Time was I saw no likelihood that I’d have any of you to the Orphan Wisdom teaching hall ever again. It was a frailty in the imaginal extremities that had come for me, and I was in the acceptance stage of staggering and reeling. How sweet it is sometimes to be wrong about what’s left of you.
When the possibility of rewriting portions of Trembling, Still came up recently, I had a good ten minutes of genuine conundra about the sentence structure, which frankly was impenetrable in some places. They were, in every sense I knew the term, dark matter. I knew then that they had to be torqued and opaque, if I was going to be any kind of a faithful witness to the awful clarity that had come to call. Then there was the matter of words in the manuscript that no dictionary has a trace of, a memory of. I knew they belonged, and were called for, and had earned their keep. I made a glossary of those words where the index usually appears.
And then there was the matter of speaking these things aloud, to people who weren’t there at the time. So I’ve travelled around some in the last while, made peace with the ground that has heaved beneath me, tested the waters to see if I could laterally ponder, and stand and deliver in ways I recognized. I could. I can.
I will, should I be spared.
And then it has come to pass that Caldera, the new double album from Gregory Hoskins and myself, has readied itself. I’m overseeing the custom printing of the record jacket as I write this. And the Nights of Grief and Mystery band has begun kicking at the stalls, hankering after some time in the footlights with the new songs. Here’s the result: we’re going to mark the record release with the first ever live performance of Caldera on July 18 in that very teaching hall. All in all, a ‘wonders never cease’ high five to life.
I hope you’ll join me there for a several day session I’m faithfully calling Staggered• Summoned• Stilled. We’ll be edging close to the clarifying light of heartache. We’ll work on speaking what the wellness world seems to think is unspeakable. We’ll make a libretto for a lucid mindfulness that is neurodegeneration’s proper, faithful companion. And we’ll sing.
Stephen Jenkinson
Founder of Orphan Wisdom
STAGGERED • SUMMONED • STILLED
A Thinking Man’s Brush With Neurodegeneration
July 16-19, 2026
Orphan Wisdom Hall
Ontario, Canada
