Reflections of a Vehement Fellow
Should you have been born in a storm, the likelihood is that you’re a stormy presence. Or, just as likely, you’re almost unnaturally calm. You go after the first sound you have in you, or you go the other way.
Either way, the storm sired you.
For all of 2024, and half of 2025, I rough rode the storm, the chaos, the terror, the ennui, the morbid destitution and the moral no man’s land of a neurodegenerative diagnosis. That, frankly, is a long time to be undone but still be hanging around. And though I don’t really remember it this way, I couldn’t have been easy to be around. My days had a vacuum, a ghosted axis around which they staggered and spun. There would be nothing new again: I was fairly sure of that.
Very much as she did earlier in the century with the Orphan Wisdom School, Nathalie Roy looked down into my ongoing undoing and proposed that somehow we – well, she at first, and then Khadija Striegel, Chris Christou and others – take the scores and scores of recordings of live talks, interviews, school sessions and so on, and give them some kind of accessible shape, ultimately to give them some kind of purpose. When she first proposed The Scriptorium to me, I balked. I didn’t think there was a critical mass of material that would warrant the treatment, and the work involved. And if I’m honest, I didn’t think I could bear that much retrospection, that much tallying of what would never again be.
Well, wrong again.
Turns out I’ve grown a fondness for that overworking, vehement fellow who griefwalked and orphan wisdomed and grief and mysteried his way around the joint. And a principal agent of me coming around to that fondness were these once a month Scriptorium Reflections calls. As it has unfolded, a theme is struck for the call, the Scriptorium’s sustaining members study the documentation drawn from the files, and then on those Sundays I join them for an unscripted encounter through spontaneous questions prompted by that study. The great beauty of these Sundays for me: I find I continue to have new thoughts about very familiar themes, and I find that the camaraderie palpable in the calls is its own reward.
The Scriptorium Reflections were born while the rough Gods were in town. I think it shows. It’s been the best part of a year now that we’ve been going after it and going the other way. I think that others might find those birth marks worth brailling and cyphering, and might consider joining us.
— Stephen Jenkinson, MTS, MSW
Founder of Orphan Wisdom
You are cordially invited to an open house
Scriptorium Reflections call and celebration of the first year of
The Scriptorium: Echos of an Orphan Wisdom
Sunday, September 20th, 2026
12 noon ET
ps we will announce the 2027 Boreal Session hosted at Orphan Wisdom in Canada during the Scriptorium Reflections call.
