The Wild School welcomes you to our first weekend in the Village Events calendar ~ NEVER LAND: a weekend with our friend & teacher Stephen Jenkinson.
Join us in The Promised Land, Gleniffer, Gumbaynggirr Country (10 minutes out of Bellingen township) NSW Australia, from Saturday afternoon from 4pm, through to Sunday Evening 10pm. We will share a supper on Saturday evening and a long lunch together on the Sunday afternoon between sessions.
Full program will be provided to ticket holders.
Stephen Jenkinson, MTS, MSW is a worker, author, storyteller, musician and culture activist. In 2010, he founded Orphan Wisdom, a house for learning skills of deep living and making human culture that are mandatory in endangered, endangering times. It is a redemptive project that comes from where he comes from. It is rooted in knowing history, being claimed by ancestry, working for a time he won’t live to see. When not on the road, he makes books, succumbs to interviews, tends to labours on a small farm, mends broken handles and fences, and bends towards lifeways dictated by the seasons of the boreal borderlands.
A former counseling director of palliative care at a major Canadian hospital, Stephen is renowned for his speaking and writing on the subject of death and dying. In fact, the breadth of his thought and work extends far beyond the death trade, touching on many aspects of culture, notably language and etymology, money, agriculture, and the ‘unauthorized history of Western civilization.
From Stephen on Never Land:
“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?
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.”
– S.Jenkinson
