For 5 years Stephen Jenkins headed the counseling team of Canada’s largest home based palliative care programmme. Working with hundreds of dying people an d their families he found a “wretched anxiety” at the end of life.
Orphan Wisdom – Stephen Jenkinson is a teacher, author, storyteller, spiritual activist, ceremonialist and founder of the Orphan Wisdom School, a teaching house and learning house for the skills of deep living and making human culture. It is a redemptive project that comes from where we come from. It is rooted in knowing history, being claimed by ancestry, working for a time we may not see.
On his farm Jenkinson operates the Orphan Wisdom School, where he teaches his concept of living and dying well. In addition to Die Wise, he is the author of How It All Could Be: A Work Book for Dying People and Those Who Love Them and Money and the Soul’s Desires: A Meditation. A quietly charismatic man who wears his long gray hair in braids, Jenkinson often travels for speaking engagements that coincide with screenings of Griefwalker. I met him for this interview on a sunny afternoon in a hotel room near Worcester, Massachusetts. The film had been shown the night before, and he was scheduled to give a talk titled “Grief, Then Gratitude.” Gratitude, for Jenkinson, is not just being grateful for what we have. It’s how we should approach all of life, giving thanks for the good and the bad, the beginnings and the endings. (source: http://thesunmagazine.org)
Filmed by Ian MacKenzie ;is a media activist and filmmaker from Vancouver, Canada. He produces short films, feature docs, and original webseries, with a focus on “new paradigm” thinkers, artists, and activists. He made this film after flying out to attend his first full session of the Orphan Wisdom school, founded by Stephen Jenkinson and his wife Nathalie. more information: http://orphanwisdom.com