Over the past few months, I keep returning to Stephen Jenkinson’s wording of orphan wisdom.
Having tried on many different rituals, stories, and framings of being human and being in relationship with the world we inhabit - from rituals that mark the different seasons of the year, to where to find guidance and wisdom and spiritual connection, how to honour the more-than-human and meet the mystical, and which stories are being embodied - and finding in my adoption of these a playacting, a disconnection from anything truly carried within, I find in the story of orphan wisdom a soil I have been germinating the roots for.
‘Orphans are not people who have no parents. They are people who don’t know their parents, who cannot go to them from here. Mine is a culture built upon a ruthless foundation of flight and mass migration. It is now a culture of people unable to say who their people are, a culture of sorts, a culture in spite of itself. In that way we are, relentlessly, orphans. Being an orphan culture is not disqualification. It does not mean that we have no wisdom. But wisdom is being confused in our time with information, with opinion, with personal experience.
Not knowing where you are from is not the same thing as being from nowhere. But it does mean that there is work of all kinds to be done. It could be that the only way for successful refugees to make a culture from their flight is to first be faithful witnesses to the poverty of their origins, to what their ancestry now asks of them, instead of what it might have fated them to be. Our culture, if a culture it can be called, or all those things we have instead of a culture, has come to a time of savage despair, it seems. We’ve surrounded ourselves with the debris of refugeehood, to fill the hollow of orphanhood. We have become a danger to ourselves, and a menace to all who will come after us, and to the world. We abandon our dead to make our way, and we are mostly singular people. We might now be artificially intelligent, the twilight of our ancestors’ dream.
An orphan wisdom might be the only culture-making thing we can rightly, honourably or faithfully claim. There is immense grief in knowing this well and going towards it anyway. That grief could be our way of working now, our labour. It could be our beauty, too.
In an information-drunk culture like our own, knowledge must be the life-tested skill of gathering what is needed, truly needed, without killing life by getting what we want. Wisdom is endorsed by the ages, yes, but it is crafted, curated and called to account by the travails and torments and temper of this very time.’
I return often to the story of orphan wisdom, and I am awed that this story and I met at a time when I had (without intention but perhaps with the tiredness of the often tried) let go of looking to other people, other teachers, other cultures, other storytellers for the rituals, stories, and framings that root me, guide me, and move me.
I am awed that this story and I met at a time when rituals, stories, and framings birthed from within were arising like seedlings, rituals, stories, and framings that were, for the first time, truly meaningful for me.
What if those of us, of a time and a place and a way of being that makes of us orphans, have rituals, and stories, and framings gestating within us?
What if this orphanhood is the soil we can root into?
What if this orphanhood is the bridge into our relationship with the more-than-human and the other-than-human, with the movement of the moon and the sun and the sea and time, with the happenings of place and neighbourhood, with our daily location within past, present, and future, and our knowing of wisdom and beauty and awe?
What if orphanhood is worlding the world for future generations just as much as the expansive, kincentric, earth-honouring cosmovisions that indigenous peoples’ world?
And what might we discover in ourselves, and in our relationship with the world around us, if we hold our orphanhood with tenderness, willingness, and generosity?
I’ve been spending the last few months working on a long-form essay currently titled Words As Relational Portals, and Walls. Here’s its opening, as it’s forming right now:
’As I travel further into the relational nature of us human creatures and the universe we inhabit - and how we are being in relationship with this ecologicalness - I find myself spending more and more time with how words, and the meaning those words carry, can precisely, directly, and wholly express, mould, and disrupt that being in relationship with.’
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.