FROM THE INSIDE
There are odds, and there are likelihoods. And then there’s what happens.
The odds were against the Matrimony book from the early going. The publisher I counted on rejected it outright, by email, which I took too personally. There was that business of the pandemic, which rejigged the priorities for a while, and pushed matrimony way down the list of what anyone was likely to pursue. There was a drastic change in personal fortune that I found persuasive.
Then there was a fateful jaunt to southern California (these were the days before Canadians were so suspect at the border), a move into funky (and not good funky) basement digs, a wondering what was to be with me. That’s when Matrimony gained its amniotics and was reborn. Kimberly Johnson, my upstairs neighbour, raised a tent above the project to mitigate the heavy weather I brought with me. She brought the book with her, got it copied, laid it out by chapter, twenty separate piles across the floor, waited for me to come visit. With no conviction that it mattered anymore, nor that I had it in me to shoulder the thing, I just agreed to be persuaded by her underailable (that’s un-derail-able) enthusiasm. I (and let me recommend this to you as good periodic discipline) submitted. A very smart thing for me to have done.
I moved those pages around. I looked for a through line. I stared out the window at the rain. I boiled with the unlikelihoods of a thing I’d forsaken years before. I stared at the ceiling. Then I took out my best fountain pen, and got on with it. I got on with the journeyman grind of willing a book to appear in the pages, one unpromising day at a time.
Sounds True said yes. I turned out not to be as unlikely a candidate for revival as I suspected. And Matrimony: Ritual, Culture and the Heart’s Work turned out to have legs.
On 10 August, at high noon eastern time, I get to thank Kimberly from the rooftops for her serious, infectious midwifery of the project.
And you get to hear about the Matrimony book from the spiritual and instinctual inside. She and I will reckon on love, marriage, art, ritual, vow taking and culture making in real time, for the first time. Maybe the only time. An old-time stand and deliver.
You get a seat at the table, and a copy of the book, and advance viewing of the first couple of chapters, for $25 – the cost of the book. That’s fair.
Join us for this one.
Stephen Jenkinson
Founder of Orphan Wisdom
