Latest Posts

Only the Living Die

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...

He’s not done yet … 2025

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...

WINTER ATTENTION

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...

WINTER HOUSE KEEPING

  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...

IN THE WAKE OF THE FIRST NEVER LAND / SEVER LAND SESSIONS

"From the ground up, that's a good description of civilization.  From the ground in, that's culture.  Civilization and culture head in different directions." Stephen Jenkinson We have now completed the firs two sessions of Never Land / Sever Land with Stephen Jenkinson & Kimberly Ann Johnson. On our end we gathered with Stephen in the Great Hall while...

MANAGING / BLESSING

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...

VERITAS

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...