SECOND CHANCE SMOKE

SECOND CHANCE SMOKE

In a shaky world you’d think you might take refuge in a clear eyed regard for your own little likelihoods: what you’re capable of, and keen on, what you quicken for.

Well yes, it’s a shaky world indeed. But I’ve been fairly wrong about my likelihoods for about a year now. I have been spared, as they’d say in the old country. Spared for now: an important caveat.

What a compelling, confounding time of life are these days of mine: once distilled, then diagnosed, all but dispirited, and now, smudged in second-chance smoke, deciding I’m not entirely done. Something of me is due.

There’s a new book coming in early July: Trembling, Still: The Awful Clarity of a Mind in Eclipse.

I could just say I wrote it. But it’s fairer to say I delerioused it. I took the hint, and for the first time wrote about my own little likelihoods, while in the teeth of an awful storm.

And I want to talk about it with you, live, in person. I want to talk about the mind, about suffering and prayer and what wisdom is, about whether there’s a self, about God, and about God-awful silence.

I’m meaning to gather the willing and the wary among you to this frayed and fateful kind of wondering. First on the farm in the Orphan Wisdom Hall July 16-19 (Registration now open) for my allies close to home and for old times sake, once at Trefacwn in Wales with Àlex Gómez-Marín and Mattias Olsson July 30- August 2 (Registration now open) for my European allies, and one in the American southwest in the fall (details to follow) with Kimberly Ann Johnson for my allies there.

I’ve no idea of ‘this is it’. I’ll come to you as if it is. Either way, I’ll bring it all.

Stephen Jenkinson
Founder of Orphan Wisdom