To all the allies, accomplices, newsworthy workers of the cultivated mind agile and lateral and literate;

to the staunch defenders of the long path, the ambivalent faith, the hard weather way;

and to you who have taken to your soul the troubled times’ most pressing plea for a heart awake:

This comes to you from an acreage of snow, grey prowlers in the bush and would-be life loving humans, and Stephen Jenkinson, whose estimation of the likelihood of his allotment has been notoriously off for years now.

I write this in the swoon of the year, when you wonder where 360 days really went. Would that the kindnesses find your door.

If you’ve been around my work for a while, Die Wise probably factored into your drawing nigh. But more likely the teaching tours of those and subsequent days had something to do with it. Nathalie Roy had everything to do with those tours, that conjuring of a public life, the subsequent advent of the Orphan Wisdom School, and Nights of Grief and Mystery. Those were heady days and nights, from one coast to the other and beyond, and we needed a lot of sway and swath and energy to move those mountains.

That energy is not with her or I as it once was.

You may know that I have a new book appearing in early July, 2026, published by Chelsea Green. Initially simply called the green book, it is officially called Trembling, Still: The Awful Clarity of a Mind in Eclipse. It’s about the extremes of the heart and mind that have come with the coming of the God of a Riled Brain. The appearance or success of this book in the marketplace won’t be buoyed or borne along by the rambunctions of former days. It’ll need some help.

This is me asking for your help.

I’m asking if any of you have friends, relatives, associates or acquaintances in medicine, brain science, philosophy, psychology, mental/holistic health or the like, and if you do whether you’d inquire on my behalf whether they’d consider having a look at Trembling, Still and perhaps writing a jacket blurb for the book. Uncorrected proofs for review are likely to be available from the publisher in mid February.

If you do, I’d ask that you ask them for an email address where we could correspond with them regarding the particulars.

Bless you for considering lending us your hand for this, and bless the young days of the year that is about to come.

-Stephen Jenkinson
Founder of Orphan Wisdom

To support Stephen’s up and coming book, Trembling, Still: The Awful Clarity of a Mind in Eclipse, please be in touch with khadija@orphanwisdom.com

Photo credit: Nathalie Roy