With
Stephen Jenkinson &Kimberly Ann Johnson
These newly released recordings are an in depth exploration into culture making.
Bonus Included: a new never-seen before session – “The Aftermath”
Who is this for?
• Wedding celebrants
• Culture Workers
• Rites of passage guides
• Men’s & Women’s work leaders
• Those looking to get married
• Community Leaders
• Oral storytellers
• Ceremonialists
Are you thinking of getting married and don’t know where to start?
Maybe you don’t have a religion or family tradition or cultural mooring…and are seeking something more than what you’ve seen.
Are you tired of the cliché narratives and find yourself looking for more depth, perspective, heart, history, lineage, tradition, and some eldership for key life events ahead?
Maybe you’ve been invited to a wedding, and want to bring something more to the ceremony than your presence.
Ever wondered about how to approach toasts and gifts?
Are you overcome by grief or at a crossroads, realizing that the healing tools you’ve previously leaned on are no longer working anymore?
Immerse Yourself in these Conversations
In February 2024 Stephen and Kimberly came together live for 5 sessions to explore the topics of Patrimony, Matrimony, Kinship, Ancestors & Ceremony. These were unscripted, realtime encounters. The sessions were professionally filmed and are now available for the first time, along with the never-before seen session – “The Aftermath”
Access
Watch or listen to 5 x 120 minute professionally recorded sessions with live studio audience
Community
Join a private Facebook group to discuss & connect with others
Book Preview
Read pages from: To Mother Culture: Patrimony, Matrimony, Ceremony
Bonus Session
Access the never-before seen session: The Aftermath:
The Aftermath reveals some of what it takes, body, mind and spirit, to do this culture work. The day after their fifth session, Stephen and Kimberly reflect on the inspiration for Forgotten Pillars and what they learned about themselves, and their work together, by doing it. It’s an intimate snapshot of two creative partners finding the language to describe what drives their ongoing collaboration and opening up about what the work asks each of them.
“Matrimony is an act of cultural memory.”
“Dying people, and dead people too, and marrying people, none of them I’d say have the right to take from the rest of us a crucial rite of passage by which the living are drawn down into the reality that their lives have changed irrevocably.
It isn’t their funeral, and it isn’t theirs to take away. Nor is it their wedding. It’s a village rite, a communal affirmation of the village’s ways of going on, not quite being able to.
The village, or what’s left of it, deserves a rite of recognition of the seismic change in their lives that matrimony would make, given half a chance. Matrimony doesn’t belong to the betrothed. It belongs to the communities that live out and enforce and endure the changes in life that matrimony is supposed to bring.
There is a real, palpable consequence to turning away from public ceremony– and not just for the public.”
Stephen Jenkinson – excerpt from forthcoming book:
To Mother Culture: Patrimony, Matrimony, Ceremony (Sounds True, 2025)
“How we are with each other, certainly in the heights and depths of our heart’s life, is how we are with what is holy in this world”
Dear Ones,
One of the unexpected consequences of working with Stephen Jenkinson is that I got married. I’m not saying that I wouldn’t have done it otherwise. I am saying that he, possibly inadvertently, pushed me over the edge.
I also watched a dear friend of mine, someone devoted to freedom, who always said she wanted deep commitment but didn’t need marriage, decide to get married.
I watched the alchemy happen before my eyes in the audience at a Reckoning event as Stephen Jenkinson elaborated on the poverties, as he calls them, of a culture that side-eyes matrimony for all the obvious reasons- women as property, marriages not lasting anyway, religious non-affiliation, and out-dated vows and agreements.
The liminal moments will always be places for potential alchemy, but with little practice and minimal ritual, it’s more likely that we are lost or empty-handed. Or maybe you have plugged into someone else’s traditions for rites of passages, and it works for a while, but you’ve begun to consider what the ways of your people might have been and how those have been so hard to grasp.
So in early 2023, Stephen and I set out to gather around Forgotten Pillars: Patrimony, Matrimony, Kinship, Ancestors, and Ceremony. There was a plan in the works for him to do his winter relocation downstairs from me, which we affectionately deemed “shacking up at the complex.” He needed to get out of minus 80 degree Canadian winter. I live in San Diego. We had several projects to work on together. He had a couple manuscripts near completion that I would try to help him get to the finish line. One of those manuscripts was called Matrimony: Wizened and Wild in the Bonehouse of Love. I was, frankly, dying to get my hands on it.
Then the day before Stephen was leaving Canada to come to the States, he received a life altering diagnosis. By the time he arrived in Southern California, none of us was sure what was possible or what was reasonable or what was advisable.
We continued on organizing the Forgotten Pillars trusting that an anchor of meaningful work would be orienting. We would film upstairs in my apartment to minimize wear and tear. We would come to each Sunday session with a promise of a 60 or 90 minute talk and see what was possible.
The plan worked. For five Sundays, ten or so good people gathered in my living room. Seven hundred or so good people tuned in from around the world. And engaging the topic of Matrimony did indeed breathe life into those book embers. Stephen finished the book!
The book now has a new title: To Mother Culture, and will be published by Sounds True in Spring 2025.
If you choose to court culture and matrimony and give this Forgotten Pillars series your attention, you will receive pages from this new book that Stephen also reads from during the series.
You will also be invited into an intimate unfolding of discovering what’s possible when two people come together faithful to what’s happening in the moment. You might even call it ceremonial.
I recommend that you watch these sessions with someone. Whether that’s a beloved, or a family member, or a friend. You’d be surprised how many people are unexpectedly enchanted by the places these conversations can take us. I recommend that you watch one session per week, which is the pace we intended – each session spirals into the next, layering and deepening.
Between sessions, you can write, gather, and wonder.
As dire world and planetary circumstances intensify and the way people treat one another is increasingly lacking in grace or etiquette of any kind, the hunger for ceremony and anything sacred is palpable.
If there was ever a time to gather around, the time is now.
Have courage!
“Self-sufficiency subverts village mindedness. Even if you can do it yourself, you shouldn’t.”
Stephen Jenkinson
About Stephen Jenkinson:
Stephen is a worker, author, storyteller, culture activist, and co-founder of the Orphan Wisdom School with his wife Nathalie Roy. The school is a teaching house for skills of deep living and making human culture that are mandatory in endangered, endangering times. He makes books, tends farm and mends broken handles and fences, succumbs to interviews, teaches and performs internationally.
He has Master’s degrees from Harvard University (Theology) and the University of Toronto (Social Work).
Apprenticed to a master storyteller when a young man, he has worked extensively with dying people and their families, is former program director in a major Canadian hospital, former assistant professor in a prominent Canadian medical school.
Stephen Jenkinson is the author of: Reckoning (2022), co-authored with Kimberly Ann Johnson, A Generation’s Worth: Spirit Work While the Crisis Reigns (2021), Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble (2018), the award-winning Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul (2015), Homecoming: The Haiku Sessions (a live teaching, 2013), How it All Could Be: A workbook for dying people and those who love them (2009), Angel and Executioner: Grief and the Love of Life – (live teaching, 2009), and Money and The Soul’s Desires: A Meditation (2002).
He is also the subject of the feature length documentary film Griefwalker, a portrait of his work with dying people, and Lost Nation Road, a shorter documentary on the crafting of the Nights of Grief and Mystery tours.
About Kimberly Ann Johnson:
Kimberly Johnson is an author, postpartum care activist, trauma educator, structural bodyworker and mother. She graduated Valedictorian from Northwestern University with a BS in Social Policy (‘97).
She studied yoga directly with the three main lineage holders of the Krishnamacharya tradition- Desikachar, BKS Iyengar, and Pattabhi Jois and taught yoga full time for 15 years, while also maintaining a Structural Integration practice.
When radically rearranged by childbirth, Kimberly’s life changed shape to attend to the cultural chasm of postpartum care, and as a result she trained in Somatic Experiencing and Sexological Bodywork to be able to help women heal from birth injuries, gynecological surgeries and sexual boundary violations.
She is the author of the recent Call of the Wild: How We Heal Trauma, Awaken Our Own Power and Use it for Good published by the feminist imprint HarperWave as well as the early mothering classic, The Fourth Trimester: A Postpartum Guide to Healing Your Body, Balancing Your Emotions and Restoring Your Vitality (Shambhala, 2017) – translated into 8 languages. She is the host of the Sex Birth Trauma podcast with over 930,000 unique downloads.
Praise from Participants
“I love you both for your crying tender delicate water drinking human caring ordinary moments you are offering us. And the extraordinary reach of your compass is so good for my heart” – Ashley Natalya
“Wordless and weeping, shaken and stirred, I went out to the garden to pray.” – Peggy Tileston
The whole experience is still unfolding for me. I realize now that I was really moving to a new view of myself, the world, and my place in it. And the pillars fed into it. Its resonances are still rippling through me. I am not sure where I’m wandering next. But I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say pillars is supporting something new being built. — Kevin Johnson
“Last night I attended the wedding of a long time client. I have been with her & her partner through two babies, moves, the addition of furred loves and the transformation of life long aches. My career has been transitioning from birth/postpartum to loss for the last two years. And last night, times collided as the bride’s mother shared a diagnosis and me, simply, my attention and hand. Life is about to change for all of these precious souls. All of this to say, I’m listening to week one in my head right now. What it means to be a pillar. How we pillar well. How we come alongside humanity as each rite bubbles forth, especially the unexpected one. All this to say, giving immense thanks to be here with all of you right now.” Jennifer Magnano
“Watching the video/listening to Kimberly and Stephen, is akin to soaking in a deep and wide, mineral-rich pool of Nuance & Ambiguity. And yet the outlines of a Reckoning also exist within this holy ambiguity, building the foundation to our culture-making as edgewalkers. And this is just the first of five.” Andrea Haeckel
“If the truth of our impending gone-ness is allowed into the room, rather than being avoided or fought off with every tool and technology available to us, the meaning of our lives has a chance to begin to do it’s work and offer something, even before we take our last breath.
This kind of revelation happened for me as I watched Kimberly, in the final moments of the last conversational session, cry, unable, rightly so, to wind up the conversation into some kind of grand “takeaway” or some kind of professionally curated ending designed to keep those present comfortable and at a proper distance. Instead she broke down crying, got on her knees, and put her head in Stephen’s lap.
It broke my heart to see this, to see her model and practice an ending, to let the enormity of it be revealed, witnessed, shared, given to a community of people as a gift needed, a gift that only reveals its necessity and consequence when received.
All of us watching were brought into the intimacy, realness, and measure of the moment, held in the tender closure, and also held by a tender opening – an invitation to get down on our knees and live, and feel, and place our heads in the preciousness of what will soon be gone. All those I’ve lost were closer to me in that moment as well.
It made me want to live and appreciate this whole mess of life more fully, including the hard, hurtful truth of knowing it will come to an end.” Samantha Wallen
“So beautiful. This is definitely a multi-listen experience. Thank you Kimberly Ann Johnson. I am so moved by the Restraint that is being expressed here. “Wisdom is not democratic…” … the slow unfolding, the restraining of what is too much, too fast, the deliberate honoring of sequence. It is an antidote to the on-demand soundbite superficiality that has overtaken our culture. Harkens back to my earlier days of years long study with an elder teacher, repeat gatherings, no chasing a “reward” each time. Albeit this is more swirled in poetry and lyricism. I loved your and SJ’s point about how this is the opposite of “de-mystifying” things. That feels about right to me. No Google Translate on hand here, for instant gratification, and immediate To Do’s. Youare Shining a light on the forgotten pillar of elder-hood, lighting a path forward for us. I just shared some of what I garnered with my husband and had a bit of a weep, so…. it resonates deeply.
The part about how matrimony may need YOU more than you need, want, or even always enjoy IT, feels so right, and how Patrimony is the function of building the home for the spirit to enter, that may require sacrifice (“making sacred”)… but that is simply not seen, understood, or honored by most today–not valued. It all helps me understand why for my husband, sometimes being married and literally holding this home physically for his family each day (doing the work of unvisible patrimony?) (chopping wood, gathering water, and more) feels so torturous and frustrating, overly turned in on itself and too domesticated…. I have more empathy now… So much to wonder about.” Amely Greeven
“I have heard it said that a conversation with only two sides (yes/no – I agree/disagree) is not worth having. Listening to Stephen over the past 5-6 years I find myself learning how to wonder and disengaging from the afore mentioned habit of mind. I use to think that to wonder about things was to simply allow aimless thoughts to wander through the synapses of my brain, turn them over and over and look at them like a beach combers newest amusement. Now I see there is a need to take ideas, concepts apart, knead them, tease them gently apart. Not to understand them or draw conclusions about them so much as to just see them better. This process of wondering takes ideas and concepts out of the two-sided arena and makes them mutli-faceted where they then have a totally different effect. There are many things Stephen talks about that I don’t understand. Like most of what he talked about during these sessions. So I listen as he teases apart matrimony, patrimony, ancestors and the rest, not telling me what they are in some definitive way that I can memorize and then regurgitate at some later gathering of friends. He holds them up so I can look at their multi-facetedness and be taken up in wondering.” Matthew Files
Watch a preview from the Forgotten Pillars Series:
Why do so many people register emptiness in response to the weddings they have seen? Where do these traditions come from? How can you miss something you’ve never had?
A 5 Part Series Exploring: Patrimony, Matrimony, Kinship, Ancestors & Ceremony
What's Included
- Instant access to 5 x 120 minute professionally filmed sessions with Stephen & Kimberly
- Access to the never-before seen bonus session - "The Aftermath" - a behind the scenes recap
- First glance of pages from Stephen’s forthcoming book: To Mother Culture: Patrimony, Matrimony, Ceremony (Sounds True 2025)
- Access to online Facebook discussion group to connect with others from around the world
A note on pricing from Orphan Wisdom Manager, Khadija Striegel:
Forgotten Pillars is the first of what is becoming a Legacy Series. Given the kind of days that have come to Stephen Jenkinson, and the real diminishing capacity for these kinds of conversations, offerings of this kind are becoming more and more rare. With this in mind, I am approaching the release of this series as an opportunity for those who appreciate his work to support this Elder and his family for the work he has given to the world over the last 2 decades.
Frequently Asked Questions
The video and audio files will be immediately available for you to stream after purchase. These recordings will be available to you for years to come.
The day after their fifth session, Stephen and Kimberly reflected on the inspiration for Forgotten Pillars and what they learned about themselves, and their work together, by doing it. It’s an intimate snapshot of two creative partners finding the language to describe what drives their ongoing collaboration and opening up about what the work asks each of them.
No, The private Facebook group is entirely optional.
These sessions are in-depth exploration into culture making. We highly recommend you create time and space to be fully present while listening – this isn’t casual listening or something to play while sitting in traffic. We highly recommend listening with loved ones.
This is a non-refundable purchase
No, this isn’t just a recorded zoom call. Significant efforts were put into the production of this series. It was professionally filmed and audio recorded in front of a live studio audience.
Khadija Meghan Rashell Striegel is the orchestrator and organizer of this series, choreographing a symphony of logistics, curating this production with grace.
Silas Turliuk is the artisan of pixels and code, who sculpts the digital tapestry of our web presence, and weaves visual enchantment into the very fabric of this project.
Jackson Kroopf is a cinematic maestro, capturing the series with a seamless blend of technical prowess and creative finesse.
Please contact admin@kimberlyannjohnson.com
