Jedidiah Jenkins Quotes

if discontent is your disease, travel is medicine. It resensitizes. It opens you up to see outside the patterns you follow. Because new places require new learning.

Once you know you are worthy and your story is worthy, you fight for other stories.

There are so many different ways to be human.

What if my friends went on without me? What if my absence revealed that I was never really necessary? What if no one notices I'm gone?

Exposure to human stories reminds us that we're all human. I mean real exposure. Listening, hearing. Not point from across the room. Engaging. And most of us are just trying to make it day by day without hurting anyone else.

When the honeymoon phase is over, what's left is the continuous choosing of the other person.

She seemed to love him without needing him.

I didn't know what I was holding on to. I had wrapped my life in the fear of messing up. Of disappointing God, which really meant disappointing my mom and friends. I was finding that so much of my life had been about avoiding the feeling of being in trouble.

Traveling alone, you get to be whoever you want. I don't mean lie. I mean you get to be a blank slate. You can't leave behind your skin color, or your height, or the handsomeness or homeliness of your face. But you can leave your story behind. If you've broken hearts, the new place doesn't know. If you've lost trust in people and yourself, the new place doesn't know. If everyone thinks you love Jesus, but you never really have figured out what you believe, the new place doesn't care. It may assume you have it all tied nicely in a bow. All your thoughts and histories. Just feeling like your past isn't a vice to hold you in place can be very freeing. Feeling like your family and the expectations and the traditions and the judgments are absent... it can fill your veins with possibility and fire.

For the first time in my life, I felt that my only allegiance was to the truth. Not to tradition. Not to safety. Not to what I had been taught. But to whatever was true. And that made me feel strong.

When you don’t know what to do, you travel. You go out and see. You have to rattle the bed, shake yourself out.

The life before had happened to me as childhood happens to everyone. The mark of adulthood is when we happen to life.

This was life? Quitting the fight and accepting yourself, flaws and all? I don't want to accept my flaws.

You may meet me and then think that you know me. I am an open book, so your guesses will often be right. But the lights are on at night, and your guesses are only guesses. There are rooms inside of me that don’t face the street.

It is astonishing how ideas can change an experience. How we can be in a beautiful forest, on a hike through verdant beauty, but if someone told us that the forest was the site of a brutal massacre, the entire hike would be transformed. It would turn ominous and sad. Or if I was told the forest was where Walk Whitman had walked every morning before working on "Leaves of Grass," the place would take on a holy majesty. Same forest. Same trail and trees. But the idea layered on top of it mutates it, glorifies or damns it.

Human beings are a cocktail of masculinity and feminity. To believe that we are meant to emulate one pole at the expense of the other, and that our sex alone should tether us to a caricatured extreme, is scientifically false and destructive. ... We are alchemy, not static elements.

I looked around and admired, meandered and felt pangs of love.

If our shittiest actions can lead to beauty, what does it mean to do right and wrong? Is it about avoiding hurting others? What about the scripture, "All things work for the good of those who love God." That sounds about right. But some things never get good. They're just terrible and then you die.

When I pretend to be less or more than my full identity, I present a character to the world. One I must maintain and prune and reinvent and defend. I poison my authenticity with the acrobatics of personal propaganda, propping up the idiot dictator of my ego. Spending my time imagining what other people are thinking instead of thinking for myself.

I want my reality to be reality, and then test things against it.

Saying everything you think or do in public isn’t appropriate at a dinner party or online.

It takes a safe and wide love to teach a man that it's possible to fail and remain.

Knowledge alone is like an unearned memory, mostly forgotten.

This is everyone’s story and everyone’s duty: to reach adulthood and then do the hard work of unpacking your childhood, your family, the weapons you picked up to protect your little body. —

Ihave learned this for certain: if discontent is your disease, travel is medicine. It resensitizes. It opens you up to see outside the patterns you follow. Because new places require new learning. It forces your childlike self back into action. When you are a kid, everything is new. You don’t know what’s under each rock, or up the creek. So, you look. You notice because you need to. The world is new.

When adults can’t speak to their discontent, when they can’t quite figure out what it is they’re wanting, they will try anything. They drink or commit adultery or quit their jobs or run away or live vicariously through their kids or stonewall their husbands. They knock things off the counter just to feel some control. They burn down their own house to escape it, without really knowing where else to go. This is the tragedy of being an animal with a mind. We are punching the walls to stop the ache in our chest.

I couldn't give up on my global optimism. I've always believed that the world is far friendlier than it is not, far more loving than hateful. Fear is like a thorn in your foot. It may be proportionally small in relation to the body, but it hurts and demands attention and everything halts until the thorn gets pulled.

...goals help us get a lot done. But they often remove our attention from the experience to the achievement. When we arrive at our goal, we think, then we will be happy. When we finally get there, we can celebrate and have fun. When I get that job, I'll be fulfilled then. When I get married, I will be happy. The Eden we pine for is not under our own feet or bike tires, but over the next mountain.

I love old drawings and the sketches of cities and animals from ancient field guides. I like timeless things, old things. They've made it to the modern age and taken on a meaning larger than their intention. I wanted my journal to be like that. There is a weird paradox in trying to live a meaningful life, one you will talk about and tell about. There is the present experience of the living, but also the separate eye, watching from above, already seeing the living from the outside.

how much energy I put into planning, trying to guarantee my independence, but how so many of my best memories have come from the times where I needed help and received it.

Hatred, mockery, and caricature seem to embolden the wounded

I long for the days of lands we didn’t know existed, before the uncharted places all disappeared.

I want to be a conscious soul, curious about my makeup. I want to do the important work. But I also acknowledge that I am a strange animal, essentially unknowable to myself. And so are you.

I know what i's like to want to be good, to want to be a good boy and a good son and think that God loves me because my teachers loves me, and my friends' parents trust me. You don't love God, man. You love feeling like you belong to something. That warm feeling of order in the universe. Of having the universe on your side, but really, having people on your side. I just want you to be free from all that shit.

The stream starts small, a clear trickle. Uncluttered with the confusion of sediment or history, it rolls over rocks and joins with other newborn streams and widens. The beginning of a lifetime of widening.

human civilization has managed to get so complex that we cannot trace out the consequences of our actions. So long as the immediate result is what we desire, we are ready to try it—but the threat of long-range danger is harder to feel.

As I get older and listen to my life, the truest things seem to live in paradoxical tension. Hope holding hands with understanding. Expectation dancing with the hard lessons of humility. The human heart piloting the mystery of the human heart.

I WAS ASKED recently, “Who is your best friend?” I don’t know. I don’t use language like that anymore. It doesn’t fit. I have friends that hold the keys to different doors of my personality. Some open my heart. Some my laughter. Some my mischief. Some my sin. Some my civic urgency. Some my history. Some my rawest confusion and vulnerability. Some friends, who may not be “the closest” to me, have the most important key for me in a moment of my life. Some, who may be as close as my own skin, may not have what I need today. It’s okay if our spouses or partners don’t have every key. How could they? It isn’t a failure if they don’t open every single door of who you are. The million-room-mansion of identity cannot overlap perfectly with anyone. But I will say, my closest friends have a key ring on their hip with lots of keys, jingling.

The thing that injured you often becomes a piece of your purpose in life. There are two privileges. The privilege of worldly access: the world being made for you, of wealth and whiteness and a runway of ease. And its opposite, the privilege of spiritual access: the world not being made for you, the forced awakening of the inner eye, the hard hand and invitation to see the world clearly. The first is a privilege that blesses you early and hurts you late. In the end, it robs you of the invitation to wisdom and harmony. The other hurts you early and blesses you in time.

On that bus, I had a lot of miles to stare out the window and think about my journey. About expectations. About destinations. I had wanted my spirit quest to answer questions for me. More than that, I needed it to reveal my questions to me, then answer them. What a burden to put on travel, which in itself is ignorant and indifferent. It becomes so hard to just enjoy the thing as it happens. We make the journey about arrival, not travel. We are so goal focused. We are the dog that won't stop paddling as long as he sees the shore. But, man, my shore had been hidden by the fog for so long.

Then I wandered the main street and thought how alone I was in my accomplishment. All these people were on vacation, doing their own thing. They saw me and assumed I’d flown here. Or didn’t think about me at all. I was just an extra in the movie of their life. But I knew what I’d done. And so did God.

Suicide among gay teens is one of the highest suicide rates of any group. People don’t commit suicide for other “sins.” No one kills themselves so they can continue getting baseless divorces, or to gossip or steal. People commit suicide when a fundamental part of who they are is being destroyed, and it is better to not be alive than to be a hollow shell.

A dream is the myriad ways we could be fulfilled in life using our talents to make beautiful things. But then there are goals. Goals are specific guesses at what we could do or become to fulfill our dream. Dreams are like a compass that points in a general direction, and goals are the islands in the ocean along the way. Goals are just guesses at where to make a home, and when they aren’t right, we try another.

For me, only mountains and canyons have this effect on me. The ocean, much bigger than any mountain, lies flat to the horizon. The flatness doesn’t have the same effect on me. But seeing a mountain, I am frightened by the giant standing over me, looking down at me with indifference or maybe love. Or with a canyon, I am frightened by the cliff, the ease with which I could lose my mind and jump. Experiencing those things leaves me properly reduced. I think it is a good feeling. The fear of God.

Okay. He's not coming back. Is he? No. I thought back to biking that first day in Oregon. Weston and I weaving back and forth, taking up the whole street, loving the August air and ocean breeze. I remember him calling me his "neighbor" every night as we'd lie in our hammocks. "Oh, how's the family, neighbor?" he'd ask. "Oh, great." We'd started with such fire and magic. With a shared destiny and destination. The beginning of a grand adventure is pregnant with a thousand futures. Every possible best thing. But the end is often a fizzle. For us, Weston left for a wedding. And didn't come back. And just like that, a chapter was done.

I had wanted my spirit quest to answer questions for me. More than that, I needed it to reveal my questions to me, then answer them. What a burden to put on travel, which in itself is ignorant and indifferent. It becomes so hard to just enjoy the thing as it happens. We make the journey about arrival, not travel. We are so goal focused... Of course, goals help us get a lot done. But they often remove our attention from the experience to the achievement. When we arrive at the goal, we think, then we will be happy. When we finally get there, we can celebrate and have fun. When I get that job, I'll be fulfilled then. When I get married, then I will be happy. The Eden we pine for is not under our own feet or bike tires, but over the next mountain.

I have learned this for certain: if discontent is your disease, travel is medicine. It resensitizes. It open you up to see outside the patterns you follow. Because new places require new learning. It forces your childlike self back into action. When you are a kid, everything is new. You don't know what's under each rock, or up the creek. So, you look. You notice because you need to. The world is new. This, I believe, is why time moves so slowly as a child - why school days creep by and summer breaks stretch on. Your brain is paying attention to every second. It must as it learns that patters of living. Ever second has value. But as you get older, and the patterns become more obvious, time speeds up. Especially once you find your groove in the working world. The layout of your days becomes predictable, a routine, and once your brain reliably knows what's next, it reclines and closes its eyes. Time pours through your hands like sand. But travel has a way of shaking the brain awake. When I'm in a new place, I don't know what's next, even if I've read all the guidebooks and followed the instructions of my friends. I can't know a smell until I've smelled it. I can't know the feeling of a New York street until I've walked it. I can't feel the hot exhaust of the bus by reading about it. I can't smell the food stands and the cologne and the spilled coffee. Not until I go and know it in its wholeness. But once I do, that awakened brain I had as a kid, with wide eyes and hands touching everything, comes right back. This brain absorbs the new world with gusto. And on top of that, it observes itself. It watches the self and parses out old reasons and motives. The observation is wide. Healing is mixed in.

Jed, it can be hard to tell the difference between an outcast and a pioneer. What if you’re meant to be the example you needed? What if God gave you your personality, your unique skill set, to equip you to walk into the wilderness and show that it can be done?” I stared at him while the question expanded in my chest. I hadn’t thought of it like that before. “And trust me,” he continued, “those examples are out there, just maybe not in your community. So look hard, read everything, pray, and move in the direction of what’s right. God will correct your steps, but you must first start walking. That’s what ‘walk in faith’ means.” My mentor didn’t say it just like that. It was years ago and I’m sure my memory has embellished it. But that conversation changed my life. Just because you don’t have a road map doesn’t mean you aren’t meant to walk in the direction of your convictions. Look at your gifts, your skills. You may be a pioneer.

The heart is deceitful above all else." A.k.a., don't trust your feelings. The heart will trick you to get what it wants.

Cycling through the mountains of central

Humans want few tings more than to belong. And nothing unites people like a common enemy.

I kept pedaling, talking to God, not Weston. and by that I mean thinking, staring at the ground, at the mountains, feeling my smallness in the bigness of the world. Feeling how ancient and powerful the desert was, how disinterested it all was in my life and in whether I touched my lips to someone else's. How entire mountain ranges could disappear, and I wouldn't care, but if I kissed someone, or didn't. I would be elated or devastated. I made a lot of miles boiling in thoughts like this.

Salento.

I have learned this for certain: if discontent is your disease, travel is medicine.

Travel has a way of shaking the brain awake.

I quit calling [writing] a 'passion.' That word is so aggressive. It implies that if you aren't burning for what you do, then you aren't living right. I don't want to burn -- at least not all the time. I want to lean into the steady goodness of making good things. I like calling writing my 'interest' or 'the channel through which I sense myself and serve others.

I want to grow, to do right by others and myself, to trust the open doors and knock on the closed ones. But I sometimes get scared of my own mind. Of my words. Of my ability to forgive myself. Of my self-assuredness. I need to let myself feel confusion. I need to be embarrassed once in a while. I need to cry and feel and know that I can’t explain it all away. I need the powerlessness of fog.

I knew that my deepest wounds were the place of my deepest meanings. And she was ground zero. My salvation was somewhere inside her.

Instead of a lineup of peaks, Cuernos del Paine looks like a jumbled collection of shardlike spikes rising in a triangle, almost like God had taken a machete to a mountain in a drunken rage. Hiking trails completely encircle both of these wonders.

You know they say Jesus walked on water when He was thirty-two. He lived to be thirty-three. You’re in your years of ministry.

Okay, I will,” I said, smiling with my whole face in that way you do when you want to encourage someone in a tender moment.

I just really think if you read the Bible, you’d understand. If you really dug into the Word.” “Mom, I’ve read that whole book. I spent my entire teens and twenties wrestling with it.” I want to keep talking—and it’s horrible, and made up, and a tool of oppression and delusion, and perhaps evil!—but I don’t say that.

In my midthirties, I realized that my parents would die soon. Not like a terminal illness. I just mean in the flow of time. It hit me hardest when my mother turned seventy. I did a quick bit of math. I go home to see her twice a year. The average American woman lives to be seventy-six. If that was how it went for her, I might see my mom only twelve more times. It is a quaking discovery to watch “Mom” becoming an old woman. Not that she looks like one. Or acts like one. Every day she seems to be on some new hike, at some new party, or laughing in a car packed with friends. But that number, seventy, has its connotations. The timeless force of nature, the mother, who exists outside of real human relationships, more an element than a person, will leave you.

I wondered about my friendship with my mom. Is it friendship? How can it be? Friendship is chosen. Friendship is discovered. But a mother and a son have a bond that is necessary. If the son exists, the mother exists. She may have abandoned him, she may have abused him, she may have loved him and laughed with him. But no matter what, there is a relation that must be accounted for. So how could it be friendship? What does friendship with a parent mean?

Um, we’re floating on a boulder in space, spinning at an incredible speed, held down by gravity and some arbitrary rule of physics. There’s only so much organic material on this planet, which means we’re made of molecules that came from dead stars. Dead. Stars. Some part of you was probably part of a dinosaur. For you to exist, every single one of your ancestors had to survive long enough to procreate, all the way back to the Stone Age and monkeys and small mammals and reptiles and fish and cells. You exist thanks to an unbroken chain of successful sex. Everything is a miracle…so calm your ass down.

wasn’t going to become someone I didn’t choose to be.

I was in the zone, each day biking farther than the last, and becoming ever more accustomed to my solitude. An entire day passed without me speaking to a single human. I did speak though, just to the world. I love talking to the road and to trees and birds. My voice keeps me company.

I wasn’t going to become someone I didn’t choose to be.

Ask the people you meet what’s the best way to go. The most beautiful. Let the place tell you where it wants you to go. The worst thing you can do is assume you know now what you’ll know then. And don’t let anyone else dictate your trip for you. If you want to take a bus sometimes, take a bus. If you need to hitchhike, hitchhike. It’s your trip, not anyone else’s. If you try to be too fanatical about it, you’ll spend more time stressing out and less time seeing a place for what it is.

It’s remarkable how normal moments live on in the middle of chaos and tragedy. People still play chess and drink tea in the middle of war. New inside jokes are born at funerals. Stranded in Nexpa, I saw the locals laughing over beers. Making jokes about the military, about the cartels, about resorting to powdered milk the last time this happened. Human beings have little capacity for sustained horror. I think our minds need to play to survive. Permanently serious people always look so tired, maybe because they are fighting an emotional battle that eats the body alive. To laugh and play while the bombs drop is one way to survive a war, even to win it.

It often dawns too late that we have only one life, only one path, and the choices we make become the story line of our lives.

for stretches we were alone on these roads, and I felt invisible and free.

if discontent is your disease, travel is medicine.

Human beings have little capacity for sustained horror. I think our minds need to play to survive. Permanently serious people always look so tired, maybe because they are fighting an emotional battle that eats the body alive. To laugh and play while the bombs drop is one way to survive a war, even to win it.

Monarch butterflies born in the fall are different than all the other monarchs. They are a super generation. They can live up to eight months as they travel from Canada all the way down to our forest. Then, after waiting out winter here, they’ll head up to warmer places like Louisiana and breed. Their children will live for only six weeks. It can take five generations of their children, who live so much shorter lives, to get back to Canada. Then those born at the beginning of fall, they become the super ones again. Then those ones begin the great journey. They can fly from Michigan all the way here, to Zitácuaro.” As we

I’m just going to do what I love, make it as good as I can, and love all the lovable things around me. I

She battles the cruel truth that what we remember does not stay as it was, and maybe never was what you remember at all. Fact overlapping with feeling, exaggeration, and gaps filled with imagination.

We revisit the past because we want to believe that what shaped us lasts forever. It does not. This is helpful for those who have trauma, and tragic for those returning to remembered beauty. I guess you can’t have one without the other. Change is either fast or slow, and it is all there is.

We transition from going to returning. Like the winter solstice, there is a moment where the whole earth shifts, the planet turning its North Pole back toward the sun. We cannot feel this, but many of the biggest changes—in nature, in life—go unnoticed. They happen without the moment ever being named.

Millennials are comfortable with therapy, with unpacking trauma, with healing the inner child and talking about foundational wounds. We were raised on all of that. Baby boomers are tougher. Constant analysis was not modeled for them. And to look too closely might open a wound long calloused. Smile and keep going. Keep calm and carry on.

This is why I have such a visceral reaction to the spiritual. To crystals and tarot cards and readings and the proclamations of empaths and healers. I’m certain much of it is positive and helpful, but it reminds me too much of the people who sanctioned their thoughts as Godly “downloads” during the most vulnerable years of my life. How much of the world’s insanity is perpetrated by people claiming to have a direct connection to God?

mom is a good person, following the convictions of her heart and her head. I know that she doesn’t feel what I feel, and she has had a lifetime of teachers telling her to distrust her own beliefs, to trust in a book before her thoughts.

OK, we can listen to You’re Wrong About: Princess Diana,” she says, “or one about ‘the greatest unsolved plane hijacking of all time: D. B. Cooper.’ ” You’re Wrong About? That podcast is two liberal women cussing up a storm. I’m surprised my mom likes it.

We order chicken gumbo and gumbalaya. “What’s the difference between gumbo and gumbalaya?” I ask. “Well, jambalaya has more rice in it. So it must be their gumbo with jambalaya rice.” “I forget that New Orleans is such a part of your history.

It reminds me of an article I read about “deaths of despair” in the United States in the nineties. The paper tracked the rise in suicides, overdoses, liver disease from alcohol abuse, and the like in white middle-class Americans. They found the rise directly correlated to a decline in religious participation. Without a God to lean on, without your confusing days being written in the stars with purpose and direction, without God having a plan for you and your measly life, many people fall into hopelessness. Human beings need to believe that their strange lives have cosmic meaning.

I do have an interest in dissidents. My mother believes 5G may harm us, and I think she’s silly. But what of the nonconformist who warned back in 1940 that cigarettes kill? What of the contrarian who said the CIA was spying on Martin Luther King, Jr.? I mean, I’ve seen no evidence that 5G or the Covid vaccines are harmful. But have I done that research myself? No. I just trust the media would tell me if they were. My media. Whatever media my mom is consuming, they’re quoting “research, studies.” They’re slinging medical articles and YouTube videos of doctors saying that mRNA vaccines kill. A month before our road trip, she sent me one of these videos. It’s a clip of a longer talk, but even the clip is twelve minutes long. “Something to consider,” she wrote in the subject line. “Doctor calls out deadly vaccine!” Twelve minutes is annoyingly long for something I instinctively discredit, but short enough to give it a go. So I do. It’s a doctor on a stage with a PowerPoint. He has studies and graphs and lists of ingredients in tiny fonts and words like “embryonic stem cells.” I write my mom a long response. “OK I’m six minutes in and here are my thoughts: he’s using a lot of technical science speak that is above my pay grade. And so, what I’m doing is I’m trusting the lingo of an expert.

When Mom says “bong,” she means her nebulizer. It turns water into vapor, and she huffs it all day like a singer breathing hot mist before a performance. Except Mom’s machine is handheld. I’m surprised she doesn’t carry it in a gun sling. But my mom is not just inhaling water. “Let’s get some colloidal silver in those lungs,” she says. Second to prayer, colloidal silver is Mom’s insurance policy on life. She makes her own, soaking two silver rods in a glass vat of water that sits next to her kitchen sink. I’ll let her explain it. This is from one of her emails telling me how to live forever: “I use distilled water and 99% pure silver rods. The rods are connected to a positive and negative charge (think of a jumper cable for your car) and they are immersed in the distilled water. Some people leave the rods in the water 2–4 hours. I leave mine in for 8–12 hours so my silver water is extra strength and powerful…I drink ¼ cup colloidal silver in a glass of water before bed, and have for years and years. RARELY am I ever sick. I take a bottle of colloidal silver on every trip (especially overseas) in case I pick up a stomach bug or am around anyone who is sick. I use it on wounds, use it for pink eye, ear infections, the flu, and more because it kills over 600 viruses and most bacteria, including MRSA. There are also studies that show the benefits of colloidal silver against cancer.” Every time I’m home, she gives me a bottle of the stuff to take back to Los Angeles. I, like a good millennial, googled its effectiveness. The scientific establishment seems to believe that colloidal silver does approximately nothing good, and in large quantities, some bad. Perhaps you’ve seen the viral meme of the old blue man? He consumed so much colloidal silver that his skin dyed blue from the inside. He looks like a Smurf with a white beard. Well, he looked like a Smurf. He’s dead. Maybe from something common like heart failure, but… When I told my mother this, she wouldn’t hear it. “I know it works. I’ve been using it for years. I don’t care what those articles say. I’ve read hundreds of articles about it.

I discovered my "condition" had a name when I changed schools in seventh grade. The new school brought new faces and new boys. I noticed their butts in their khakis, and I noticed that I noticed. Then, on some television show, I heard someone talking about being "gay," and the whole universe rushed through my head at once. I thought back on everything I'd heard in church, and realized I was the thing they had warned against. I was immoral and bad. This is a wild thing to conclude as a kid. It's not like the moral lessons everyone learns in the course of growing up - like when you call someone a name, see them get hurt, and your conscience teaches you the power of words. Those lessons sting then move you to better behavior. This revelation was different. I hadn't done something bad. I was something bad. the only you that you know - everything you're becoming - is bad, and there's nothing you can do about it. It's a horrible and complicated headspace to grow up in. (This, in my opinion, is why so many gay people turn to art, music, fashion, or comedy. As the world around them grows hostile, their spirit becomes obsessed with the meaning of it all. Straight people, finding the world designed to suit them, don't need to explore its meaning in quite the same way. But gay people don't have that luxury. We must study it, dissect it, reject it, or reshape it. We do this with the thing that was rejected: our heart.)

I can’t ask her about it, I can’t confront her, because it’s just another thing that will break my heart. But I can be a passive-aggressive bitch.

WHEN I IMAGINE where I want to live, the first thing that comes to mind is where I want to have that coffee in the morning. I picture the breakfast nook or the chair and the book and the coffee and the view. My second dream is where I will have a beer. I see afternoon light getting low and angled, sending yellow rays through the tree branches. Maybe on a back patio, or on a grassy bluff over the Pacific Ocean. The imagined locations of our happy places say something about us. About how we recharge or what we crave. I want a cottage on a boulder mountain. A bed and a quilt and an old stove with a teakettle on it. A telescope and a chart of constellations. Books everywhere. Removed from the world but also in it, caring about it and for it. Being old and thoughtful with a pipe to smoke on the porch and a few squirrels who trust me. A raven would be even better. And friends stopping in. Nieces and nephews making the trek to the mountain for a night of stories and some whiskey in their Dr Pepper. I’ll pour it and say, “This never happened.” Of course, I’m too social for that fantasy. I like being in the thick and churn of society. So I’d probably get up to that cabin on a mountain and leave after a month or two. But who knows what age will do to me. Who knows if I’ll slow down, less hungry and more content. Who knows if I’ll find a raven who’ll have me.

I have learned this for certain: if discontent is your disease, travel is medicine. It resensitizes. It opens you up to see outside the patterns you follow. Because new places require new learning. It forces your childlike self back into action.

The children ran up offering beads and brightly colored scarves and dolls made from folded palm fronds. It didn’t feel like life in paradise. It felt like poverty tourism

Being labeled is claustrophobic. It locks you into connotations.

Humans want few things more than to belong.

Humanity fixates on violence. We’re fascinated by its abnormality; we want to understand it and learn how to avoid it. But the truth lies somewhere in between blood and peace. Most of us will move through life without experiencing the abnormalities of violence, but that doesn’t mean those abnormalities don’t exist.

Fear is like a thorn in your foot. It may be proportionally small in relation to the body, but it hurts and demands attention and everything halts until the thorn gets pulled.

By thirty, I had learned a valuable lesson: You are not an idiot. It’s okay if you don’t know everything. Don’t pretend. Ask all the questions you want. It’s fine if you’re not prepared for the zombie apocalypse at all times.

MY FRIEND TOM, a filmmaker, professor, and writer, told me, “Whatever your pain is, that’s where you’re going to find your passion. Whenever I talk to students, I ask them, ‘Where do you hurt specifically?’ For example, the school system always pushed me out. It didn’t accept the creative person that I was, and nobody listened to me, so my passion now is listening to kids and accessing the voice in them that has been quieted and silenced. That came from my pain.

I met a man in Baja California who left his life in Texas to start fresh. He said he’d had a family, but it “got complicated,” so he left. Now, in his sixties, he lives on the beach in a camper van. When I spent two summers in Alaska as a teenager, I remember seeing the same thing. There were so many grizzled men with wrinkles acquired from wrongdoing. They came to Alaska to forget and to be forgotten. The state seemed full of them. Patagonia is like that, too. The ends of the earth. The places that do not ask follow-up questions. I know I have it in me. In a small, frightening way, I have felt it when I’ve failed and my soul hardens like a statue. I’ve felt a surge of shame flip some switch and turn me cold. Meticulous. Surgical. I won’t live like that. It takes a safe and wide love to teach a man that it’s possible to fail and remain. —

Riding the Redwood Highway, I felt like a pauper sneaking into the castle. The trees began to tower above us, like a convention of gods, either speaking so far above that we couldn't hear, or waiting for us to leave so they could begin again.