Quotes from Stephen Jenkinson

The meanings of life aren't inherited. What is inherited is the mandate to make meanings of life by how we live. The endings of life give life's meanings a chance to show. The beginning of the end of our order, our way, is now in view. This isn't punishment, any more than dying is a punishment for being born.

Grief is the midwife of your capacity to be immensely grateful for being born.

Not success. Not growth. Not happiness. The cradle of your love of life … is death.

Having a conscience now is a grief-soaked proposition

Grief is not a feeling it is a capacity. It is not something that disables you, we are not on the receiving end of grief we are on the practising end of grief.

Dying is active. Dying is not what happens to you. Dying is what you do. Dying

Partying at this time of ecological meltdown is not affirming of reality, but an abdication from it. It is a place of false refuge especially so when there is no evidence of an acknowledgement of affirming life as it is, for this would require of these people a heartbrokeness.

We should be able to tell the difference between dying and being killed.

Hope is very often a refusal to know what is so, and steadfastly it is a refusal to live as if the present moment is good enough and all we really have. Hopeless is the collapse of that refusal, and it looks a lot like depression

Anthropologists who study the wretched consequence of conquest, language loss, and ethnic cleansing say that it only takes two generations of rupture to sever the chord binding people to their ancestors and their ability to be at Home.

of why we are born, what our life means, why we die as we do. The right to control our own death, tragically, is all that our Religion of Self has left us.

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

The realization and the humbling power of knowing that life is not a human thing could go a long way toward making us human.