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“Grief is the midwife of your capacity to be immensely grateful for being born.”
― Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

“When your focus is on how you feel about things in the world then the things of the world slip from view, your little boat of learning things for what they are are swamped by the swells of how you feel about them. With hard work and with learning, the things of the world are still somehow out there, waiting for you to know about them, no matter how you feel. They survive how you feel about them and they are there before and after the storms of your feelings roar through and abate. Feelings aren't much of a compass to go by.”
― Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

“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.”
― Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

“Dying is active. Dying is not what happens to you. Dying is what you do. Dying”
― Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

“We should be able to tell the difference between dying and being killed.”
― Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

“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”
― Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

“How might people in some other village or town rise up each morning? What does being alive mean to them? It isn't likely that they wake up every day expecting to die. They likely want to live at least as much as we do, and they want this for each other too. Experience has taught them not that life is cruel, random, arbitrary, unjust. Experience has taught them that life is unlikely, everything considered. Waking up each day, and having your children do so, is not written in the stars, not an entitlement, far from inevitable. It is not even the fair trade meritocratic consequence of being careful and living right. For all that, waking up each day is a gift. It is a gift that is not reward for playing by the rules. It is a gift from the Gods, giving each living person the capacity not just to go on, but to go on as if he or she has been gifted, to go on in gratitude and wonder that all the things of the world that keep them alive have continued while they slept. Wonder, awe, and a feeling of being on the receiving end for now of something mysteriously good: These are antidotes to depression.”
― Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

“Our lowest infant mortality rate is bought in part by obliging infants with considerable birth abnormalities who would otherwise have died from them to live with them instead, often well into their childhoods and beyond, and by asking their families to learn how to do that. Our superb life span is purchased in part by extending old people's lives far beyond what their illness or their disease would have allowed, while still not entirely ridding them of that illness or disease. We should add a fourth record to the string of our achievements: I suspect that we also die the longest. We are not allowed to die on schedule. Often we do, but it isn't encouraged.”
― Stephen jenkinson , Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

“Cost-effectiveness is the screw that turns the wheel of efficiency. But there is a considerable cost to pursuing cost-effectiveness. Here is the logarithm of progress: The more you pursue being saved from the drudgery of going through your days, the ordinariness of being around, the venality of physical limitation or vulnerability, the more is taken from the physical world to provide you that salvation and the more remote you will be from what grants you your security. That is an ecological and spiritual fact.”
― Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

“Seeing the end of your life is the birth of your ability to love being alive. It is the cradle of your love of life.”
― Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

“Dying wise: That's that antidote. Dying wise is the rumor around which all the attempts to control and manage and detoxify and assuage and domesticate and diminish dying swirl in our corner of the world. Dying wise is a thought unthought-a rumor-in a culture that does not believe in dying, and it will take about as much courage and wisdom as you can manage to do it. Dying wise is a life's work. Dying wise is the Rhythm, the Story, around which human life must swirl.”
― Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

“What does it take to get us to stand quietly, like somebody under a clear midnight sky, taking all of it in, stilled by the staggering pitch and pull of life? Things going well doesn't seem to help with this. Good fortune isn't persuasive on this matter, and it rarely gives people pause. It's when the news isn't good news; that's usually the time you find the limits of what you can bear to know. Then, maybe only then, you might be able to see that the waves of what you believed and did and held off from doing will still have their ripples, long after you're done. They outlast you. And this is tremendous news. When you are still enough for long enough, sometimes the river, the boat, and the waves and eddies-all of it-can turn into what you mean when you say, "My Life." If you can do that, you can change things. Your life becomes a little friendlier to the world, to what the world needs from you. It becomes a little friendlier to the endings of things too.”
― Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

“Sit on the shore while everything else goes on by you, and get through the low-level anxiety and the boredom and the feeling that you've already seen it all. That's a good time to learn. Here's what's there to see. Everything we do and don't do makes a wake, a legion of waves and troughs that pound the shores at the edges of what we mean, grinding away on the periphery of what we know. They go on, after the years in which we lived our individual lives are long passed. If we don't learn that simple, devastating, and redeeming detail of being alive-that what we do, all the jangle of our declarations and defeats, lasts longer than we ourselves do, that the past isn't over-then the parade of our days stands to indict much more than it bequeaths. This is something that we have to learn now. Many of us count on our best intent winning the day or getting us off the hook of personal or ecological consequence. It hasn't, and it won't.”
― Stephen Jenkinson , Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

“What if those people could stand on the shore watching their wake wash a bit of the shore away? And what if each of us could stay put long enough to see the rippling trail of everything we did rolling out behind us? What if we stopped long enough to see the long train of unintended consequence fan out from every innocently intended thing we did?

A taste for the consequence, for what endures: Maybe then there'd be a chance for things to be different.”
― Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

“Gratitude needs practice, though. Gratitude for the things that don't seem to help, that aren't sought out or welcome-that's a demanding kind, and it is needed in hard times. A book about dying should have that kind of gratitude in it, bleeding through from the other side of sorrow. Drink enough of the sweet, strong mead of grief and love for being alive and it isn't long before you're sending a trembling, life-soaked greeting out to everything that came before you and to everything that will follow, a kind of love letter to the Big Story.”
― Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

“Dying well is not the end of parenting, but the fullness of parenting, not the end of a marriage, but the last great act of a married life. Dying well is a bequest that you leave to those you love, probably the only thing that in the end will not be eaten by moths, apportioned by lawyers, or bought for quarters in a yard sale. Dying well is the way you could be known by those you won’t live long enough to meet, the way by which they might feel loved by you after you die.”
― Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

“Against the usual instincts though, I am asking all who read this to forego their normal hope for a plan, a grand scheme to fix what’s wrong to kick in after thirty pages. It won’t happen here. That is a big part of why it is the way it is at the end of our lives, this problem-solving reflex. It is that way with most relationships in trouble: We instinctively try harder to do more of what we’ve been doing that got us into trouble, trying to fix what we are hardly willing to learn.”
― Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

“What does it take to get us to stand quietly, like somebody under a clear midnight sky, taking all of it in, stilled by the staggering pitch and pull of life? Things going well doesn’t seem to help with this. Good fortune isn’t persuasive on this matter, and it rarely gives people pause. It’s when the news isn’t good news; that’s usually the time you find the limits of what you can bear to know. Then, maybe only then, you might be able to see that the waves of what you believed and did and held off from doing will still have their ripples, long after you’re done. They outlast you. And this is tremendous news. When you are still enough for long enough, sometimes the river, the boat, and the waves and eddies—all of it—can turn into what you mean when you say, “My Life.â€� If you can do that, you can change things. Your life becomes a little friendlier to the world, to what the world needs from you. It becomes a little friendlier to the endings of things too.”
― Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

“Specifically it means learning the ways that place has of being itself: This is what I mean by obedience. It means having an enduring recognition and knowledge of a specific place and finding your clan identity in that endurance. And there is something more, something unsuspected and fundamental that the doctor’s question has been leading us to. Being at home in a given place means recognizing the rocks, the plants, the winds, and the waters and stars of that place in your own body, and your body in the rocks, the plants, the winds, and the waters and stars of that place. It means more than having memories associated with a given place. It means learning again how you and those you love and admire, in every physical, metabolic, chemical, mythical, and spiritual sense it can be meant, are made of the things that make the place you belong to. That is the alchemy of belonging. This is where home comes from.”
― Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

“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.”
― Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

“The horror of slavery is this: You can sit beside a slave, you can speak the same language, even obey the same laws. You can eat the same food. You both can weep and love your children and miss your dead. But you are a human being, and he or she is not. Slaves are property, and human beings are property holders. The power of slavery to corrupt a person’s capacity to know themselves as worthy, as belonging in the world, as made by the Makers of Life, is beyond reckoning, and this is comparable only to its power to corrode the ability of slave owners or of those who live off the avails of historical slavery to honor their ancestors or to know themselves as coming from honorable people. It is the undoing of humanity, nothing less, as we are about to see. It is the ushering in of oblivion.”
― Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

“The realization and the humbling power of knowing that life is not a human thing could go a long way toward making us human.”
― Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

“There are no great answers, you could say, but only great questions made greater when their answerers are nobly defeated by the awe and mystery of the way things are.”
― Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

“The Old Hurt. A noble thing, highly prized, the root of all functioning ritual. And that hurt is something no Celt would dream of being without, it’s the very weft and weave of true culture. It’s nothing to do with clinging to grievance, rather wearing certain hard-earned melancholies like a cloak. To those with eyes to behold it, it’s the essential markings of an elder. And we are drowning in its deficit. After twenty years of initiatory work in the wilds of Snowdonia, I recognize its cadence immediately. Its gorgeous and unusual scent.”
― Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

“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.”
― Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul