The Newest Work
from Stephen Jenkinson
Author of Die Wise & Come of Age
Released August 12, 2025
This isn’t a book about marriage or relationships or intimacy.
It is about the mythic, poetic, eloquent act by which matrimony is conjured from romance.
Like Die Wise with the death trade, like Come of Age with elderhood, Matrimony is steeped in disciplined contemplation of the threadbare cultural inheritance that is our present moment.
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Camera/Edit by Jackson Kroopf
Music featured "In a Hidden Nook Between Worlds"
by Cole Pulice courtesy of the artist
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"At its most alive,
most engaged,
in its most devoutly practiced heart,
matrimony was sacramental trade"
“Matrimony is a triumph, analyzing and reconstructing marriage through the ages.
This illuminating work challenges the paucity of the modern wedding ritual and offers inspiring, practical pathways for deeper, more meaningful rituals. It’s a bold, clear-eyed view of what the marriage ritual could be, if we are courageous enough to tune in to the ancestors and to follow our truth.”
“When people are rewarded by the dominant culture for self-absorption, when they are sleepwalking through their time, matrimony can be a revolution.
It is an act of redemption, and almost all of its consequences are cultural. Not personal or emotional or psychological. Politically spiritual, you could say.”
"This book is for those who have been asked to be keepers of thresholds and know that makeshifting ceremony has consequences.
This book is for people who are at the end of their rope with borrowing the sacred from everywhere else.
This book is for people whose grief for what has been forgotten propels them to remember."
An excerpt from Chapter 11
Salt & Indigo
The Sacraments of Trade
Click Here to Read
This time, the deal is struck. The salt people load their mules with indigo in homespun. They leave a blessing for the Old Ones of the indigo people and are gone over the rise.
Within the day, the indigo people come, see that the deal has been struck, that the spirits have been called in. They load their horses with salt blocks in burlap, remember the ancestors of the salt people, and go on their way. The story of their meeting is told back home.
For a time, there are more indigo people in the world than there were, as the salt people dye their best clothes and stain their arms with that wonder. There are more salt people in the world than there were too, as indigo people feast and rest easy with some of their food salt-curing for the lean times to come, rich for now in the briny mother of cuisine.
“With Matrimony, Stephen Jenkinson trails a troubled beast.
A beast many regard as simply AWOL, rarely glimpsed or woefully stretched on the rack of whatever progress report is currently doing the rounds. A beast with hurt feelings. With chewy wit, nimble storytelling, and the unmistakable tang of lived experience, he sets our sights for the initiatory core of the endeavor.
Turns out, we barely knew the thing at all. This isn’t a book about groovy intuitions, but mythically reasoned imaginings; far may it sail.”
Martin Shaw, PhD
Mythologist and Author of Bardskull & the award-winning Mythteller trilogy
“Matrimony is a summons, a reckoning, and a blessing. With the raw grace and precise poetics that are his signature, Stephen Jenkinson lays bare the scaffolding of love and commitment—not as sentimental refuge but as a culture-making labor, as an inheritance both weighty and wondrous.
This book will shake loose your assumptions, invite you into the work of witnessing and being witnessed, and, if you let it, alter your understanding of what it is to be bound—to another, to time, to the making of meaning itself.”
Elena Brower
artist and bestselling author of Practice You and Art of Attention
Rituals
are waltzes
with Wild things.
"If you don’t know what you’re doing—and ofttimes when you do—things can go sideways with unnerving suddenness and ease in ritual. Intention does not rule the day in ritual. In ritual, everything but you rules the day. Imagine, then, turning your love and hopes for a better day over to that."
Order Matrimony:
Ritual, Culture and the Heart’s Work
About the Author
Stephen Jenkinson
MTS, MSW
Culture activist, worker, author ~ Stephen has taught internationally and is the creator of the Orphan Wisdom School, co-founded with his wife Nathalie Roy in 2010. The School convened semi-annually in Deacon, Ontario, Canada’s Gulf Islands, and in northern Europe.
He has Master’s degrees from Harvard University (Theology) and the University of Toronto (Social Work).
Apprenticed to a master storyteller when a young man, he worked extensively with dying people and their families, is former programme director in a major Canadian hospital, and former assistant professor in a prominent Canadian medical school.
He is also a sculptor and traditional canoe builder whose house won a Governor General’s Award for architecture.
Since co-founding the Nights of Grief and Mystery with singer/ songwriter Gregory Hoskins in 2015, he has toured this musical/ tent show revival/ storytelling/ ceremony of a show across North America, U.K. and Europe, Australia and New Zealand. They released their Nights of Grief & Mystery album in 2017, and at the end of 2020 released two new records: Dark Roads (live work) and Rough Gods(studio work).
He is the author of Matrimony: Ritual, Culture and the Heart’s Work (2025) A Generation’s Worth: Spirit Work While the Crisis Reigns (2021), Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble (2018), the award-winning Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul (2015), Homecoming: The Haiku Sessions (a live teaching from 2013), How it All Could Be: A workbook for dying people and those who love them (2009), Angel and Executioner: Grief and the Love of Life (a live teaching from 2009), and Money and The Soul’s Desires: A Meditation (2002). He is a contributing author to Palliative Care: Core Skills and Clinical Competencies (2007).
Stephen Jenkinson is also the subject of the feature length documentary film Griefwalker (National Film Board of Canada, 2008, dir. Tim Wilson), a portrait of his work with dying people, Lost Nation Road, (2019, dir. Ian Mackenzie), a shorter documentary on the crafting of the Nights of Grief and Mystery tours , and Murmurings of the Land (2025, dir. Mattias Olsson), a portrait of his land-based life.
His books, recordings and DVDs are available at the Orphan Wisdom Shop.
To inquire about Stephen Jenkinson’s work, speaking engagements, live-streams, counsel calls, concerts, media interviews, and The Scriptorium, please contact us.
“How we are with each other, certainly in the heights and depths of our heart’s life, is how we are with what is holy in this world.”
This book is for you if...
Matrimony Events
Matrimony Book Release Celebration
with Stephen Jenkinson
& Kimberly Ann Johnson
Mark your calendars for a live gathering to commemorate the debut of Matrimony: Ritual, Culture and the Heart’s Work — a virtual evening of readings, reckoning, and cultural inquiry with the author, Stephen Jenkinson, in conversation with Kimberly Ann Johnson.
Sunday, August 10, 2025 at 12 noon ET
Details forthcoming.