk about their own lives, their fears for their future and the future of their towns and cities, their uncertain, drifting allegiances. In the early days Solidarity seemed like a doomed fantasy, and we waited for the Russians to plow that wild, unlikely flower under. But those tense months went on, and Solidarity began to look a little more like courage instead, like how it all could be. It carried with it a whisper about what was possible if enough people at the same time outgrew their bitter depression and defeat and decided, probably with nothing to lose, to act. Solidarity was contagious, at least in that classroom, and the kids would come to school daily with things they’d learned from the newspapers about what was happening in Poland. They were for a year displaced and homeless, but they still wanted to learn. So they learned someone else’s struggles and dreams, someone else’s enemies and allies, in someone else’s language, until they could learn their own.

Things went as they went for Poland, for Central America and for me, and by routes circuitous and unlikely this winter, thirty years later, I was in Poland for the first time, in the Krakov airport, heading towards two days of teaching. It was to be the first time I would try to plant my work in another language, a language I didn’t know five words of, and I was very unsure that we could manage anything of merit or use. There were a few stones in the road early on: the airport security guy asked me where my gun was, and things were strange and tense for a while; we passed a farm wall that had white supremacist rants spray painted along it’s thirty yard length; there was clearly a lot of borderline poverty in the countryside; almost half of the homes in Krakov burn coal to stay warm, and the air can be acrid and harsh. Our hosts had the heartaches that come from having kids and from not having them, from being young in a deeply uncertain time, from trying to make marriages and businesses work. They also had a canny alertness to what was happening in the world far from their borders, and with it a savvy willingness to try impossible things. My appearance there was once such impossible thing. The event took place on one of those European riverine freighters that seems a mile long and ten feet wide, but this one was tricked out beautifully as a teak and brass conference hall and restaurant, moored on the Vistula River. When the night came for the screening of Griefwalker in a language that was no one’s mother tongue, the place was packed. People came from all over the country, they told me. At the workshop the next day the same the place was packed again.

The organizers had hired a translator. She was nervous, capable and devoted. We conjured together that evening and all the next day a kind of syntactical dance, and it was marvelous. The people were curious, respectful and attentive. A good number of them chirped alternative translations of my opaque visions. When we came to the day’s end, the formal thanksgiving and farewells lasted a courtly and graceful forty five minutes. Very old world manners abounded. I received very fine applause. The organizers were abundantly lauded. But here is what I will never forget: the translator got a standing ovation, as was proper.

The people appreciated and honoured us for having come a long way to be with them. What was stirring and heart breaking, though, was the enormous regard and respect they had for the opportunity afforded them to hear something new, something from afar, and the veneration they had for learning, and for those who made it possible. Many of those people were of the generation that filled the streets for Solidarity and dared the Russians and their own secret police; the rest of them were the children of that generation. The early 1980′s were lived memories for them. The dreams for Solidarity were dangerous dreams in those days. There must be some real heart ache that many of them have not quite come true in the time since then. And still the peoples’ thirst for learning, and their respect for the chance of being taught, endures.

I have worked in many places across the English speaking world and beyond, and I’ve seen no equal to that thirst and that respect. It’s probably out there – I continue to travel as much as I do because I’m sure it’s out there – but I’m fairly sure it is uncommon. The irony is that teaching events abound in the English speaking world, minus that thirst and respect. Most of them are rootless, homeless, hovering in conference centres and retreats, belonging to nowhere, dedicated mainly to self improvement. Learning seems to be held in the same esteem now that food is: being so common it is more like a consumer good, more like fuel than medicine, tolerated when it is fast, sweetened and easy to process, and generally dismissed when it isn’t. A large crowd of North Americans attending an event given by an unknown teacher without any advance press or PR, in a foreign language, who doesn’t promise inevitable and instant personal transformation: that is an unlikely scene.

Teachers seem to have become more customer satisfaction engineers than living treasures. Teaching is trancing when it loses it’s ability to radicalize, and ‘radicalize’ means etymologically to draw one to the root of things. I hear that university teachers are now evaluated by their students, and that this determines a lot of job security. These days teachers – the radicalizers, at least – are paying, dearly, for being held to the artifice of conjuring novelty and schematizing wisdom. The day will surely come, if it hasn’t already, when the consequences will be more democratically disbursed.

I didn’t stay in touch with any of the Central American kids, but to this day their kinship with the Polish people I met thirty years later, unexpected as it was, is clear to me: it is forged by mayhem, and by a clear and present danger to the human ability for disciplined, purposeful wonder. Perhaps it took the predations and privations of the communists foreign and native, and before them the nazis and their collaborators, and before them the Austro-Hungarian imperialists, and before them I don’t know what, for the Poles of the present moment, at least the ones I was privileged to meet, to learn and relearn and remember and treasure the great privilege of learning. I haven’t given up on the outside chance that it might take something less catastrophic for our corner of this world to begin doing the same. What has been our increasing poverty during the course of my life time can one day again become our riches. All that is needed is a living, practiced understanding that the willingness not to know and the willingness to learn and to have real teachers in our midst – they are what conjure the teachers in our midst.

All blessings and praises upon the translators, and the great rememberers, and those who gather to hear them remember.

Stephen Jenkinson

Photo Credit: Ian MacKenzie

The internet churns out so much frame by frame disposable eternity that anybody from anywhere can loom up out of the mist to claim a little of your attention, at any time. Play your cards right and one day you could be that anybody, looming. And then what you said or did will be a stand in for you.

The most challenging part of the whole thing for me is that what ended up in the film Griefwalker stands in many viewers’ minds as my final word on a few subjects. People imagine that I planted my feet firmly, smoothed my hair for the eternal close-up (or should have), and then crafted an elegy for the ages. More often what ended up in the film is something I thought was important on a certain Tuesday in late fall, paddling along a river in my early fifties, an hour before dusk.

But maybe that’s the way it is always: there are only ever particular afternoons, particular rivers, particular moments in the great arc of your days, particular things that came to you to say, and you didn’t stop saying them. You were wondering, that’s all, and you’ve had some practice at it by now, and it shows. And maybe that qualifies you for the documentary treatment. Someone thinks that what you said bears some scrutiny, and is worth repeating, and what you wondered goes out tottering on spindly legs into the world. Then you get emails from Burma and Belfast letting you know that someone else agreed, or didn’t, or could have said it better, or decided to live another day because of what you said one Tuesday in late fall, or because you carried on too. There’s a lot of companionship in going on, unexpected companionship. People often recognize that.

I was surprised a few months ago when I got an unexpected invitation to teach at an Anishnabeg reserve in northern Ontario. The organizer’s brother had seen Griefwalker on tv, and thought I might be a good idea. I was honoured to be asked, but I tried to persuade the lady that, at least politically, it probably wasn’t a wise thing to do. How could a white man stand up in a room of native people and teach anything, in any fashion, and not conjur memories and reincarnations of residential schools, Indian agents, pass books, land grabs, half apologies, Oka and Ipperwash and all the colonial and genocidal policies and practices that for many people on both sides of the divide are not ‘in the past’? Probably he couldn’t. But she persisted. She wanted me to talk about grief, about losing, and her community needed the chance to talk about it. With real misgivings I agreed to come for a couple of days.

Here’s the great mystery of what happened. First, people came. Lots of them. And they came again for the second day. Old people came. Parents came. Band council members came. Christians and traditionals and the undecided and unclaimed came. For a while they watched me, politely and intently. Without restlessness or boredom or disaproval they waited to see why I’d come and what I had.

For two days we walked a tightrope strung between two sturdy posts: one, the good intent and curiosity that we’d all brought with us, and the other, the last five hundred years that carried us there. We were all waiting to see whether this time anything could be different. I worked on it, and they worked on it too. There was a word I so carefully avoided using – we – and that was because it wasn’t clear yet in that room whether ‘we’ was even possible, or preferable.

Here’s the second great mystery of what happened. Slowly and softly and carefully people began to talk about their sorrows, about the unexpected and the violent deaths, about the break ups and break downs and all the endings and thefts and losses that happened weeks ago and generations ago. The great, unexpected marvel was that they didn’t keep their grief from me. They didn’t ‘circle the wagons’. I gave what I’ve learned about grief, and they gave their willingness to grieve in return. In that exchange we conjured a bit of the magic of deep human life. We didn’t ‘set aside our differences’, and we weren’t the same underneath the skin. But because everyone for a little while risked hurting together and remembering together, something like ‘we’ appeared.

There is a lot of work to be done now, right now, in our time. Some of it is ecological, some political and economic, but all of it is cultural. Work I think is best understood as ‘the thing you’re least inclined to do’, and so we have our work cut out for us. The dominant culture, as near as I can tell, is in the beginnings of a terminal swoon. I don’t think it can be avoided. It’s end can only be prolonged or prompted, veiled or midwifed; those are our choices. The dominant culture was not built as if the last five hundred years on these shores had happened; it was built in spite of those years. It was built with a shrug to the past, and with the view that the past is gone. That is the principal reason for it’s ending. A culture unwilling to know it’s ragged, arbitrary origins is fated to a kind of perpetual, uninitiated adolescence, and it is by this adolescent spirit of privilege and entitlement and dangerous amnesia that our culture is known in the world.

We have to be in the culture making business, and soon. Real culture is not built on bad myths of superiority or inevitability or victory. It is built by people willing to learn and remember the stories that slipped from view, the rest of the truth that the empire won’t authorize. That learning and remembering costs people dearly. The work of building culture is learning and remembering how things have come to be as they are, without recourse to premature, temporary fixes, or to depression and despair. The way things are now, despair is a laziness no one can afford.

In other words, culture is built by people whose wisdom is underwritten and sustained by grief. It is in grief that we can recognize the humanity of other peoples, and they ours. Not general, faceless discontent, but the ordinary, mysterious grief the rises in each of those this-worldly moments when we meet the g’chi manido, the great mystery of life, each time we are willing to remember what is no longer. The Anishnabeg people are here, at home, and their memories and griefs are a real part of their land title now. Any culture seeking sanity and belonging – especially any newly emerging culture – must consider apprenticing to their many skills of broken heartedness.

Stephen Jenkinson, MTS, MSW

In a culture like ours it is not an easy thing to contemplate, this idea of bringing children to darkness deliberately and with purpose. It is a culture drawn to light in the singular and driven way of the moth. Everything possible is illuminated and revealed. Pornography is a good example. Another is schooling. Most are programmes in ending uncertainty, building competence and extending mastery, by assaulting mystery and containing darkness. You cannot go to a restaurant without a soundtrack that guides your conversation by banishing any quiet you might seek. None of those guys trust you to your silence. Visually you are allowed very little darkness, city or suburb, in the name of security I guess. You can’t drive down a road without being signed, cosigned, designed, resigned and signed again, every possible subtlety articulate and glaring and declared. It’s relentless.

Darkness and shadow do not have good PR, as you know. Nobody wants to be left in the dark. Being lucid means being light bound, and both seem advisable. There’s a well known book that divides the humanity in simple and ruthless terms into Sons of Light (among whom you’d want to be included) or Sons of Darkness (reserved for people who don’t know what you know). A poet I admire, William Stafford, wrote with certainty that the darkness around us is deep, and you can tell he didn’t think that was a good thing. When psychologically attuned people consider The Shadow they are generally trying to do something about making it less shadowy, and frankly it is darkness that gives many of them job security. I supervised an employee once who announced with pride that she’d begun to teach dying people how to be comfortable with their discomfort – another secondment of human cleverness to the project of banishing shadows inner and outer.

And there’s Christmas: the most light-flooded, the most illuminated, the most shadow-banishing project of them all, whose timing – the winter solstice – is no accident.

I know that the world seems plenty scary enough, and dangerous, without subjecting children to darkness unmediated. But we could ease up on the anxiety long enough to consider that darkness, with all its mysteries, has always been the place where healthy cultures brought their children to learn life. It isn’t where they were brought to be warned about life or defended against it, but where they were given the chance to love it instead. That is what most initiation ceremonies are for, to give children the ability to love being alive.

One year, right around this time and full of the emptiness of Christmas, I tried to do something else with my kids. We ended up in the north country, a good distance from the ambient light pollution that many kids now think is natural, and it was cold. There were two feet of good snow on the ground, and we had a small cabin to ourselves. With great ceremony about mid-morning on the twenty-first we turned off all the lights, all the heating and electricity, and as the day went on we talked about how it must have been hundreds of years before us, right at that time of year, for people who lived right in that spot. When night came on the shadows grew mauve and, in the way real darkness has of being itself, luminous. The cold wrapped itself around us, the poplars cracked with frost, and standing outside with the last amber of sunset gone from the sky we could, gorgeously, see. The lake ice close by moaned and shattered in the gathering, frozen dark. It was a powerful thing, that night. It was full and alive. The kids complained a little and found this a strange thing to do, but mostly they were awash in awe, and somewhere in that night they met darkness’s true heart: mystery. They remember it still, and I am hoping that mystery has a presence in the lives they are choosing and forging for themselves. I hope that the solstice, if they take note of it at all, has a full darkness to go along with the livid street life they’re more and more used to.

Mystery is my mistress, has been for a long while. Whatever teaching I’ve offered over the years has enthroned mystery as a patron saint of all our meetings. At my school we wrestle hard the mysteries of being a human, alive. So far, the mysteries have always won.

On the night of the twenty-first we’ll stand outside again and listen to the dark, and watch the silence, and imagine some of you doing the same, maybe with some kids close by. Here on our end of things we wish for you rich shadows, wondrous darkness to go with your certainties, proper twins, faithful companions. Would that this time of year give us again a taste for such things.

Stephen Jenkinson

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Certainly there will come times in life when each of us are surrounded by people who mean well by us, who proceed with us as if not much has happened that really changes anything, as if we’re fine and will remain so, as if we’re likely to know whatever we need to know and probably already do, all the mandatory things. Those people we usually count among our friends. You may not see them for a while – if you farm, as we do, you may not see them often at all, or only when the green season finally goes white, and you find yourself like a migratory bird again in a season of visiting – but when you do they give you as you give them a clear signal that each of you is pretty much as you’ve been, that sustenance remains your reward. One of the great compliments we give to each other, once our aging has become palpable, clear and marked, is that we don’t look any older. Or, if we do, that it’s an improvement, and suits us well, which almost comes to the same thing.

Of course, this is not much of a map to set the compass of your days by. Friendliness of this kind can be confusing to all concerned, the same way offering gold bullion to someone trying to tread water can be confusing. The good intent doesn’t determine much. To know where you are in the arc of your life, in the caravan of your days, that can help. From what I’ve seen around me it isn’t often welcome knowledge, not the way my corner of the world piles up its treasure of no unwanted change. In my time of enduring the professionalized low grade trauma known as the palliative care industry, known to me as the death trade, I saw most dying people a-twist in their sheets, some part of them knowing that something was happening, but more of them adrift and clinging to the straw rafts their caregivers wove from maybe’s and not yet’s and we’ll see’s. And be positive’s, and don’t give up’s. The lunacy of that particular kind of friendly cheerleading led most dying people along an unremarkable trail of little uncertainties, and that became their last months. Though it was deeply, truly knowable, most dying people spent their dying time not knowing where they were, not knowing what this time of their life asked of them, mostly waiting to find out, to be told. Instead of learning.

We in the dominant culture of North America don’t practice those rites of losing that go a long way to helping other people in other, older places know where in the arc of their days they are. Often what happens is that, instead of learning what the poet Elizabeth Bishop called the art of losing, we learn ‘steady as she goes’, and rarely are things steady. Often we are drawn to each other by certain samenesses that we bargain won’t change: people who like the same restaurants or politicians, or live in the same kind of houses or collect the same kinds of memories for their shelves, often find each other and spend decades of their lives cultivating the No Random Change of their days. Swapping those samenesses looks a lot like constancy, and to a people hooked on competence, feeling good and being all you can be constancy can look an awful lot like a life. Certainly during my lifetime the great con that has resisted all evidence to the contrary is the one that mutters every day: ‘You have a choice. You have the deciding vote on what your life means, on what happens, on all the Great Supposed To’s. You have a vote on what’s true.’

Over the last couple of years one of the particular joys of doing Orphan Wisdom’s work is that more and more younger people are coming. Most of them aren’t spiritual tourists, wandering from one experience to the next, haggling over what a little enlightenment should cost, asking for continuing education credits before they vote with their feet. More and more they are beginning to resemble people no longer convinced and condemned by their cultural orphanhood, the very people I had in mind when I began our School. I don’t know how they’re finding the School and me, but they are. Many older people still come to this work steeped in doubt, muttering ‘Prove it and I’ll come’, but the younger ones often have some vestigial wonder about them instead, and their mantra sounds a lot more like: ‘Maybe’. They often sit at the front of the room. They ask questions, real questions, not lawyer questions, accusations tarted up to sound like questions. They don’t often come with a firmly entrenched right to know things, but with a more pliable desire to know them, sometimes even a willingness to learn them, and sometimes a longing for real work.

Something has begun to happen, because of this. The young people drawn to this work are aging the rest of us drawn to this work. They don’t mean to, and many of them don’t know they are doing it, but they are. When young people approach something that has for a time been carried by their elders, driven by whatever emptiness or rumour of nourishment might haunt them, older people have a chance to see themselves as worthy of that approach, as having done something with their lives that warrants that approach. Just as you began growing an ability to love by being loved first, which sent up into the light an unlikely and unsuspected shoot of green worthiness in you, so being sought out by someone younger than you gives you the chance to suspect what they suspect, that someone knows something worth knowing, that the whole enterprise might not be in vain, or if it is that there’s no need to go down into that vanity alone. It could be that those young people who are certain unsuspected sisters and brothers of mercy that the poet laureat of our moment, Leonard Cohen, wrote of:

If your life is a leaf
that the seasons tear off and condemn,
They will bind you with love
that is graceful and green as a stem.

And so it is that elders do not elders make. That is more what happens in senior centres, where the elderly remind each other of what can no longer be. No, it is young people who make elders. They do it by proceeding as if there might be such a thing as elders, often without any evidence that this is so, and by not seeking only their own. Young people make elders, in spite of every whisper that discredits the Tower of Age, by seeking them out. In that way the young give to the aged among them a sign of where in the story of their lives the elders might be, by whispering:

‘You are here, now, at this moment in your life when
you’ve seen more than you’ll see. Thank you for that.
Can you spare a few moments of the moments you have left?’

And it may be that elders – not parents – are the ones who make young people, by readying themselves for the unlikely appearance of someone still keen in spite of it all, a sojourner after life who arrives without notice at their door. Elders must go through their latter days without much evidence that one day they might well be needed by someone younger, someone who quietly fears that it has always been as it is, and that there aren’t reasons enough to continue.

My teaching life here often obliges us to leave the farm and travel in hopes of finding evidence that something of what I’ve written here might be true. (We usually find it.) We leave our farm, all the plants, animals, the buildings, the whole barely orchestrated mayhem of the thing in the care of young people now. It has become a mysterious and unsought after pleasure, to return home and see what young eyes found needed doing, how their ways make a new kind of sense. It is great practice too for the end of all our days, when each of us will have to entrust everything we’ve known and done and loved in the care of those who don’t yet know what we place in their hands, but who in time to come might hold it in some esteem, maybe only because we preceded them, or because we tried.

All blessings on your wild years, on their wild ways of ending, on the road in and out of town, and on those to come.

Stephen Jenkinson, MTS, MSW
Author, Spiritual Activist and Founder of The Orphan Wisdom School

Most of my fields are deserts with a thin disguise of twitch grass in the summers. We get less snow every year now, and in winter the fields look like the shallow white lakes that might appear in your dreams, acres wide and inches deep. This past winter we stood on a wind blasted knoll and imagined our way towards grazing animals come spring. We had to build from scratch, since no farmer before me with an instinct for the possible would have grazed animals on that glacial till. We began by stomping the outline of a few buildings in the snow, trying to site them so that late winter sun would fill them with pale, thin light to warm the newborns some. But we ended up where pretty much every farmer does: siting fences. I submit to you that every planting or growing enterprise has and will in time come down to that, to a fence. It goes further: I’d guess that the rudimentary comfort and sense of safety our way of life affords us in the dominant culture of North America, the goofy sense of security that allows us for better and worse to plan and proceed, owes pretty much everything to a fence.

The kind of fences available now in the farm supply stores are models of ruthless efficiency, razor thin, almost invisible from head on, more persuasive and relentless than any politician or preacher you might name. Dig a few cedar posts into the ground, winch the wire with a come-along from the tow bar of a truck and nail the staples, and something happens to the place and to you. It has a shadowy, conjuring magic I hadn’t counted on: by the end of three days of work there was a proper field where there used to be sweet fern, gravel and the odd gopher hole, and I involuntarily had become a kind of lord of all I surveyed. There was order, suddenly, inside the line, and some kind of low grade chaos in the bush outside it, and ne’er the twain should meet, and I had done all that with wire. That, friends, is the unsuspected power of a fence.

This may be fairly well known: the quiet little fact is that it was the invention of barbed wire – not disease, not locomotives, not wars of attrition or residential schools – that efficiently concluded the days of free ranging up and down the prairies of North America in the 19th century, and it was barbed wire fence that afforded the governments of the day the solution to their ‘Indian problem’. And it was farms and ranches, not cities, that killed off what was left of a centuries-old nomadic life on this continent within one lifetime, and it is farms and ranches that keep it killed in my lifetime. What is not so well known is the etymology of the Old English phrase ‘beyond the pale’. Now it means ‘unsupportable, intolerable, or not fit for proper company’, but ancestrally it meant ‘on the other side of the boundary, or wall, or fence’. Splice these two meanings together, and you find that from the days when the English language was in its infancy, and long before that, fences have been used socially, agriculturally and tribally to segregate what people prefer from what they prohibit, and to tame what they fear.

Fences are the high water mark of our notorious domestication of animals, plants, water, all manner of once-wild and running things – including our human competitors and neighbours, and our own human soul, if I speak honestly. The truth is not that good fences make good neighbours: good fences make neighbours irrelevant. They relieve us of the dirty work of working things out with neighbours, over and over. Watch how people living side by side, without a fence, calculate to the inch the likely property line and enforce it with a lawn mower. Somebody in that story is itching for a fence, for the remarkable power of kingdom-making that it has. I would guess that when the revolutions come again, if they are for real this time, they might begin by burning down the fences and declaring that the commons have been reinstated.

This morning we walked the perimeter of the field with the dogs, as we often do, the mist rising off the mountain behind the farm and the sheep nosing dewy twitch grass under the young white pines, and I wrestled again the ancestral pull of boundaries and intolerances. There’s nothing prudent about it, to be sure, but something of the old chaos lovers in my line rose up and whispered to me, “Well, what if you left the gate open?” I didn’t, but I might.

Stephen Jenkinson