00:00:00.000Hey for the wild community, it's Ayanna here, and I wanted to share a few updates before we get into our conversation with Stephen Jenkinson.
00:00:09.260So first off, for those of you who donated to the One Million Redwoods Kickstarter, thank
00:05:34.880a lyrical, poetic portrait of his work with dying people.
00:05:39.080Stephen lives in a handmade, off-the-grid life on a farm beside the River of Abundance and Time in the Ottawa Valley in Ontario, Canada.
00:05:47.860Well, welcome back to For the Wild, Stephen. It is such a gift to be sharing space with you in this way again.
00:05:55.060You're very kind. Thanks for the invitation.
00:05:57.160Since we last spoke, you have composed a new book, Come of Age, The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble, which is to be released this summer.
00:06:08.180And I listened to a recent interview, and it led me to reflect upon how dominant culture neither encourages nor celebrates elderhood.
00:06:18.680Instead, it exalts youthfulness, and I think this obsession with youth is entwined with
00:06:25.580capitalist ideals of limitless growth.
00:06:28.920In this interview, you said, quote, elderhood is a consequence of life's limits, not life's
00:06:55.120Okay. Well, let's see what we can do with this. I mean, it's a very, your question cuts a wide
00:07:00.800swath, of course, even though you've quoted me in there somewhere. But let me start with
00:07:05.820something maybe easier to approach and not so conceptual. And it's something like this. Why did
00:07:11.040I take on, was I drawn to this subject or how did this come about? And you could say, well,
00:07:16.640you know, you're 63, it's kind of in the territory. Well, a lot of 63-year-olds don't
00:07:21.800write about elderhood. In fact, virtually none of them do, in English at least, maybe in other
00:07:26.800languages I know nothing of. So there's the first thing. I mean, I look around as I did when I worked
00:07:32.420in the death trade, and I looked around for some sign, some indication that the dominant culture
00:07:38.960and all of its citizens were kind of in the ballpark of what was happening. Not on top of
00:07:45.120it necessarily because who can be these days but at the very least that there was a combination of
00:07:51.060curiosity and something like concern that drove people in the direction of what's happening now
00:07:57.400I don't mean what's current and sexy now I mean what's happening you can't go to the news for that
00:08:05.100you have to be remarkably discerning and have the capacity for a real cultivated
00:08:10.920discipline, or as I've often threatened the people in my Orphan Wisdom School, one day the reading
00:08:18.180list is going to be 20 books long, and the assigned question will be, what's not in any of the books
00:08:24.400that you've read? So this is how I came to it. I simply wondered, where's the elderhood function
00:08:30.240to be found? Because early on, that was my first take on it, that elders are not personality types,
00:08:36.600They're not in nice gowns and nicely coiffed hair or no hair at all, depends on your style, and things of this kind, that they're not in fact, elderhood doesn't really have much regard for or use for, or maybe even ways of employing particular personality types.
00:08:55.440But maybe it's a function instead of a person.
00:08:58.920Maybe it's a way instead of a thing done.
00:09:02.700That's what I started to wonder about.
00:09:04.080So needless to say, I looked and I looked and I looked in vain for something like a concerted, ongoing, recognizable elder function in the culture.
00:09:17.320And here's the irony I came upon very, very quickly.
00:09:21.280We, no news to anyone listening to this or yourself, this is an aging population in North America.
00:09:26.700and for the next, I don't know, 15 or thereabouts years, that will be the case that the lion's share
00:09:33.640of the population will be over, I don't know, 50, whatever the numbers are. You would think then,
00:09:39.980let's do the obvious math on it. If you have more old folks per square foot than you've ever had1.00
00:09:47.020before, which we do numerically and as a ratio of the population, it would stand to reason then0.51
00:09:54.180that we would have more elders than ever before or would it or does it even better because it's
00:10:03.820not hypothetical you know I could simply ask you is it your experience that the culture that has
00:10:10.020given you your education and your concerns and your style options and everything in between
00:10:16.480has provided you with so much elder presence in your life that you actually need a break from it
00:10:25.360because you're forever guided by its presence and its affable wisdom and its time-tested
00:10:32.100abilities and its sustainability. I mean, I'm asking this somewhat in jest because I'm guessing
00:10:38.860you wouldn't even have this podcast and you wouldn't be having me on it
00:10:43.380if that was true about your life personally, that you were awash in the presence of elders
00:10:49.020in your life. So how can this be then that we got more old people than ever before
00:10:55.620and we don't have a commensurate presence of elders in that demographic? Well, it's in the
00:11:03.800reasoning where you look for the gap or the shortfall. You don't look for it in the old
00:11:08.920people per se, you ask yourself this instead, from whence comes elderhood? Does it come from age?
00:11:18.160Does it come from the sort of cumulative sort of blunt force trauma of the thing that we call
00:11:25.120experience? Is elderhood an inevitable consequence of an aging population? And I think the answer to
00:11:33.680all those questions is no. It's none of those things. As it turns out, our reliance upon
00:11:39.180experience as the midwife of elderhood has put the emphasis on the wrong syllable,
00:11:45.020culturally speaking, because it imagines that sheer endurance confers wisdom. Let's just call
00:11:52.820it experience. Experiences and wisdom, they're not synonymous, nor does one inevitably give
00:12:00.820over to the other. In fact, enough experience in one place and one person produces trauma just as
00:12:08.580likely as it produces wisdom. And then the next thing is to wonder, well, what is this wisdom
00:12:15.640thing if it's not the cumulative consequence of just a lot of experience? Well, you and I are
00:12:22.100contributing to the dilemma surrounding wisdom right now as we're speaking, because the notion
00:12:28.660of wisdom has been so desperately, let's call it democratized, through the new media that's
00:12:35.080available in the last, I don't know, 15 years or something, that instead of an understanding of
00:12:41.020wisdom, what we have is a kind of marketplace jangle of opinion. The understanding being that
00:12:48.220if enough opinion is out there, you hear the theme again, if there's enough opinion out there,
00:12:52.940wisdom will just kind of inevitably out itself and emerge and become inherently useful.
00:13:00.840Well, we're a little bit, we're well into the experiment of social media now. And I would dare
00:13:07.260say that our encounters with wisdom are no more numerous now as a result of this media
00:13:13.180than they were before it. If anything, the notion of wisdom itself has taken a hit.
00:13:19.000Okay, so if you add all of the, I go on, of course, but if you add all of this up, I'm answering the question from whence came my concern about the book.
00:19:36.080You have a clear sense of that. Not a lot of fun at parties. And of course, I don't get invited to
00:19:40.520them anyway. But not that I'm asking. I'm just observing that. Well, here's the thing. First of
00:19:47.680all, you're kind enough to ask me to appear on your program, but this does not confer upon me
00:19:52.540or anything I say, some kind of timeless, sagely, I get it, I've got it, don't worry,
00:20:00.920I'll let you know kind of status at all. It's really important to keep saying this over and
00:20:05.240over again. Because in a time of phantom talking heads and so on, if you make it to the airwaves,
00:20:12.680you're already trafficking in this idea that you've got something fundamental to say. I don't
00:20:18.080accept that assumption at all. So I have to earn my way towards being listened to. I don't assume
00:20:25.200it by any stretch of the imagination, right? That's the first thing. So the second thing would
00:20:30.000be this. I don't have a plan. I don't have a scheme. I don't have the answers. I don't feel
00:20:37.460any obligation to have the answers. I think that is a seduction at least as fierce as anything that
00:20:45.240comes from the marketplace. You asked me about the youth culture, I think, earlier. A little bit of
00:20:51.340the new book has leaked out. In fact, I think I leaked it, but I forgot. But it's out there a
00:20:56.780little bit. And there's already been responses. And as I predicted in the book, and as I've said
00:21:03.580whenever I've taught this material, the lion's share of the volatile reactivity against what
00:21:10.020I'm talking about comes from people my age and older. It's quite interesting. It's very important
00:21:16.940to observe it because ostensibly at least, I wrote a book about elderhood for those people who are
00:21:23.500demographically in the ballpark, you see, not as an instruction manual, but as a plea.
00:21:32.300I'm pleading for them to reconsider what the latter half of their life is for.
00:21:39.560And they might say to me, who are you? And I say, well, I can answer the question,
00:21:43.760but it's not that relevant. Who am I to do such a thing? But I waited, frankly, for somebody else.
00:21:50.120and I stopped waiting and I just decided well I'll just I'll kind of wade into this thing
00:21:56.600and one of the most relied upon offenses is this allegation about youth culture now I'm not
00:22:06.480pretending for one second that there's not such a thing or that it's it's the sexy beast and has
00:22:12.220been well since I was young myself probably you know youth in and of itself is a value
00:22:19.540today. It's absolutely bizarre and it's everywhere. I grant all of that. And it's pernicious in how
00:22:27.380it leans upon aging people and it leans upon people who begin to look their age when that
00:22:34.380is no longer a compliment. If it ever was a compliment to say to someone that you look your
00:22:40.160age, you don't look your age is more often a compliment. But for all of that, I would like to
00:22:45.980Raise the ante about it all and say, I don't think it is in the realm or in the job description of being an elder to be thwarted in your elderhood by the dominant culture worshipping youth.
00:23:15.980That's not a good enough reason, okay, to take your marbles and go home or stay inside the gated communities or just stick with your own age group or whatever else the decisions might be that ensue from that or the offense or the hurt or the feeling that you enjoy at best a kind of liminal status that nobody has any recourse to you anymore.
00:23:38.940that you've become um sorry i forget the word in manufacturing terms when the the item is no
00:23:45.420longer necessary it's been it's been you know co-opted by the latest new version of things
00:23:50.340whatever the word is it's just not enough it's not good enough and here's why
00:23:54.720because the subtitle of the new book is the case for elderhood in a time of trouble
00:24:00.480that's a very important thing for me to put in there because it is one thing to talk about
00:24:05.620quote elderhood in the abstract, although I don't think there is such a thing as elderhood
00:24:10.860in the abstract. It's another thing entirely, though, to wonder about what has become of
00:24:16.880elderhood in a time so utterly threatened and threatening, so utterly endangered and endangering
00:24:25.500that the ante is upped on us all, because the time will come. It's already emerging,
00:24:33.680But the time will come when someone one half your age, even one third your age, will ask
00:24:41.040you in one way or another, when you were my age, they'll say to you, did you know what
00:25:09.160You could be deciding that it's too late, that there's nothing to be done, that you're tired, that you worked already for 40 years in the marketplace.
00:25:19.560Okay, but that doesn't mean the question is not going to come.
00:25:22.380And it doesn't mean at some level that person one-third of your age doesn't deserve an answer for the likes of you once you hit your 60s or your 70s.
00:25:32.340So what are you going to say? Because whatever you and I are doing today will contribute to
00:25:39.880whatever answer you have to give when that day comes. So somewhere in there, the answer is going
00:25:46.560to come to something like this. If you're willing to be really candid and not defend yourself,
00:25:52.320it might sound something like this. Well, everybody who wanted to know what was happening
00:25:58.180when I was your age could have known there was enough ways of finding out if you were brave
00:26:05.940enough and if you're heartbroken enough, you could have found out. But the truth is that when I was
00:26:12.860your age, not everybody wanted to know what was happening. So not everybody did. And that's a
00:26:21.600candid truth. You know, here's the other question that will come along. Okay, so what did you do?
00:26:30.660And not only did I write the book with those two questions ringing in my ears,
00:26:34.300but I'm speaking to you now with those two questions ringing in my ears. And I can't imagine
00:26:41.140looking someone your age in the eye and saying, you know, it's just such a drag that everybody's
00:26:48.560worshiping youth. I just feel useless and I take it as a personal insult or tragedy or worse and
00:26:56.100I'm defeated by it. Given everything that's going on in this world right now, I'm afraid that that
00:27:02.940defeat is indefensible. It might be accurate emotionally and psychologically and spiritually
00:27:09.200accurate, but is indefensible given the troubled times that we're in. So last thing I'll say on
00:27:16.460this subject, then you could imagine or reimagine that elderhood's function is not a universal
00:27:23.880function, nor an eternal function, that the ways and means of elderhood are purely and properly
00:27:32.660a consequence of the times in which the elder finds himself or herself. In other words,
00:27:40.900your understanding of elderhood is dictated to you by the times that you occupy. So elderhood,
00:27:49.780first and foremost, is both a child of its time and in some way a redemption of its time.
00:27:58.080And it takes enormous courage of the heart, an enormous discipline to take what you know about
00:28:04.880what's happening in this world and translate it to a purposeful or a purpose-driven life,
00:28:11.720I guess I would call it. But that is your practice for elderhood, to do that very translating.
00:35:49.060And please, let's go back to what you're going to ask.
00:35:51.260But it's very important that people begin to seriously question to the point of undermining the assumption that more, if anything, grants you greater opportunity to respond, to react, to have a fulsome, heart-engaged reaction or response to anything at all.
00:36:10.480It's demonstrably, in your generation, no longer true.
00:36:15.000If it ever was true, it's not true anymore.
00:36:18.540I'm so happy that we're on this topic because I am somebody who was just consuming information.
00:36:29.860And it was almost like this addiction to a type of suffering of trying to take in as
00:39:24.980And if we have any respect for them, any love for them in principle at all, we will try
00:39:31.160our best to engineer a world in which there are fewer or less of everything than there was
00:39:38.160when you came on the scene or when I did. And that includes less frigging yammer.
00:39:45.500Okay. By which I mean, wouldn't it be something if this ludicrous idea that everybody has an0.81
00:39:52.880opinion, a right to an opinion and a right to express it and to be heard was challenged
00:39:59.540fundamentally and held to a standard of something like discipline or learnedness or something like
00:40:06.920wisdom, where the idea would come around that maybe your right to an opinion has to have the
00:40:14.700consequence of deepening, feeding, sustaining the culture. Not sustaining you, but the culture
00:40:25.180instead. You know, last thing about it. I'm asked fairly routinely now to lead people in various
00:40:33.060ceremonial endeavors. I don't advertise it. I'm not advertising it now. But this observation
00:40:39.120comes from that. When I'm asked to do these weddings, one of the things you see is there's
00:40:45.860an understanding of a wedding ceremony that it's a rubber stamp upon how two people feel about each
00:40:53.820other. But that has never been what a wedding is. A wedding is to craft something that isn't there
00:41:03.240now, that isn't there as a result of cohabitation, for example, isn't there as a result of common
00:41:10.220law union, that there is something fundamental. The word used is matrimony, that matrimony
00:41:17.320happens as a consequence of people undertaking certain things, ceremonially speaking. Whenever
00:41:23.500I do these things I see to it that symbolically and materially and in every other way I can think
00:41:31.420to do it that I insert the culture and its problems and its betterment in between the two
00:41:40.480people that I am wedding and I insist that it be there throughout the ceremony and after it
00:41:48.020I literally put the world between these two people and their feelings for one another.
00:41:54.020My assumption being at least that how you feel about each other, if it passes through the world, you see, doesn't go directly back and forth between the two of you like a Pokemon game, but actually passes through the medium called the world.
00:42:11.240That the world is the beneficiary of your willingness to enter into this matrimony.
00:42:16.960not the two of you, the world that has granted you virtually everything. So this is my way of
00:42:24.560holding even the public yammer and my participation in it to some kind of standard that can have
00:42:31.560deep efficacy, that I'm not sitting here, listen to myself talk, admiring the sound of my own voice,
00:42:38.920even though clearly I talk a lot. But I'm trying to speak in such a way that I would tend eventually
00:42:46.040towards silence, which I understand the responsibility of any elder to do is to work
00:42:51.940themselves out of a job. You see, if you're doing the work, you are less and less mandatory
00:42:58.600in the arrangement. If you're doing the work, they'll need you less and less. And I learned
00:43:05.080this when I was in the death trade. People would ask me all the time, oh, so you were there at the
00:43:10.240moment of death of all these hundreds of thousands of people? I said, no, no, I wasn't there. There
00:43:15.300is that many people that I was involved with. But if I was there at the end, man, that's a little
00:43:21.740ghoulish, isn't it? That I engineered an arrangement in which I was needed up to the point of death and
00:43:27.300even beyond. When in actual fact, if I'm serving these people at all, should I not becoming more
00:43:34.300and more obsolete in that function? Should they not be able to turn to each other and to their
00:43:40.520circle of companions and so on in their lives and this death wisdom become democratic instead of
00:43:48.040more specialized which is what's happening it's becoming more specialized it's no surprise the
00:43:54.340dominant culture has a remarkable capacity to not change while appearing to change and you are
00:44:02.120seeing that happen in this parallel universe now of these alternative death practitioners the death
00:44:08.500doulas and all that, if you pay close attention to what they say that their job is, you will find
00:44:15.700it's another iteration of the job that's already there to help somebody die. But it never wonders0.74
00:44:23.160what happens when the somebody in question doesn't want to die, refuses to die, won't understand
00:44:29.500themselves in those terms even. Who are you helping now? And what's your repertoire for being helpful
00:44:35.160and comforting and all the rest. That's what I called into question in that book,
00:44:41.300Die Wise. And this new one, I guess I'm calling into question the very notion
00:44:45.240that older people simply by their presence should be, quote, reassuring, unquote.0.51
00:44:52.220There is a quote from the book that's handy in my mind right now. So I'd like to tell you,
00:44:56.240because I'm proud of it, proud of that I came up with it. And it said something in the order of
00:45:00.960this. Elders call still water to rise when the people have forgotten their thirst.
00:47:47.880I've been thinking a lot about the disparities between what we say we want as these children of the dominant culture and what we actually want in movements for social and environmental justice, per se.
00:48:05.200and I see true equity as being unachievable and not even just true equity I mean all the things
00:48:14.280even talking about as unachievable as long as there is capitalism and addiction to consumption
00:48:21.020and addiction to staying alive and youthful and so on and so forth for example even if
00:48:29.240racial fissures and economic fissures were equalized or healed in the United States
00:48:34.840the surface of long lines of slave labor and earth suffering would barely be scratched globally.
00:48:41.980So I wonder, what are your thoughts on equity, fairness, and freedom for humanity as realities
00:48:49.320versus idealistic illusions that just make us feel better when we say we're fighting for them?
00:48:58.580This is a very well-wrought question, and it's a bit overwhelming. Anybody who leaps into the
00:49:04.360fray with a ready answer to the question that you've just asked is not to be relied upon
00:49:10.480necessarily. And so I don't have a one-size-fits-all, don't worry about it kind of response
00:49:18.600to that. I would say that confoundment that you've described is a mandatory confoundment to have
00:49:25.680when faced on the one side with the systemic deep injustices that you've identified.
00:49:33.140Yes, indeed. Historically and in a contemporary way, the dilemmas that you've articulated about deep inequity are systemic, show no sign of backing off, and bedevil and bedraggle any attempt to wrangle any other kind of fundamental change. Absolutely true.
00:49:53.540all I would say in support of your confoundment would be this. One of the things that really
00:50:01.020concerns me about people coming to me with this kind of global scaled conscience is that
00:50:10.800they tend, from what I can see, to be in some fashion both enraged and paralyzed simultaneously
00:50:19.700And without realizing that one begets the other, that the rage, as understandable as it is, is a midwife for the impotence. You know, you're rising up against nothing. There's nobody there.
00:50:35.880The forces that you're talking about, that you'd like to take on, it's sort of Don Quixote style, right? You're looking for the windmill. The bad guys concentrated in one place. But the bad guys, quote unquote, are way ahead of you in this regard. They don't sit in one place waiting for you to find them, right? That's not how it works.
00:50:56.900The caginess necessary to understand the arrangement confounds your easy take on right and wrong, okay? Right and wrong are two possibilities now, but they're not, everything doesn't divide up that way into right.
00:51:15.200It's too confounding. The people that you would want to, quote, free from the shackles are also beneficiaries of the arrangement that you've articulated.
00:51:27.060So you're not going to get a lot of takers as soon as you try to operationalize this kind of paralyzed conscience, kind of macro level insight thing.
00:51:39.040The principal reason being that our take on what constitutes human has been really compromised by the dilemmas you've described.