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Early in 2023 Stephen and Kimberly Ann Johnson came together for a 5 Part Series on Patrimony, Matrimony, Kinship, Ancestors & Ceremony. These sessions were raw, real, raucous revealing, and an act of remembering. We want to let you know the series is on sale now through August 22nd. Access the Forgotten Pillars Series Here The day after their fifth session, Stephen and Kimberly came together to reflect on some of what it takes, body, mind and spirit, to do this culture work. This conversation was recorded and has become a short film - The Aftermath. This is a bonus session that...

When someone tells you news that he/she has told five hundred before you, it comes across as barely news. It's rote, and it's your turn, and that's it. Part of the disease-brief protocol I was told: "There'll be good days, and bad days." Which has turned out to be rigorously, unspectacularly, allopathically true. Today - for reasons untraceable to me - was mostly a bad day. Withered feeling and stumbling, reasons that used to serve well now out the door and gone-seeming. For the hundredth time I questioned the reason behind coming to Wales, to Totnes, behind an event at the...

Alma mater they called it in more innocent but no less culpable times. An awful lot to lay on a stint in school. I brought a untutored brew of vocation and a love of the spoken word to Harvard Divinity School some 45 years ago. I had plans. Harvard had ways. They let me in, gave me the run of the place, leant me money. I was up to my eyes in proper learning. I meant to get into the priesthood of something or other. They rightly thought that was ill conceived. I seem to have spent a good part of the time since...

With amazement and awe, we watched as tickets for the UK Prayer event with Stephen Jenkinson & Dr Martin Shaw sold out in 3 hours. After many middle-of-the-night calls across the pond, we found a different venue that can host three times the participants. The new date and location details follows: Details & Registration Here Saturday June 15, St Mary's Church, Totnes – UK: Prayer: An Evening of Conversation with Stephen Jenkinson and Dr. Martin Shaw Any of the tickets purchased for the original June 14th date are automatically updated to the new date (Sat. June 15th). If you require a refund, please email...

To know the moment that you're in, and mobilize accordingly: that's where grace and style and eloquence are born. Once there, though, it's work to find where desperation gives way to urgency, urgency to purpose, and purpose to limit. Karaoke's unbecoming when elegance and elegies are called for. There's wrangling now to be done. Not much of an invitation, I'll grant you. But there it is. Let's find out what we've got, what we really know. Stephen Jenkinson Founder of Orphan Wisdom Details & Registration Here June 9th-12th, Ty Sanctiadd/Trefacwn in Wales, UK A time among friends. Theme: The Beginning of Ending. Photo credit: Kimberly Ann Johnson.

The Orphan Wisdom project is a stout thing to manage. There are a lot of moving parts. People coming and going, life having its way.  It never was a family business though it may have looked like it from time to time. It's certainly not now, with the waters troubled and the wind up. So, we're taking this opportunity to announce that Khadija Striegel has joined as Manager of the enterprise. She'll be the first point of contact for most  things from now on and we're delighted to make this known to you. Khadija Meghan Rashell Striegel lives and works on the...

To all of you who have lingered, loitered, listed to port or to starboard, given up or given in or gone mental while waiting even for an update as to anything Orphan Wisdom, or are awaiting the starting gun, or a sign that it even exists anymore: Good day to you, and blessings on your hearth and heart. We first of all thank you mightily for hanging in, if indeed you've done so. Many of you may go back to pandemical days, or feel like you do, while the school just mysteried out, as so many things did. Thank you for considering coming...

I live with someone who loves to augment the air around the place. Her friends know this about her, and so we are on the receiving end of aromatic gifts, candles and incense from the wide world. The math of incense is like the math of life, I suppose: the rumour scent of what could be, and then some kind of ignition, and the whorls of beauty waft, disperse, go invisible and for all of that linger a good while in the fabric of things. But the aftermath of incense is there too: a little dust pile of leavings, like the shucked-off skin...

An irony of a kind: I make what living I do with words, with speaking, yet my handwriting is a marvel of economy. Or was, before fine motor skills began obeying the passage of time. I'm careful with words, mainly, and careful about them, and for their sakes. We've flown underneath the down under. Hobart it is, Tasmania. Any further south and its penguins and calving glaciers. It's the edge of someone's world, to be sure. It's the middle of someone else's. The conscience of the tour ranges back and forth across those mythic, poetic soundlines. Here every event, every departure...

Drastic: from Grk. drastikos "effective, active, violent", from drasteon 'a thing done', from drao,' to make, do, act,' which is of uncertain etymology. The sense of 'extreme, severe' is recorded by 1808. Not before. That's something to love about language: the words just obey the rolling in of the mists, the abrasions of time. You have something you hold, you pull, and you leave most of it in the ground. When it comes to drastic, things aren't so panicky as we'd have them be. Go back far enough, and drastic is just 'something that gets done'. We had Nights of Grief and Mystery on the road for five of 2023's months...

We are all of us children of a troubled time. We are surely other things, noble and ignoble things, capable of remarkable goodness, capable of making our ancestors proud. But we moderns do need to decide and decide again what it means that we could have been born in more favoured times and were not, what might be the mythic and poetic and moral criteria and condition of our citizenship in such times. Once, such a responsibility was the particular purview of political and heirloom leaders, sanctified pulpit masters, masters of ceremony, court jesters in court, orators with a cause. But the entry requirements and...

Night before last, carbon payback for daring this kind of air voyage: after a five hour drive and a five hour connecting flight, a two hour layover, and three immobile hours on the tarmac we're informed something doesn't work, and at 2 a.m. we're off the plane, wandering aimless in an empty San Francisco airport, sleeping rough on the floors, curled in against the aircon cold of the place. Turns out a big airport takes about three hours off during the haunting time of the night, where the line marking night from dawn is smudged and gone. Then, as...

I've been a pulmonary refugee for some time, and have been obliged to join the geese and the butterflies and head to less acute climes when the native cold comes on. It's probably extended my days. I was ongoingly grateful for the respite, and uneasy about the clear disfigurement of the locale that mass migration of the seasonal kind inflicts. My reasons for going weren't any more noble or mandatory than anyone else's. I couldn't get clear of the tourism thing. I did two podcasts on the matter with Chris Christou's End of Tourism. The trouble of the thing doubled down. Half way through the...

There are marvelous things about being on the road. There are the reminders that the world's a big place, that humans are a disparate lot, that life's not long, that you're often older than you think you are, that being right is more a coincidence than a plan, that being in the right place is at least as good as being right, that 'timing' is God's middle name sometimes, God's middle finger other times. It depends on severity, and on how you are with happenstance. The carbon complicates things, so it's a lot of work to make sure that...

When the end of my thirties loomed my mother play-glared at me on the eve of my birthday and half declared and half prayed as follows: "I don't have a forty year old son!" She did, though. And the current odometer would gall her still: she has a son who's all but seventy. Someone sent me a kind of psychic get well card a while ago. The text inside included the following bit of intolerance: "You don't stop playing because you get old. You get old because you stop playing." Honey, listen. It's more like this: you'll get old, or you won't....

If you're in the mood for meme-length considerations, I'd move on if I were you. This is likely to be lengthy. It'll cover some ground. In the lobby after last night's show a man outwaited all the other patrons to offer me dramaturgical advice, to wit: the end of the festivities should not leave the paying public where it does, hefting a life's stonepile of regret. It should release them to the limit defamation of the stars in a night's sky - where it starts, in fact -  that they might revel without compromise, I guess, and break even on the evening,...

It's called 'a world tour', this thing of ours. Grand-sounding. Over the top for Canadians to say about themselves. And there isn't much agreement about the scale or range that makes up a 'world' jaunt. One thing's more certain than not, though: small places don't usually qualify for world tour inclusion. If you're on a world tour, you go to those places that have those 'I--whatever the place is' t shirts everywhere. You go to places whose names, even in short form, even in a couple of letters, prompt torrents of association, the kinds of places where if you...

Some days stagger to their conclusion. We're far from home, in someone else's land, holding out for a kindly reception for our heart's labours. The morning's day off has been spent not touring the haunts of my Harvard days, but in a hotel foyer, waiting on the repair of the rental van's flat tire, each band member after their fashion nursing the beginnings of what turns out to be food poisoning. You can guess this is not going to go well. By mid afternoon we're by the highway side, and the roar, door flung open, some of us doing what you...

Torrid Tucson night   The second act of your three act play - if you get one - is there for you to find those with whom you'll live out the reasons for your birth and your persistence up unto the present moment. It's outrageous good fortune just to get one. It marks you for keeps as a citizen. It gets you up over the fence of your romance and your self-esteem, and out into the rolling fields of your people. A couple of days ago I'm standing in the arrivals concourse at the Albuquerque airport, and I'm waiting for my wife,...

I know - or I'm fairly sure, and that's as close to 'know' as the circuitry of being modern and home-seeking and confused by freedom allows - that there are people out beyond my ken who receive, and sometimes read, and sometimes consider these things I compose and send. I know there's a daily avalanche of things to consider that compete for your give a shit. Here's one more. I did an interview the other day in which the host opined that perhaps the whole of my life's work came down to an attempt to make the case on behalf of...

It's a delicate business, this boycotting. The best of people wants justice to prevail, starting anytime. Starting last week. Starting now. Good will: we could start there. But good will is a complicating business. Boycotting a country is a bit like taking the hippocratic oath: maybe, if you withhold your little something, maybe nothing bad will happen. Or maybe it will stop happening. Or, at least, in the great merit calculator in the sky, your withholding will by an increment of one act not undertaken tip some kind of balance. And if everyone withheld their little somethings ... It is...