Years ago I stumbled on a kind of secret hiding in plain view: I could strain at the bit forever trying to invent or discover something new, or I might do something else with what happens more or less every day. I might treasure the commonplace. I was inspired by yoga. I figure the yogis took breath, an inevitability with humans, added a bit of attention, affection and discipline, gave us something marvelous and useful and restoring. It still needed work from the rest of us. But there it was. Over the years I’ve tried to do something of the same with speaking.

Culture, bona fide working culture, does the same. It takes the uneven striving of its people, one for the other, and the matters of the heart, and the odd mechanics of making a go of living together,  and making home and making babies, and growing older and differently capable, and finally dying away, and employs them all in the ordinary marvel of trying to make working, sane citizens of its people. Patrimony, matrimony, ceremony, tradition, kinship, ancestral rafter dwellers: all of them are more or less forgotten pillars of the culture house of the west.

For a culture in atrophy, tradition is more like habit, ceremony is more like catharsis, and matters of  the heart can’t find a way into the mirrored funhouse of being safe and managing trauma.

In a time that rewards the stand alone strategies of self improvement, culture could use some attention and devotion, some discipline and affection. In a five part series of encounters, Kimberly Johnson and I mean to do some of that work. Join us there.

Stephen Jenkinson
Founder of Orphan Wisdom