The Seat Can Endure

The head cannot take in more
than the seat can endure.

Winston Churchill

The Three Stages of Manhood

The three stages of manhood are:
boy, man, and "You look good!"

Billy Crystal

The Natural Order of Things

The allegation of independence 
is the real codependence. And
codependence, that's
the natural order of things.

Stephen Jenkinson

The Idea of Initiation

It doesn't seem to me that the idea of initiation
should be talked about as a separate undertaking
from the undertaking of trying to come to
an understanding of what constitutes
your sense of being human.

Stephen Jenkinson

Too Expensive

Our sense of "OK" is
too expensive for the world.

Stephen Jenkinson

Knowledge and Learning

Knowledge is all the uncertainty you can bear.
Learning is the uncertainty you can't.

Stephen Jenkinson

You Don't Have to Cooperate

You're dying, but you don't have to cooperate
so enthusiastically with the process.

Leonard Cohen

So I'm Not

I don't want it to end, and as it ends, I will wish it's not. 
But not wishing it would end is not the same thing as 
being resentful or having a grudge, because when I
finally saw the ending of me, is when I became capable.
That was God kissing me on the forehead, saying
"This is not going to last, son, so away you go.
You don't have to hold anything back." So I'm not.

Stephen Jenkinson

The Word Lost

The word lost means you're not where you wish you were.
That's what lost is. It doesn't mean you don't know where
you are, it means you wish you weren't here. So lostness
is a condition of wishing otherwise, of being unwilling to
be in the place you actually are.

Stephen Jenkinson

Regrets

Down along the fence line, the back forty of your life,
there's a pile of stones, your regrets. If you don't go down
there to visit them often, you'll end up thinking either that
they're not there at all, rarely true, or that they make a pile
a mile high, rarely true too. So, here it is, they're always
there and the pile is rarely as high as you think it is.
When the ending of days comes into view, that's

a good time to visit that little altar. So here's an idea.

Don't add another stone to the pile with the way you are

with the ending of days. Just remember. Then climb

that little hill, picking up one stone and putting it back

in place, remembering as you go, it's not all bad.

When you get to the top, look around, because that's

the vast field of your life, with everything it was,

now visible and lucid and you can only really see it

from up there. And that's the big story.

Stephen Jenkinson

I Wish You Could

I'm gonna take a little walk
through them fields.
I'm gonna carry me gently
so my heart can heal.
I'm gonna find me a demon
in a dark, dark wood.
You can't come with me.
I wish you could.

Gregory Hoskins

Call It Love

From cradle to grave, human life appears to be

one, long, continuous effort to feel comfortable,

physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

If we can get that and accept that it's our natural way

of being, we might understand ourselves better

and things might just go a little bit better for us all.

As we find more sustainable and healthy ways

to feel comfortable, we can use these for ourselves

and for others' sake. We might even call it "love."

I don't know.

Dan Metevier

Like It Slow

I've always liked it slow.
I never liked it fast.
You want this thing to go.
I want this thing to last.

Leonard Cohen

On the Receiving End

Anybody who speaks with any authority
about the arc of their life is either foolish
or wasn't there. You know, because that
sound of authority makes it sound like
you were dialing it in, or you knew
what you were doing, or you knew
where it should go. But you're on
the receiving end of how your life goes,

right?

Stephen Jenkinson

I Still Don't Know

I'm circling around God, and
around the ancient tower
And I'm been circling for a thousand years
And I still don't know if I'm a falcon, or a storm,
Or a great song.

Rainer Maria Rilke

A Society Grows Great

A society grows great

when old men plant trees
in whose shade they

shall never sit.

Greek Proverb

No Appetite for Learning

The instinct to supply, over and over again, solutions,
the mania for solving, solving, and solving is
generally a mania that's undertaken at the expense
of learning how things came to be as they are.
Because there's no appetite for learning inconvenient,
unsought, unwanted realities. There's only an appetite
for escaping them and leaving them behind.

So the solutions that are generated by a mind

or a people or an era that wants to leave
its desperately unwanted recent past behind
generated what kind of solutions? Solutions that continue
to bear the kind of problems they're trying to leave behind.

Stephen Jenkinson

So Lightly Here

So come, my friends, be not afraid, we are so lightly here
It is in love that we are made, in love we disappear

Leonard Cohen

What Grief Does

What grief does is let you in for this:
The ways of the world are bigger than you.
The ways of the world are bigger than your decisions
and your belief systems about it and your proper posture
in the face of the world is humility, not control.
It's taking a knee, not taking more of what you need.

Stephen Jenkinson

Going Home

I love to speak with Leonard
He's a sportsman and a shepherd
He's a lazy bastard
Living in a suit

But he does say what I tell him
Even though it isn't welcome
He just doesn't have the freedom

To refuse

He will speak these words of wisdom

Like a sage, a man of vision

Though he knows he's really nothing

But the brief elaboration of a tube

Leonard Cohen

Donning a Spacesuit

When I was born I donned a spacesuit
for living on this plane, it was this body.

Ram Dass

Dangerous Thoughts

We can entertain dangerous thoughts
without being in danger.

Stephen Jenkinson

Willing Somehow to Serve

Your capacity at being old, righteously and properly old,
is that you no longer are driven by what you want but

instead, you're willing somehow to serve.

Stephen Jenkinson

Grieve on Schedule

Your capacity to become a deep-running human being
is born in your capacity to grieve on schedule, or
as I put it, to be wrecked on schedule.

Stephen Jenkinson

Go On

I can't go on.
I'll go on.

Samuel Beckett (Book Title)

Living With the Questions

The market's cornered on solutions.
I live with the questions.

My glandular event is wonder.

It's not certainty and salvation,

it's wonder.

Stephen Jenkinson 

Elderhood in Other Words

If you don't learn the poverties, you don't know anything.
And if you don't know anything, you're not a grown-up.
You're just a bag of aspirations and fret striving to be free.
But what's human freedom really? Is human freedom to be
freed from anything or everything? Or is human freedom
the capacity to act differently in the face of an utterly

unchanged circumstance? I tend to think the second one.

Human freedom is an exercise in being willing to proceed

otherwise when nothing in the circumstance rewards you

for doing so. Elderhood, in other words.

Stephen Jenkinson

Elderhood's Fundamental Responsibility

Elderhood's fundamental responsibility is cultural,
not interfamilial. The principal responsibility of an elder
is to see to it that the culture is enhanced, endorsed,
and underwritten by sanity. And wherever they see
the betrayal of cultural sanity, it's their responsibility
to at least blow the whistle, if not do something 

actively about it.

Stephen Jenkinson

Empty Life and Full Life

You have to learn "empty life."
What kind of lesson is that?
That's where your grievance
about being ripped off because
you're dying comes from:
from having been taught about
"empty life" and "full life."

That's a curse, not a teaching.

Stephen Jenkinson

Grieving and Loving

Grief is a way of loving

that which has slipped from view.

Love is a way of grieving

that which has not yet done so.

Love becomes a recognition

of its temporariness and

you love the temporariness too.

Stephen Jenkinson

People in Therapy

People in therapy are often in therapy
to deal with the people in their lives
who won't go to therapy.

Unknown

Hope Obliges You

The present is generous and you
don't need to turn away from it.
But hope obliges you to abandon
the present for the sake of a possible future.

And if you're dying, what are you supposed

to be hoping for? That you're not dying?

What will that turn you into? It's not good.

Stephen Jenkinson

Being Alive

When I glimpsed the end of what I claimed to love,
being alive, that was the beginning of my capacity
to love it. Now that is about as counterintuitive
as you can get. When I saw the end, I was granted
the capacity to fully inhabit and locate myself
in being alive.

Stephen Jenkinson

The Grief That's For Real

The grief that's for real, the big one, it comes from a recognition of the way life is and must be, that it requires death to be able to continue because death feeds everything that lives. The recognition that that's the case and that it includes, not just you, that's the easy part to see, but it includes the people that you love and the things that you don't want to end. That's grief and it's not personal. But the key, the real skill to being grateful is not to be grateful for the stuff that benefits you. That's easy. What about being grateful for the stuff that doesn't benefit you in the least, but you're grateful that it's in the world? Now you're getting somewhere. 

Stephen Jenkinson

No One Asked Them to Do It

Someone who's dying has a job description in front of them. No one asked them to do it. Their job is to die I'm going to say extravagantly instead of well. To set the banquet table that should be spilled in the wake of their dying, where everyone who ever knew them, or whoever wanted to, or whoever didn't want to, is invited. And the storytelling that ensues is the feast.

Stephen Jenkinson

Walk Around As If It's True

Your life is in the loop.
Your life is the loop.
You're part of the loop.
And hopefully, that stirs in you
that feeling enormously grateful
and then enormously indebted.
And you don't know what to do
about the two of them and
you think you're supposed to
do something about the two of them
but you're not. You're supposed to
know it and walk around as if it's true.

Stephen Jenkinson

Not Human

It is not human to fear death
because it's not a universal fact.

Stephen Jenkinson

Twin Skills of Life

The twin of grief, as a skill of life, is the skill
of being able to praise or love life, which means
wherever you find one authentically done,
the other is very close at hand. Grief and
the praise of life, side by side.

Stephen Jenkinson

No Grander Purpose

We are not created for any grander purpose than the ants
that are there or the flies that are hovering around us or
the mosquitos that are sucking our blood.

U.G. Krishnamurti

The Fact That It Ends

The crucible of making human beings is death.
Every culture worth a damn knows that.
It's not success. It's not growth. It's not happiness.
It's death. That's the cradle of your love of life.
The fact that it ends.

Stephen Jenkinson

How Firmly in Your Life

If you have to get the news
of your death from somebody else,
how firmly in your life are you?

If you can't anticipate your own death

and befriend it, and so on, then

how strongly in your life are you?

Stephen Jenkinson

The Most Challenged

Of all the life forms on this planet,
the human one is the most challenged
to show the proper regard and respect
for the natural order of things and
to find our way in it.

Stephen Jenkinson

Not Much Known

Our mortality is a knowable thing,
not much known by us.

Stephen Jenkinson

Be Prepared to Stop

Be prepared to stop, while
stopping is still an option.

Choose the thing that will be

otherwise forced upon you.

Stephen Jenkinson

What Has to Die

What has to die is
your refusal to die.

Stephen Jenkinson

The First Casualty

The habits of life should properly be the first casualty 
of you entering into the end of your days.

Stephen Jenkinson

North Americans Are Addicted

North Americans are addicted to a terminal degree
to their competence and their certainties and
their swagger and their autonomy and mastery.
These things are recipes for dying a miserable,
grinding death. Guaranteed, virtually.

Stephen Jenkinson

Cashing Out

What dying is really supposed to be is you
sort of releasing your death grip on everything
that granted you your certainties, your stabilities,
your sense of yourself, and all of that. You're
basically cashing out, and hopefully with
a sense of gratitude about the whole operation.

Stephen Jenkinson

Refusing to End

It remains mysterious to me,

the hostility toward endings

is presented as a life-positive

orientation, that it's life-affirming.

But there's nothing about life
that refusing to end, affirms.

Stephen Jenkinson

The Demand to Live

The death trade, as I learned it and saw it, is there
principally to deliver on the demand to live.

It's beyond an expectation. It's an inalienable right.

And if the endings of your life are coming to call

and you wake up every day demanding to live,

you are likely to be in a circumstance of adversity,

not companionship. And that is a culturally-derived,

deep-running error that means you no good.

Stephen Jenkinson

Without God

Psychology has become monotheism
without God.

Stephen Jenkinson

Sinking vs. Floating

When one tries to stay
on the surface of the water,
one sinks.
When one tries to sink,
one floats.

Zen Proverb

The Meaning of Awake

The word awake [a wake] means
"to be claimed by the fanning out
of consequence, intended and otherwise,
that ensues as a result of you [and yours]
proceeding how you do."

Stephen Jenkinson

We are Experience, Experiencing

Sure, thought may insist we lack purpose,
but that doesn't mean we aren't living our purpose

already anyway. And doing it spectacularly well.
The point is clear. We are alive. We breathe.

We walk and talk and like and 

dislike and want and cry and laugh.
We are experience, experiencing.
And that, as it is, is the whole perfect, already-here, point.
Which makes insisting on additional contribution

or purpose kind of pointless.

Judy Cohen

More Experiences

Listen to your elder's advice,
not because they are always right
but because they have more experiences
of being wrong.

Unknown 

The Work of the Elder

The work of the elder is determined entirely
by what prevails and what ails a people
at a given time.

Stephen Jenkinson

That's It

I think the world whispers,
"All we need of you is that 

you be human. That's it."
The dilemma is in the meaning
of the word "human."

Stephen Jenkinson

Just Right

No rules.
Just right.

Former Tagline for Outback Steakhouse Restaurants

Always Had the Power

You've always had the power, my dear.
You just had to learn it for yourself.

Glinda the Good Witch (Wizard of Oz)

Think Different

If you continue to think the way
you've always thought,
you'll continue to get
what you've always got.

Kevin Trudeau

You Know It's a Blessing

I saw grief drinking a cup of sorrow
and called out, "It tastes sweet, does it not?"
You have caught me, grief answered,
and you have ruined my business.
How can I sell sorrow,
when you know it's a blessing?

Jalāl al-Dīn Rumi

The Shaman

The shaman is the figure at the beginning of human history
that unites the doctor, the scientist, and the artist into
a single notion of care-giving and creativity.

Terence McKenna

Learning to be Astonished

Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect?
Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is
my work, which is mostly standing still and
learning to be astonished.

Mary Oliver

Like a Pendulum

Life is like a pendulum:
the deeper the sorrow,
the more colorful the joy.

Isadora Duncan

There You Are

So, the cross is always ready and waits for you everywhere.
You cannot escape it no matter where you run, for
wherever you go you are burdened with yourself.
Wherever you go, there you are.

Thomas a Kempis

No Feeling is Final

Let everything happen to you.
Beauty and terror. Just keep going.
No feeling is final.

Rainer Maria Rilke

New Seeds

Yesterday is gone and its tale told.
Today new seeds are growing.

Jalāl al-Dīn Rumi