To Shake the Sleeping Self: A Journey from Oregon to Patagonia, and a Quest for a Life with No Regret

by Jedidiah Jenkins

who showed me how to let go of my house when the flood comes, and to build on higher ground.

Be sensible, but be wild. Be ordered, but be free. Be responsible, but take risks.

The giant groves of Northern California. The guardians. As if the redwoods protected the perfect weather and fertile fields of central California from a northern invasion. As the Sierras defended her from the east. And the desert defended her from the south.

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.

I lay there thinking back through my life—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.

Entrusting yourself in others is hard but the release of letting go so tightly to your independence is freeing - a lesson not only learned once

This is what you wanted, I told myself. To be free. Out here. Living the dream at thirty. And for what? To be uncomfortable? Well. You got that. But who cares? What are you really here for?

But I held this feeling of dread in one hand. The other hand was holding love. Love for Mexico. For the land and the ocean. For the freedom of seeing new things and not knowing what was next. Have you ever felt two things at once? Two opposite things?

Always Maybe that's what makes it an adventure Maybe that's what shocks your system into really seeing Really feeling Really being

The only person I knew in every direction was myself.

Just feeling like your past isn’t a vice to hold you in place can be very freeing.

Uncomfortable with a part of myself I took as nothing: my whiteness. I took it as a floor, unseen and stood on. Now I was becoming aware of how the floor was built, and of the systems in place that kept it there.

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.

I got the erosion of the shoreline of a river, one pebble at a time. I wanted to change. I wanted to be born different. To be replaced and born again. New. Forgotten and remade.