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Paths and empty halls -by Nathalie Roy Whichever way I walk, I would come upon an empty hall. There's a path to the front door of my house that leads down a slope to the river, The River of Abundance and Time. She's frozen over now, in most places. Coyotes cross over in the night. Ice feathers cling to Her. Rising early, I can...

Only the Living Die: A Year of Reckoning Live in Joshua Tree: March 7 & 8 In time of yore, most people went to the desert reluctantly. Ekvballai, 'driven out': that's what it took to get there: a God at your heels, or in your rafters, just apounding. Or a vision. Or crying after one, for want of reasons why a life does...

Gone. That's a sure sign that something happened, out there beyond the reach of the busy mind. Gone. It's good practice for The Big One. Two nights ago, the coldest of the year by far, we ignored Boss' barking - the last time we do that - and stayed warm inside. An hour later, satisfied and ready...

Sanity and Soul: Die Wise, Ten Years On High Stepping In the place I was born to, habit drove the engine of almost everything. The metronomic plodding of the inevitable calendar-driven days: that was the cadence. Working for the weekend. High-fiving the ghosts. Making do in the suburbs. Getting used to everything was more valued than...

Only the Living Die: A Year of Reckoning Live in Joshua Tree: March 7 & 8 For most village people, for many centuries or most, the desert was a place you went to for extremes, when your life was calling out for some kind of edge by which to find its centre. The desert was a place of drastic clarity, where...

Nathalie's dream is coming true. We're creating a Scriptorium around Stephen Jenkinson’s collected work. The Boreal Sessions will be in-person scriptorium labour. We are hard at it, creating an online Library and Colloquium and, in good time, we may be able to offer a collection of hand-crafted books based on decades of Stephen's talks, including Orphan Wisdom...

Paying attention: there’s a reason we use the word pay. It’s hard to have a sort of chronic attention span. It asks a lot. But being asked much of helps. Your feeding the place you call home, and your recompense, may be a consequence of your being asked a lot of. Stephen Jenkinson speaking about...

A public life. A life's work.  Two things that sound official, intentional, inevitable. Both have come my way, and neither have that sound to them, not to my ear. * It is a joy to be surprised by one's little life, to be taken aback. I am joyful that way. It is a relief to be the worker and not...

  December 19, 2024 Dearest greetings to you, These cold, clear, dark days have inspired a bit of Winter house keeping. Many of you will have received a newsletter, sent out back in April of this year introducing me, Khadija as a new member of the Orphan Wisdom team. The correspondence and the conversations with you all have been...