Sanity & Soul: Die Wise, Ten Years On – 5 part online event
March 15, 2025 @ 10:00 am - March 16, 2025 @ 12:00 pm
Join our 5-part online event to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of
Die Wise, A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul
“Dying wise is a moral obligation. Dying well is not a matter of enlightened self-interest or personal preference. Dying well must become an obligation that living people and dying people owe to each other and to those to come.”
Stephen has invited a couple of luminary allies to join him on-camera. He has mobilized the Orphan Wisdom ensemble to grind out the details, and soon we’ll be inviting you to join us in bearing witness to Sanity and Soul: Die Wise, Ten Years On, a livestream encounter with a life’s work.
When Stephen mentioned last fall that he wanted to mark the ten year anniversary of Die Wise, we began crafting this event.
Two 90 minute Livestream Encounters – March 15 & 16
10am PST / 1pm EST / 6pm GMT / 5am ACT (+1 day)
Registration is Open:
Participants will have access to these recordings for two years, until the end of March 2027.
Here’s what’s included:
1. There are three conversations Stephen has with people who are dying. We hear him weave the death literacy that he has spoken so much about. We are particularly blessed by the willingness of these people to participate in this event. Recordings of these conversations will be made available for registrants at the start of March.
2. And there will then be the two livestream sessions with learned companions. He’ll be speaking with Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín in Spain by Zoom and Dr. Manfred Becker will be sitting with Stephen in San Diego.
3. This event features an online community group for attendees to share and connect. It’s similar to a Facebook group page, but instead hosted on the Orphan Wisdom site.
“..if you have mortality on your horizon, if you think dying just has to be better, saner, more soulful than we’ve made it out to be, if you love being alive, with all the mystery and grief that brings, if you count yourself among the walking wounded, or if your heart is due some spirited attention, then this weekend is for you.”
We’ll take a good long look at what I’ve been entrusted with, and what it might stand for now.
– Stephen Jenkinson
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 getting good at anything.
None of which helps when your number gets called, and the jig is up.
There’s shock instead, and a Lord-have-mercy divination of things never done, things poorly understood, lousily loved. Life set aside.
And then, crawling from the dust and rubble, blessed and caved in, there’s you and there’s now.
And there’s some choosing to be done.
*
I think I loved the death trade well enough. I knew the privilege of it, the madness, the banquet of sorrows and love that made up the work. I think that shows in Die Wise.
On St. Patrick’s day coming, Die Wise will be a decade in the world, and a going concern for all of that time. Lo, the book and its audience found each other.
Which I would never have seen coming.
All of this decade’s heavy weather – its carnage, its desert sojourn, that decent run of good fortune, and now the maker’s mark of frailty upon me – stirs me to strike up the string band of my unsteady ligaments and high step it a bit.
I’ve mobilized the Orphan Wisdom ensemble to grind out the details, I’ve prevailed upon a few willing dying people to join us. I’ve invited a couple of luminary allies to join me on-camera.
And now I’m inviting you to join me in bearing witness to Sanity & Soul: Die Wise, Ten Years On, a livestream encounter with a life’s work. I’m meaning to celebrate.
-Stephen Jenkinson
Film clip by Ian MacKenzie
Stephen Jenkinson, MTS, MSW ~ Culture activist/ farmer/author ~
Stephen teaches internationally and has authored seven books of cultural critique. He is the creator and principal instructor of the Orphan Wisdom School, co-founded with his wife Nathalie Roy in 2010. The School’s new project, The Scriptorium (2025), is creating an archive and library of his life’s work.
Apprenticed to a master storyteller as a young man, he worked extensively with dying people and their families. He is former programme director in a major Canadian hospital and former assistant professor in a prominent Canadian medical school. Stephen has Masters’ degrees from Harvard University (Theology) and the University of Toronto (Social Work).
In 2023 Stephen received a Distinguished Alumni Honours Award from Harvard University for “helping people navigate grief, exploring the liminal space between life and death, and connecting humanity through ceremony and storytelling.”
In August 2025, Sounds True will release Stephen’s newest book: Matrimony: Ritual, Culture, and the Heart’s Work.
He is also the author of Reckoning (co-written with Kimberly Ann Johnson in 2022), A Generation’s Worth: Spirit Work While the Crisis Reigns (2021), Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble (2018), the award-winning Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul (2015), Homecoming: The Haiku Sessions (a live teaching from 2013), How it All Could Be: A workbook for dying people and those who love them (2009), Angel and Executioner: Grief and the Love of Life (a live teaching from 2009), and Money and The Soul’s Desires: A Meditation (2002). He was a contributing author to Palliative Care – Core Skills and Clinical Competencies (2007).
Since co-founding the Nights of Grief and Mystery project with singer/ songwriter Gregory Hoskins in 2015, he has toured this musical/ tent show revival/ storytelling/ ceremony of a show across North America, U.K., Ireland, Israel, Australia and New Zealand. They released their first Nights of Grief & Mystery album in 2017, and at the end of 2020 released two new records: Dark Roads and Rough Gods. A new album release is planned for 2025.
Stephen Jenkinson is also the subject of the feature length documentary film Griefwalker (National Film Board of Canada, 2008, dir. Tim Wilson), a portrait of his work with dying people, and Lost Nation Road, a shorter documentary on the crafting of the Nights of Grief and Mystery tours (2019, dir. Ian Mackenzie).
He was a stone sculptor turned wood-carver, and learned the arts of traditional birch bark canoe building. His first house won a Governor General’s Award for architecture. He now lives on a small scale organic farm in an off-grid straw bale house. The 120 year old abandoned granary from across the river which appeared in Griefwalker was dismantled last year and re-erected at the Orphan Wisdom farm, where it is again a working barn.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín:
Àlex is a theoretical physicist turned neuroscientist investigating human consciousness. He holds a bachelor’s degree in physics, a masters in biophysics, and a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Barcelona. He was then a postdoctoral research fellow at the Systems Biology Unit of the EMBL-CRG Center for Genomic Regulation and at the Neuroscience Programme of the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown in Lisbon. Since 2016, he has been the director of the Organism Behavior Laboratory at the Institute of Neuroscience in Alicante, where he is currently an associate professor at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). Since 2022, Alex is also the director of the Pari Center in Tuscany, Italy. Alex lives in sunny Alicante, Spain, with his wife, two daughters, and a cat.
Alex had a near-death experience in March of 2021. He then decided to devote his research efforts to the scientific study of human minds in the real world, concentrating on what he calls “the edges” of consciousness – a wild, weird, wonderful field where great enigma meets gross stigma. In 2023 he was awarded the first Linda G O’Bryant Noetic Sciences Research Prize. His research encompasses the origins of the arrow of time (inert matter), neuroethological principles of action and perception across species from flies and worms to mice and humans (living matter), and robotic and artificial intelligence applied to human stupidity (so-called artificial life & mind). You can find most of his work here: https://behavior-of-organisms.org/
Dr. Manfred Becker:
Manfred spent his career in cutting rooms “lying the truth” through film editing. After studying journalism and film, Becker began his working relationship with the National Film Board of Canada, co-editing ‘The Journey’ in the late 1980s with Academy Award winning director Peter Watkins. Since then, Becker has written, edited and directed close to fifty documentary films which have been screened at festivals and on television screens around the world. He completed his PhD before joining full time faculty of York University’s Cinema & Media Arts where he is currently Grad Program Director of the Film program and associate professor in the Faculty of Arts, Media, Performance and Design.
He is the author of Creating Reality in Factual Television – The Frankenbite and other Fakes (Routledge, 2022). Professor Becker teaches UG and graduate classes in Documentary Production, Editing, Media Ethics, Essay Film, Introduction to Filmmaking, Production, and Writing for Television.
Transcript of Stephen speaking with Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín and
Dr. Manfred Becker who are his special guests on March 15 & 16th:
“If you would, lend the gift of your inquiring selves to the subject. And the subject is a kind of public service, a question of moral citizenship. It is also me, ten years on. Things are not what they were. I have in a strange way joined the ranks of the people that I once served from some kind of functional distance, and I’ve never in a public way considered that aloud before.
We will do this as people that are dancing. Not as people driving, trying to get somewhere. We are in this very sensitive response mode, and the grace that is available to us is that we have no sense of prevailing or winning, or even of success.
To my mind this is an act of engaged moral citizenship in an excitingly troubled time, with some personal attributes to lend some spice to the situation.”
Join Us for this celebration. Get your tickets here:
Frequently Asked Questions
Event date: March 15 & 16, 2025
Time: 10 am PST start – 90 minutes each day
Cancellations Policy
We offer no refunds – If for some reason you are no longer able to participate, know that you’ve helped make it possible for someone, who could otherwise not attend, to be present. Thank You.
What is copyright infringement?
The people who contributed to this series, either by way of permitting us to include their counsel call conversation with you, and the musicians allowing us to play their songs, and the participation of the special guests, we ask for your respect by not copying, forwarding nor reproducing these files in any way. They are the property of Orphan Wisdom.
How long is the recording available?
The audio and video recordings of all five conversations (3 audio conversations & 2 livestream talks) will be made available to all registrants shortly after the event ends. Access expires in March 2027.
Is there an online community group?
We’ve decided to create a Sanity & Soul online community group for those who register. Those who do, may participate in several engaging threads with the goal of creating an online space to connect with each other in a meaningful way.
Can I submit a question? Yes, there are two ways: The preferred method is to post your question in the Sanity & Soul online community group. If for some reason that can’t work for you, then email us.
Where do I find the Zoom webinar link?
Check your spam box. Check your email the week before we start and we will also post the link in the online community group platform.
Technical difficulty or Other Concerns? email us.