What Dying Teaches Living
PREPARING FOR my conversation with the guru of grief, one of our elders, Stephen Jenkinson, tomorrow night, I realise—though we say things differently—how much thought we share.
Jenkinson is a palliative care worker, a thinker, a wise-acre, and more latterly a band member of Rough Gods. His books include Die Wise and Coming of Age. Orphan Wisdom is the name of where and what he teaches about growing up to ourselves. Orphan wisdom is a body of knowing and dwelling—understandings and practices of living and hearthing and caring—that a culture, such as his and mine, which has orphaned itself from elder wisdom, would do well to learn before it’s too late for us and for the earth we have occupied with so little heart.
Though he says he is not a poem, his utterances lead me back to many poems, including some of my own. Our title Tuesday night is The Wisdom of Time. And I wonder what he will say time teaches us about living slowly, living deeply; I wonder what he will say about what we learn from dying about life.
I’m trying, as time moves too fast, too flush with things, to finish a poem I began two weeks back after Lucy and Henry swam with me at Flat Rock in the Upper Kangaroo Valley. That poem includes these lines, which seem on point: “In the potholes, which know no floor my feet can find,/ the moments pool, while the years disappear/ Downstream, and time drains eras from the hanging/ swamps… Eternity’s made of moments that don’t know how/ To pass, and one of them’s not passing here this late/ September afternoon…”
My poem “Time Passages,” written for Alan Holley, who composed from it a choral work for the Australian Chamber Choir, is a reflection on two different apprehensions of time, the Dreaming and the clock, which met in Botany Bay a couple of hundred years ago, I wonder “what if we live/ two lives at once: one like/ An ocean; the other, a shore? What if who/ We are did not begin with us…” And again, I say, “ Time does not pass in the country of/ the mind; the heart/ is not a race time runs,/ for time is tidal there.”
Grief is a practice, Jenkinson says, that won’t get you invited to too many parties, but it can teach you love; it can teach you gratitude. Covid is a god come to teach us some manners; one’s own dying as a gift one carries, and should learn to honour and bear out, as a duty to one’s life and one’s children’s lives: these are some of the beatuiful ideas of Stephen Jenkinson, a Canadian writer, singer, farmer, teacher, grief practitioner. And I look forward to talking through some of them with him for Talking Sticks tomorrow night:
https://orphanwisdom.com/event/stephen-jenkinson-at-talking-sticks/
In a culture that does not believe in endings, what will we deal with heartbreak? Jenkinson plaintively asks in this interview I found in my research. His answer: “less heart.” More pills. More shrillness, I’d add, and shaming and ghosting and outrage, more self-righteousness at what barely counts. Instead of what poetry practises and might teach one to perform—the transfiguration, through an attention to the lyric of one’s words and actions and days, of pain into beauty, of loss into love.
As I write in “Grief Wears a Body,” “You learn to grieve by grieving, and nothing must rush the work./ Rain will fell you earthward;/ be in no haste to rise. Grief lasts as long/ As love was deep./ I want to say it’s work that doesn’t pay,/ But there’s a living you earn by putting in the time./ Grief pays for what it takes by all it gives.” And what a practice of grief has given Jenkinson, he says, is a gift for love, a natural gratitude, a dedication to living deeply, to dying beautifully day by day, but living a deliberate life.
Catch us on Tuesday evening (Wednesday morning, Ontario time), 20 October 2020.
