Jason Stewart

“Partying at this time of ecological meltdown is not affirming of reality, but an abdication from it. It is a place of false refuge especially so when there is no evidence of an acknowledgement of affirming life as it is, for this would require of these people a heartbrokeness.”
― Stephen Jenkinson

“Dying is active. Dying is not what happens to you. Dying is what you do. Dying”
― Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

“Grief doesn’t go away. It can change into many things and will, but as a substance and presence it never leaves. To have caused and witnessed suffering and loss of life means grief is eagerly awaiting your decision as to what direction it will take in your destiny: to make more life or to make more death and violence, internally or externally. The best decision is that all grief be turned into life-promoting grief-based beauty and usefulness. The willingness for violence-shattered soldiers to heal others makes their malady into medicine.

If a society is alive, and aware in this way, then those who have suffered loss will have a chance to heal, and those who have caused loss will be socially supported to sprout a new type of life-making person out of the death they have caused: a person who can now help others to heal from their losses, instead of both of them causing more loss to the rest of the world. This not only gives a place to these people, but having been remade into a new type of human, they will become an indispensible necessity for the future well-being of the community on the whole.

Only in such a way can one who has killed continue living without destroying even more: themselves and/or others. Alive, in love as one who can feel the heartbreak of another, they are praised by their community as useful human beings instead of being shunned or forgotten.”
― Martin Prechtel, The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise

“Orphan Wisdom is a teaching house and a learning house for the skills of making human culture.

Knowledge, in an information-drunk, competence addicted culture like our own, must be the life-tested skill of gathering what is needed to make life without killing life in the gathering.

Wisdom is the place where knowledge is fired, forged, and annealed to become something of great beauty, useful to the world.

Human Culture is made when that beauty swells into life and dies to nourish a time we won’t live to see.

Knowledge gathers wood and flint and gut. Wisdom conjures a cranky, playable fiddle from the gatherings. People who have been bathed in the grief and love for life play some small magnificence on those fiddles together, and sing their unknown songs, and make human culture.”
― Stephen Jenkinson