Reckoning

From Stephen Jenkinson

Collaboration: I’ve come to it later in life. For a good stretch there I was properly after the sound I was entrusted with, charged with making. When the ‘for better and for worse, this is you” moments arrived, the sound arrived. I worked it. It worked me.
And after catching the melody of my allotment, and befriending it, I began to hear the possibilities for harmony. My Reckoning with Kimberly Johnson has been a real-time harmony of generations lifted up for the not yet born. We figured the place could use that sound.

The catalyst

Reckoning came on: A younger woman no longer young, author and teacher in her own right, sends a note in late fall 2021 to someone she doesn’t know, an older man not yet old, author too and activist of some kind. She proposes a talk she’ll promote. Her purpose: to wonder about what is happening to the moorings of her generation.

 

Whole-person heartbreak ensues, prompting another session, the next evening. As winter comes on, they do five more. By then, something is born of their wonderings. They consider the transcripts, they write a letter to each other, blessings of a kind, bindings of a kind. Reckoning is what they call their meeting and their book.

Reckoning is the cultural cyphering of Stephen Jenkinson and Kimberly Ann Johnson. It’s an unguarded, sober meeting with Spirit Work, Elderhood, Grief and Plague and Building Culture in a Me-First Era.

To be tried at home. With Companions.

Stephen Jenkinson

The acclaimed teacher, culture activist, and bestselling author of Die Wise and Come of Age, works that have reshaped the contemporary conversation around dying, elderhood, and the fate of culture. He is the founder of the Orphan Wisdom School and the host of the Nights of Grief & Mystery tour, a concert of storytelling and music that has drawn tens of thousands into a deeper apprenticeship with sorrow, wonder, and what it means to be human.

Read more about each of them in the following pages.

Kimberly Ann Johnson

The bestselling author of the early mothering classic The Fourth Trimester: Healing Your Body, Balancing Your Emotions and Restoring Your Vitality, published in seven languages around the world. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, Vogue, New York Magazine’s The Cut, Harper’s Bazaar. She is the host of the Sex, Birth and Trauma podcast with over half a million unique downloads.

Read more about each of them in the following pages.

The BOOK

Reckoning

Available in Audiobook and Paperback

A book about the long shadow of our refusals and obligations, and the rough, redemptive culture-making that begins when we learn to live with what we’ve set in motion.

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