Forgotten Pillars Series Now On Sale

Early in 2023 Stephen and Kimberly Ann Johnson came together for a 5 Part Series on Patrimony, Matrimony, Kinship, Ancestors & Ceremony. These sessions were raw, real, raucous revealing, and an act of remembering. We want to let you know the series is on sale now through August 22nd.

Access the Forgotten Pillars Series Here

The day after their fifth session, Stephen and Kimberly came together to reflect on some of what it takes, body, mind and spirit, to do this culture work. This conversation was recorded and has become a short film – The Aftermath.

This is a bonus session that will be included in the series. If you were in on the live series, The Aftermath has been sent to you in an email from Kimberly.

After the Aftermath

There’s a kind of p.s. at the end of this short film called Aftermath. Kimberly Ann Johnson and I had spent the afternoon debriefing on camera on the back end of a five part series we did together we called Forgotten Pillars. In this summary session we spoke about each other, but at separate film sessions. I’d forgotten that a film was in the works. I didn’t know what she’d said about our working together until watching the film a few minutes ago. It was like finding a letter someone wrote you that slipped between the books on a shelf, and you find it without looking for it, looking for something else.

The old farmers where I live have an expression they use to signal the total self-evidence and truth of a thing: ‘No use talkin” they say. That’s where Kim and I were, that day. Having spoken our souls out, there was no use talkin’.

She’s so good at quiet.

And so as we did so often through the late winter and early spring of this year, we walked instead, wordlessly for the most part. That’s what we’re doing at the film’s end, heading towards some salt flats by her house. I’d forgotten that a train had rattled past us in the distance. I knew then, and I remember now, how poetically called-for that train was at that moment.

Everything we did, everything we talked about, was somehow on that train, or on that train showing up just when it did, at day’s end, each of us having spoken our peace, the camera still rolling but forgotten now, the train of our work pulling away into the unknown certainties of what becomes of us.

All aboard, it said.

Stephen Jenkinson
Founder of Orphan Wisdom