Knowledge in an information drunk, confidence-addicted culture like our own, must be the life-tested skill of gathering what is needed to make life without killing life

in the gathering of it. Wisdom is the place where knowledge is fired, forged, and annealed

to become something of great beauty, useful to the world.

Human culture is made when that beauty swells into life and dies to nourish a time we won't live to see.

Knowledge gathers wood and flint and gut.

Wisdom conjures a cranky, playable fiddle from the gatherings.

People who have been bathed in the grief and love for life play some small magnificence on those fiddles together and sing their

unknown songs and make human culture. So those are the words of my guest today, Mr. Stephen Jenkinson. I was going to read

you one or two more of his words because, I mean, they are prophetic, I believe, in nature. So this is

him speaking of the elder, the role of the elder in our culture, he says, the work of the elder is

determined entirely by what prevails and what ails a people at a given time. I really love that

sentiment because in many ways it speaks to the time that we're in, that in some ways there's

chaos in our current midst and that the elders that we're in, that in some ways there's there is chaos in our current midst

and that the elders that we are surrounded by are in, are really in some ways entrenched in that

same chaos. One more, one more, one more of his excerpts here. The future remains as best as I can understand it,

an allegation. Nobody's experienced it yet. So it's not clear that there is such a thing,

but it's a useful conceit to get to take the pressure off the current situation, I guess.

So in some ways, this is what Stephen and I are going to talk about today.

So Stephen Jenkinson is a teacher, an author, a farmer, an activist.

He is the founder of the Orphan Wisdom School in Tramore, Canada, which is kind of out

in the midst, out in the boonies in Ottawa.

He's the author of four books that include Die Wise,

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