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

by Jedidiah Jenkins

Exposure to them seemed to expand what she found acceptable. It reaffirmed my belief that exposure creates empathy.

I was finding that so much of my life had been about avoiding the feeling of being in trouble.

I always thought I didn’t need comfort, but the trip had taught me that that’s something comfortable people say.

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

Even after all this time, The Sun never says to the Earth, you owe me, look what happens with a love like that, it lights the whole world.

Last week we had some newlyweds. This was their honeymoon. Some people should not marry. They fought the whole hike. By the third day, they stopped talking to each other.”

Jordan said his friend had decided if he did find himself at the gates of heaven, and wasn’t let in, he’d say, “Well, what did you expect? I did what I could with the information I had. And the story I was told wasn’t convincing. Isn’t it up to y’all to convince me?”

Jordan’s story reminded me of the James Baldwin quote: “It was really a matter between me and God. I would have to live the life he had made me to live. I told him quite a long, long time ago there would be two of us at the Mercy Seat. He would not be asking all the questions.”

But that’s what faith is—believing without certainty.

Yet I had been raised to assume otherwise. In my version of Christianity, certainty seemed propped up by a scaffolding of fear.

I have found more comfort and have felt a greater faith in something bigger than me, I have felt a bigger hug from the universe by rejecting the obsession to call it something. To name it. Maybe there is life after. Maybe there isn’t. Maybe it’s Jesus. Maybe it’s a giant oak tree. Maybe it’s energy. Maybe it’s stardust. Maybe we just shut off. But not calling it something certain has opened my heart more than when I was Christian, feeling like I was the lucky one who got to hear Jesus’s name and thus be accepted into the club. And quitting that limited idea, that the truth is so small, has given me deeper curiosity in the universe, my world, and the people around me. I love them more. I love everything more. Because I don’t see anyone else as right or wrong, we all just are. The not knowing feels so much bigger and more exciting and mystical and grand and beautiful than whatever words humans strung together to describe It, God, and how you attain It.”

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.

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.

Ferguson made me uncomfortable with my country and my understanding of it. 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. Seeing police brutality and protests in Missouri reported in the Argentinian press embarrassed me. The way that indigenous South Americans were treated, from Colombia to Argentina, felt different to me. They were second-class citizens, certainly, but at least the ruling elites didn’t pretend that everyone had equal footing. In the United States, white kids grow up on a mythology that everyone has the same chances, and hard work and responsibility will lead to success. The American dream was a meritocracy. But all that looked different from down here.

I want to see the empire before it falls.”

I couldn’t put a finger on it, but I knew that my deepest wounds were the place of my deepest meanings. And she was ground zero. My salvation was somewhere inside her.

I was entering the final month of my journey, and no one was watching. Which, though lonely, felt poetically personal and perfect.

When you’re sitting alone on the porch with a beer, a book, and a friendly face, almost anyone will talk to you.

This has been a common experience for my whole life. Something about the way I hold my face, or my mediocre good looks, my unintimidating stature, my curious and friendly eyes, always leads strangers to talk to me. In any city, people ask me for directions. People ask me what book I’m reading. People talk to me, and I’m sure they don’t know why. They might say, “You seemed nice,” or “You look like you are from here,” but I bet they didn’t have the thought first. They just felt familiar with me. It has been a constant reminder of the hidden motivations of all our actions. The signals we send. The language we all speak and cannot hear.

and all those hearts I carry in my heart, those boards and nails that build my house….

I wasn’t walking away. I was just wondering if God was bigger than what I had been told in church. If perhaps He wasn’t so jealous, so frightened by the rest of His creation. Backsliding felt a lot like walking forward. Like expanding into love and wonder. I had dared to crash with my old beliefs into the ditch, and I stood up fine.

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.

The Eden we pine for is not under our own feet or bike tires, but over the next mountain.

Yet now, at the end of the trip, I felt a dull melancholy. The way DayQuil can mask a cold, but leave you with a muffled head.

Plus, it was easier to be around my mother with the buffer of a third and fourth party.

I started walking on ahead again, letting my thoughts drift back over my trip, thinking how far I’d come, wondering whether or not I had changed at all.

I had. I knew I had. But how? These walkabouts, these rites of passage, these spirit quests are meant to transform. We want to meet Jesus on the road, to be stopped in our tracks by a white light or a burning bush. I didn’t get any of that. 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. I don’t know how that happens. I guess you have to completely erase your past, which I wasn’t ready to do. So I carried it with me, no matter how hard I ran from it.

Time didn’t quite move like I’d thought. I had wanted to slow it down. I wanted to be aware of every moment passing, in reflection and contemplation. I wanted to leave my office life in order to feel time passing in some more holy way, holding it in my fingers and studying each minute like a prayer bead. But that isn’t how we experience life.

But then we slid into living the trip, and my awareness dulled into routine.

I had wanted slowness, but I got life.

She was going at her pace, and she asked for that, and I would go at mine.

But by now I had slipped into my animal brain. I was looking from rock to rock, boulder to trail to hand-hold, focused only on what was before me. My hands are cold. Put them in your sleeves and don’t touch the rocks with your bare skin. Climb over this boulder. Put your right foot here. Breathe through your nose. This boulder is wobbly, step lightly and watch your ankles. It was meditative.

The trip had dismantled me. But I didn’t feel lost like I had been. 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.