Stephen Jenkinson - How To Find Peace By Asking The Right Questions

0:01I am so glad you could join us. I'm your host, Mo Gaudet This podcast is nothing more than a conversation between two good friends sharing inspiring life stories and perhaps some nuggets of wisdom along the way This is your invitation to slow down with us Welcome to Slow Mo

0:34Welcome back. My guest today is someone I consider an important teacher in my life, Stephen Jenkinson. Steve is a cultural activist. He is a farmer. He is a sculpture. He is a philosopher in many, many ways, but he is also an author of many, many books, including some that are my favorites, Die Wise, Money and the Desires of the Soul, A Generation's Worth, his book during the pandemic. And I think there is one more, but I'm not informed of it, that came later after that. But he basically sort of presents life as it really is. And because of many, many years of working with the dying, he attempts to anchor us in the reality of where we are.

1:29And there isn't a time where we need this more. So I'm going to tell you, being aware of Stephen's work, this might not appear to be a very cheerful conversation because our world is going to be facing challenges as we progress into the next decade. But the truth is, also if you understand Stephen's work and if you understand my approach to holding on to the truth and engaging with it, I expect to have one of the most cheerful conversations about the reality of where we are today and how we can deal with it, engage with it, almost like a video gamer engages in a challenging video game. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a very long time.

2:18I've just arrived from Rio de Janeiro and I'm so jet lagged, but I couldn't ask to delay it. I couldn't ask to move it because this definitely is an important moment for me, a moment where I meet one of my heroes, Steven Jenkinson. Hello, Steven, always, always so elegantly dressed. well it's very kind of you to notice i think you're exaggerating but i'll take i never say that but when i was younger i'm guessing you might be a year or two older than i am and so i always told myself that when i reach my 60s my retirement plan would be to wake up every morning and wear a full beautiful suit and walk slowly to a place that is familiar to me where I have a cup of coffee and ponder life.

3:12And as I study your work and look at your videos, you seem to be doing exactly that, aren't you? It's important in that fantasy to get paid somewhere in there too. I didn't think about that bit. You know what they say is trust in God and tie up your camel, no? Exactly. Yeah, I wrote that in one of my books, actually. The idea, however, is that as a young man, I learned to never negotiate in my dreams. You know, life will negotiate enough with me. So, you know, when I had a chance to dream, I would simply say, and money would pour in from the ceiling. Why not? You know, that's not a bad place to be.

3:56Okay. Well, listen, if that happens, you call me, I'll come to where you are. Yeah, then I would have figured something out. Clearly. Yes. I actually want to ask you about that lifestyle that I constantly see you when you're teaching. You're out in nature. You seem to be in a very contemplative mode. Your school, the Orphan Wisdom School, is not in the middle of the noisy life that we live in. And I believe that you made that move back in 2010. Or has that always been the way you lived? A little bit further from all the madness, if you want. Wow. Well, probably before the move to the country, I made the move somewhere inside me to withdraw a little bit from the fracas.

4:47I don't remember a particular time that I did so, but probably my own inclinations are towards a kind of combination of solitude and solemnity. and then I just had to find a circumstance where I could articulate that and have it available. Ultimately, that turned into farming, but not initially because I wasn't born to farming. I had to outgrow all my immature understanding of what it would be. Of course, I imagined a kind of contemplative dream of sorts And this is not true at all. Farming is highly engaged. But whereas you could say the life of a monk or a dervish, perhaps, is a life that's trying to separate itself from the world and imposes upon itself a high degree of rigor in its discipline to compensate for the gone-ness of the world.

5:58in the case of farming instead of the vows that you make to god for example you have the weather and the weather is your local god and the weather asks things of you does things to you but mostly what it does is it takes your decision making and gives it a very small place on the side and mostly what you're doing is trying to respond so that circumstance changes your notion of self-determination and it makes you something closer to a kind of servant rather than a kind of master that's so beautiful if you would allow me i know we're in a podcast and there are tens of thousands of people that will be listening to this but this is a topic that's very very very I've been preoccupied with this for quite some time.

6:54You use the word dervish and perhaps, perhaps I don't feel fully like a monk. I feel more like a wandering dervish, if you want. And it's been knocking at my heart now for several years. I've attempted many times to retreat 40 days at a time. But I have to say openly, I dream of a life where I'm more controlled by nature than I am controlled by civilization, if you want. And yet, I feel a duty to show up. Those incredible conversations I have on this podcast seem to be making a difference to some people. So did you manage to find the balance between what you're supposed to do in life, between making money, as you mentioned at the beginning, and between that idea of I need serenity, I need solitude, you know, as you mentioned at the beginning?

7:51Yeah, I don't think balance would be the right word. I think a kind of useful and devote compromise is a better understanding of interesting. Yeah, yeah, I think the notion of balance puts you in a kind of masterful position. just that's the sound of it to me that you kind of negotiate all the contending circumstances and somehow you find this place where it's neither yin nor yang something like this but i think certainly the life of farming is not the life of mastery it's it's the life of ongoing compromise and for every action that you undertake it's preceded by hours and hours of inaction apparent inaction which is the act we call it at home we call it watching the farm channel yes and this is where you're taking taking dictation from you know what you're doing is watching what you thought you knew again and discovering you didn't quite know it whether it's the behavior of animals whether it's their interaction with the weather whether it's of course the gross changes in in dominant weather patterns that are happening now where your old understanding of there's certain weather patterns or seasonal realities that you could count on that's all gone basically i mean i shouldn't say it's all gone but i think it's going and yeah clearly so so all of this is to say then that um a farmer's job i don't think is to achieve balance not really the farmer's job is to compromise and ultimately to lose in the struggle uh quote unquote against nature because that's what farming is farming mostly is fighting with the circumstances, seeing if you can find a way to survive.

9:58I know it's not a popular understanding. City people in particular favor the notion that farmers are out there, you know, being at one with the universe and loving the weeds and, you know, all this kind of stuff. But this is not true at all. It's an immense struggle. And the more debt you have and the more you are in the pocket of the big agricultural conglomerates and suppliers and so on, the more compromises you make. So instead of making spiritual compromise with the world, wherein you are supposed to lose as a human being, you instead make these terrible moral compromises with necessity and with indebtedness and so on.

10:43And I don't think most human beings can survive that degree of moral compromise. And this is why I think the world over, you know, fewer and fewer farmers appear in the next, in the young generation. And everywhere you go where the big agribusiness prevails, you have an immensely high dangerous rate of suicide amongst farmers. That's very true. These things are all quite relevant to each other, you know. Yeah. I want to visit some of your work, which I have to say is plenty. If we were to cover all of your books, it would take us four and a half days to just skim the surface, honestly. But do you believe that this struggle is just part of the human experience?

11:28That if you're in the city, you're struggling with all of the challenges of being amongst humans with so many contradicting objectives and targets and agendas. And if you're out there, you're struggling with nature and the morality of what you need to do to fit in a little bit with that other world. Is there any place where there isn't that struggle? Well, I think the formula that you've described has a certain presumption. And it's that the same person, whether in the city or in the country, brings the same repertoire, the same degree of prejudice, the same unexamined sense of being on the losing end of life kind of feeling.

12:11So therefore, struggle becomes the order of the day. And it's just how you articulate the struggle from one context to the next. But the real possibility exists that from time to time there are people who understand these, the realities that we're describing differently than conditions of struggle. And so when I said earlier that one of our responsibilities as human beings is to fail, what I mean is if you look at what human beings do to the world as a consequence of their numerical and technological success, you'd rightly come to the conclusion that the more humans are defeated the better it is for humans oh wow you see so if if you can understand that it's it's a big challenge to live it out of course but as an understanding of a principle it's possible that you could you could bring that understanding into a kind of life where in addition to the struggle you have a sense of gratitude, of thanksgiving.

13:19And those two things together, they moderate intensity of what we're describing here. I think they do. And they give you a chance to reflect and to be especially grateful for things that don't benefit you directly, but they're in the world. And so they have some necessity. And if your gratitude goes there, then your self-interest is not the boss your concern for the greater world is the boss and gratitude is your way of of articulating that sense of responsibility to the world and that's why i said shorthandedly it's better for all things concerned if humans are defeated in their sense of grandiosity and mastery and dominion.

14:07So wise, I have to admit, those words will stay with me forever. The idea, perhaps as I negotiate in my mind now, of at least succeeding sufficiently, but not crossing the line. And it seems to me that life is now defeating us in a very interesting way. As you mentioned, climate change, for example, it's basically life saying, look, you guys, honestly, I appreciate very much all of the innovation, but hey, I still have the power here. I'm going to change things a little for you so that you fail a little more or be defeated a little more. It's quite eye-opening that you see it this way. Another element that's important to introduce, and I learned this from working with dying people so often, is that for grownups in the real world, there is such a thing as too late.

15:01And I would not be surprised to discover or to have it confirmed over the next decade that we are in many respects already in the time of too late. That the notion of personal conservation and recycling, I mean, these are nominally important things. But honestly, as I said to a guy here in the village the other day, recycling your personal plastic that comes out of your house is basically like changing your socks. It has that degree of consequence in the wider world. I'm not saying don't do it. I do it myself. But let's just not delude ourselves to thinking that this is all we have to do. And if enough of us recycle our plastic, then the climate will readjust itself and the dolphins will be swimming in the canals of Venice.

15:54I don't think so. I don't either. But then how do we respond to that, Steve? I mean, in many ways, my work also looks at artificial intelligence and where artificial intelligence is going. It's looking at the current geopolitical environment and how the world is heating up, you know, in terms of power struggles, the economic struggles and so on. And, you know, for many of us, I think we're on the receiving end of this because the maximum we can do is like changing our socks. So how do you find peace and calm in a world where it seems that we're approaching a point where it's going to become a little tougher?

16:35Yeah, I don't think we're approaching a point. I think we're there. I'm trying to be a little kinder to the ears of my listeners. Yeah. You know, again, this is a terminology that I think I learned when I was working with dying people. Dying people would refer to their dying in the future tense, constantly. When I die. Or sometimes if I die. But never I'm dying. But you see, they were all dying. not in some nominal Buddhist sense of the term that everybody's dying all the time which is clearly not true but they were actually metabolically dying and they were employing their dying time to resist the realities of dying and that seems to be a fairly good metaphor for modernity that we are we are in some sense in a period where the the onset of ruination is already occurring.

17:35And yet we talk about waiting to see and hypothetical questions like, how do we do this and do that? And I think we're better served and the world is better served if we just change the tense of all of these ruminations and start saying, how have we done thus and so? Because if you can faithfully witness to how things have come to be as they are, then the notion about what does one do in the face of this storm becomes more available because it's a response to something, not a kind of generic reactivity. It's a particular kind of, as we'd say in English, response ability. So for me, I'm not a fan of hope.

18:30I don't find that there's any obligation necessarily among grown-ups, sentient grown-ups, to pat each other on the shoulder and reassure each other and that if we just do this and if we find some equanimity and if we just change our socks and if enough people change their socks all at once, well, you know, the globe will tip and, you know, this is not how it happened and it's not how it's going to happen either. we the truth of the matter is it seems you're familiar with the english poet w.h. odden of course yeah yeah okay so he has a wondrous but kind of ruinous observation he's made about modernity he said it seems to me that we would rather be defeated than be persuaded and so there's a lot of circumstance now geopolitically socioeconomically where the powers that be and the great sort of middle class, if you will, are there with their arms folded playing, let's see what happens.

19:35But doing that is the answer to the question, what happens? This is what happens now, waiting to see if it's really that bad, waiting to see if people like me are not just exaggerating or worse, and that we're secretly hopeless, and we're just vectoring our hopelessness, you know, from podcast to podcast, which I'm not hopeless at all. I'm free of the notion of hope, which is to say, you know, the last time I checked it out thoroughly, hope is a very much a future tense circumstance. That's where it actually operationalizes in the future, but it has immense consequence for the present. But for example, hope is completely not required to mobilize on behalf of a better day.

20:23No. I agree. I think one of the things we're doing right now is mobilizing, you and I at this very moment, mobilizing on behalf of a better day. I'm not saying we're being very successful or very effective, but at least in intention, this is what we're doing. But look what's not necessary. You and I don't have to hope we're sitting here talking to be able to sit here and talk. Hope is completely not required to engage the dilemmas that we're beginning to talk about now. If you require hope, you're importing it from elsewhere. Yeah? So hope is always a compromise of the present moment. Nobody hopes for the way it is.

21:06We hope for the way it isn't. Okay? So my orientation to life is to do everything I can to inhabit the way it is. That's so beautiful. So I have to say, as I hear you talking and the likening of this to working with the dying, it almost seems like a disservice to the dying to tell them, oh, hold on, you know, you're going to get better. It's not almost a disservice. It's malpractice. Oh, that's so eye opening. And what you're basically saying is that we're all dying sooner or later, right? It seems that the planet as we have treated it is sort of responding in a bit of a I'm sick way and that the answer is found in here and now.

21:56The answer is not found in what will happen in 10, 20 years time. The answer is what's happening right now. The answer I think is found in the capacity to formulate increasingly more responsible questions. Elaborate on that, Steve. Sure. Generally speaking, you and I know we come from probably a kind of education, a formal education or informal one, where the notion is that you use questions to achieve better and better answers. And as soon as you achieve a better answer, then the old question is dispensed with and no longer necessary. And you use the question the way you use a tin can. Once you've got the contents of the can, you just throw away the can.

22:40But I'm suggesting to you that a better question is that thing you're looking for. A better question serves the circumstance. You know, good answers are a dime a dozen. Clever answers, ironic answers, dismissive answers. There's millions of them. But a good question by definition survives the answers that you bring to it. It's still there, like those stars in the night sky, still there, still wondering, unconquered, unvanquished, and unblinking. That third one might be the most important, unblinking in the sense of not wavering. yes obviously informed of the desperate circumstances that i think we're entering into but not dissuaded by those circumstances that's what a better question is it's not a better mousetrap as they say in colloquial english it's a better question and a better question is a sign that you remain engaged but trying to cancel out the questions with better answers is a sign to me, more often than not, of people trying to get out from under life or get out from under the oncomingness of the likely near future and things like that.

24:02So what's our better question as we speak? Not what do we do? What do we do now? What are we doing now? This is observable. It's not hypothetical. And Auden's observation is sadly accurate. It's clear that contemporary modernist people really across the world are more inclined to be persuaded by defeat than persuaded by persuasion. because persuasion indicates somehow that you're surrendering, but defeat somehow suggests in a vague and vain heroic way that you haven't succumbed yet, that you can still struggle out from underneath something, that you can still somehow, you know, prevail. And like I said off the top, the more humans are heroic and prevail, the more ruin follows the example.

25:03So this is why I'm suggesting that a line of inquiry that serves our ability to be defeated, hopefully with a little grace and something like elegance, is the order of the day. It's not an affection. It's not what color of tie you wear. It's your willingness to carry yourself in the world as if your mastery is an accident that you've grown to overcome. That is incredible. I mean, so I've been looking forward to our conversation for quite some time. I was in Rio de Janeiro a couple of days ago and I just landed, so I'm completely jet lagged. And as I was getting on the flight, I was thinking, who am I going to be speaking to as I land in Dubai?

25:55And maybe if I can reschedule it. And it turns out that it was our appointment. So I was like, no, we're not rescheduling this. Because I think your perception of what we have today, since your very early work, to be honest, Stephen, is I think what humanity is missing in the equation of trying to deal with our calamities, if I may use the word. I want to touch on two of your books, one very, very, very early and one more recent to cover this topic. Like I want to touch on all of your books, but maybe we meet several times if your time allows. So in your very first book, Money and the Desires of the Soul, I think a lot of what we go through in life today is because of that hunger for money.

26:40And your conversation of in the book about the idea that we sort of like the spiritual ones would say, oh, no, no, I don't need that. I don't, you know, I give that up. I'm not interested in this. It's sort of, again, hiding our heads in the sands, basically, because, you know, the soul has to merge with that progress that made money part of our life somehow. Can I ask you openly, what do you define as the desires of the soul? And what should our souls desire at times of confusion that we're coming to? Well, I mean, because we use the word soul here, in contemporary English, this topography is very uncertain, and we're not very articulate in contemporary English about the nuances that constitute, quote, soul.

27:34So I prefer to understand soul as a verb rather than a noun, and understand as a way of making your way rather than as you or some possession that you have, this kind of particularly special inner part of you that you could call the soul. So you imagine it as a souling then. It turned into a verb. How does the soul go about its work then might be a question to ask. and this is why I wrote a book called money in the soul's desires to suggest that money it's it doesn't say money or the soul's desires as if there's some kind of dichotomy and you have to decide between them and once you've decided on behalf of the soul then you have no more money trouble or whatever it is the soul has an obligation in its work to engage the world Engage doesn't mean defeat.

28:35It doesn't mean manage. It doesn't even mean survive. It means to join in some fashion without disappearance, to engage purposefully over time, not in one fitful moment of alleged insight, but ongoingly to plant the insight, you know, for the sake of a better day. so I think there's nothing particularly elevated about soulfulness soul has its work is in the alley not in the celestial spheres it's out behind the tavern this is one of the things that makes Rumi and Havez so lovable is their understanding that the soul belongs in the world and that the trouble is not the soul's, the trouble is ours.

29:30You may be familiar with this one. I'll see if I can remember how it goes or at least how it begins. He says, all day long I think about it and that at night I can't help it. I say it. Who am I and what am I supposed to be doing? And I have no idea if I could only break out of this prison for drunks the point that Rumi is pursuing there is that the sense of not quite belonging to the world which I would suggest to you is the soul's problem not the world's problem. In other words, the world is a perfectly good place for the soul. But if the soul thinks otherwise, then the soul is not working very assiduously.

30:20So I think the soul is part of creation not some kind of hovering being that doesn't really belong in creation but accidentally finds itself here and you know has to make do perhaps as you once said it's the need it's what the soul needs is to be engaged in this world hovering on top of it doesn't really deliver to the soul what the soul you could say the soul needs the world yeah but it's not clear that the world really needs the human soul not really i mean no more than the world needs more humans correct i mean in in an interesting way it's it's the soul's journey through the world that is perhaps the only way to answer that question by rumi which is who am i and why am i here what am i supposed to be doing what am i supposed to have to do here i'm like a bird from some other aethery he says the days come in will i'll fly off but until then who speaks with my mouth who sees with my eye and what is the soul and it's it's an amazing sort of rumination that allows for the real possibility of genuine confusion in the soul a genuine sense of alienation that itself doesn't really belong i'll put it differently our feeling that we don't really belong here doesn't really belong here beautiful indeed which once again is a very very eye-opening observation around what needs to be done here i think your latest book which i have to admit your you choose titles that are almost exactly what we don't want to hear right it's like Okay.

32:10You know, I think a lot of us, including myself, but a lot of, you know, many people want to escape the reality of what's happening around us. And your latest book is Spirit Work While the Crisis Reigns, right? And I think that should definitely be my next question. So the spirit belongs here, the soul belongs here as the crisis is building around us. In a very interesting way, I would say there has always been some kind of a crisis, right? Whether it's climate change approaching us or, you know, the crisis might have been I'm sort of stuck in traffic when I don't want to be stuck in traffic or some silly.

32:53Yes, not the same magnitude, but I know what you mean. Yeah, I mean, some of us will choose to look at whatever our lives, whatever state our life is in, and then take whatever is wrong and consider that the crisis, right? So what is the spirit work in the time where crisis reigns? Okay. Actually, thank you for mentioning it. It's actually the second last book that you're referring to. Oh, is it? Okay. It is. Did you have another one? This was 2021. 2021. Yeah. The second last book was called A Generation's Worth Spirit Work While the Crisis Reigns. And that basically was a book that took form during the course of the pandemic.

33:33Okay. The most recent book is called Reckoning. Oh, I did not hear of that. What's wrong with me? I need this. I need it badly. Reckoning. Okay. I think that describes the whole approach. So anyway, so apropos of the question that you've asked, though, The axis here of the question or the challenge in the question is the meaning of crisis. Crisis doesn't mean calamity. Etymologically, the word crisis means something like this. So there is a kind of inadvertent or unintentional crossroads that you find yourself at. And in moments like that, whereas once upon a time you imagined you had many possibilities to choose from, At the time of a crisis, you only have a few, but there's still choices to be made.

34:27And the moment of choosing is upon you. And you will voluntarily or otherwise choose. That's what a crisis is. So in and of itself, it doesn't mean that something's terribly wrong. It just means you don't have a lot of room to negotiate anymore. And that's why we get that secondary sense of crisis of some terrible thing looming and the sky falling and all these kinds of things. It's not really what it means. So with that, from that point of view, spirit work while the crisis reigns. The crisis nominally was the pandemic, the COVID-19 pandemic. but much more importantly it was our increasing reactivities to the correct to the pandemic not the pandemic per se correct or you could say what it turned out to be is that nine-tenths of the pandemic was our reactivity to it and one-tenth was the virus correct and the reactivity the reactivity for i mean i shouldn't speak with such great authority about all kinds of places in the world, but from what I've seen and from what comes to me by virtue of talks like this with other people from all over the place is the sense that we're just beginning to see the kind of, I'm going to use it, the hell flower of the pandemic blossoming.

35:54We're only beginning to see it now. And a lot of it is mobilizing in the so-called social justice world. you know the notion of personal truth is the only kind of truth that's reliable it's the only kind of truth that there is the kind of extraordinary war upon tradition and upon received wisdom and i could go on but the the suggestion i made with the subtitle is the work of the spirit in a time of crisis is the work of engagement and direct action it's not the work of withdrawal or if there's withdrawal necessary, it's temporary and it should be redeeming, not seeking after solace, but an act of redemption as well.

36:44Well, the souls are infinite. I could keep saying so at the end of a sentence, but the thing that mobilized me was the vision that we are not anywhere near at the conclusion of an episode. you know, globally, or I mean, I'm sure that it makes no sense to speak globally, because look out your window, and you can't see the globe, you can't find it, you can't find everything. So ultimately, you know, we are, are we not blind men, touching various parts of the elephant, trying to make grand statements about what it is. But it doesn't prevent us from guessing, or from being wonderstruck or especially from being full of awe.