Interview: Stephen Jenkinson and Àlex Gómez Marin in conversation about Never Land

Stephen Jenkinson and Àlex Gómez Marin in conversation about Never Land and his event in May 2023 at The Pari Center, Tuscany.

Never Land – May 12 – 15 – at The Pari Center, Tuscany.

People half our age will someday soon confront us with two questions: when you were my age, did you know what was happening (or what could happen)? And so, what did you do?

The most bearable answer: we had no idea. The state of the world would then seem more tolerable if failure by naive ignorance was actually the case. But was it? If it wasn’t, this would entail a kind of intolerable inheritance. We’d quickly become the ancestral monsters no one would claim as their own. It’ll be a psychic DNA whose indelible stain won’t be amenable to cosmetic fixes.

We are children of strange times. Our birthmarks are both troubled and troubling. We do not, most of us, belong. We inhabit, we own, instead. Being in the world but not of it: that was once a foundation of Western spirituality. It will end up being a stain by which we will be held in disrepute. Our way with the land entrusted to us bears the marks of our unbelonging. Given the fact that we don’t have a long time here, we should proceed with an undesperate degree of urgency in the matter of land stewardship. There is a fine decision to be made: we bear the mark of unbelonging either as an affliction or as an assignment. Those coming to this event may have, voluntarily or not, opted for the latter.

In this gathering —employing a format, approach, and content unprecedented at the Pari Center— we will raise these questions until they attain deliberateness and intention. We will work on inheritance, prejudice, spirit work, grief and wisdom. We will work with what is difficult to recognize and hard to live with.
People half our age will someday soon confront us with two questions: when you were my age, did you know what was happening (or what could happen)? And so, what did you do?