Never Land: Culture, Agriculture and the Striving after Belonging
In order to midwife his new book on culture and agriculture, grief and dirt, Stephen Jenkinson will be doing a residency at the Pari Center in Tuscay, Italy. Stephen will then head to Hajmat Końca in Katowice, Poland to offer a talk there:
WHEN: May 19th (evening session) & May 20th – 2 sessions
WHERE: ul. PCK 6/11, Katowice
The most bearable answer: we had no idea. The state of the world would then seem more tolerable if failure by naive ignorance was actually the case. But was it? If it wasn’t, this would entail a kind of intolerable inheritance. We’d quickly become the ancestral monsters no one would claim as their own. It’ll be a psychic DNA whose indelible stain won’t be amenable to cosmetic fixes.
We are children of strange times. Our birthmarks are both troubled and troubling. We do not, most of us, belong. We inhabit, we own, instead. Being in the world but not of it: that was once a foundation of Western spirituality. It will end up being a stain by which we will be held in disrepute. Our way with the land entrusted to us bears the marks of our unbelonging. Given the fact that we don’t have a long time here, we should proceed with an undesperate degree of urgency in the matter of land stewardship. There is a fine decision to be made: we bear the mark of our unbelonging either as an affliction or as an assignment.
Those coming to this event may have, voluntarily or not, opted for the latter. In this gathering we will raise these questions until they attain deliberateness and intention. We will work on inheritance, prejudice, spirit work, grief and wisdom. We will work with what is difficult to recognize and hard to live with.
REGISTRATION, EMAIL: emilka.medrzecka@gmail.com
HOSTS: Hajmat Końca and Instytut Dobrej Śmierci
People half our age will someday soon confront us with two questions: when you were my age, did you know what was happening (or what could happen)? And so, what did you do?
STEPHEN JENKINSON ~ culture activist, worker, author, founder of The Orphan Wisdom School ~
Jenkinson teaches internationally and is the creator and principal instructor of the Orphan Wisdom School, co-founded the school with his wife Nathalie Roy in 2010, convening semi-annually in Deacon, Ontario, and in northern Europe.
He has Master’s degrees from Harvard University (Theology) and the University of Toronto (Social Work).
He is the author of Reckoning (co-written with Kimberly Ann Johnson (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 and translated into Hebrew and Turkish), 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), Homecoming – The Haiku Sessions (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).
Stephen Jenkinson is also the subject of the feature length documentary film Griefwalker (National Film Board of Canada, 2008, dir. Tim Wilson and translated into five languages), 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).