Mother, Nature Quotes

“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.”
― Jedidiah Jenkins, Mother, Nature: A 5,000-Mile Journey to Discover if a Mother and Son Can Survive Their Differences

“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.”
― Jedidiah Jenkins, Mother, Nature: A 5,000-Mile Journey to Discover if a Mother and Son Can Survive Their Differences

“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.”
― Jedidiah Jenkins, Mother, Nature: A 5,000-Mile Journey to Discover if a Mother and Son Can Survive Their Differences

“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?”
― Jedidiah Jenkins, Mother, Nature: A 5,000-Mile Journey to Discover if a Mother and Son Can Survive Their Differences

“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.”
― Jedidiah Jenkins, Mother, Nature: A 5,000-Mile Journey to Discover if a Mother and Son Can Survive Their Differences

“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.”
― Jedidiah Jenkins, Mother, Nature: A 5,000-Mile Journey to Discover if a Mother and Son Can Survive Their Differences

“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.”
― Jedidiah Jenkins, Mother, Nature: A 5,000-Mile Journey to Discover if a Mother and Son Can Survive Their Differences

“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.”
― Jedidiah Jenkins, Mother, Nature: A 5,000-Mile Journey to Discover if a Mother and Son Can Survive Their Differences

“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.”
― Jedidiah Jenkins, Mother, Nature: A 5,000-Mile Journey to Discover if a Mother and Son Can Survive Their Differences

“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?”
― Jedidiah Jenkins, Mother, Nature: A 5,000-Mile Journey to Discover if a Mother and Son Can Survive Their Differences

“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.”
― Jedidiah Jenkins, Mother, Nature: A 5,000-Mile Journey to Discover if a Mother and Son Can Survive Their Differences

“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.”
― Jedidiah Jenkins, Mother, Nature: A 5,000-Mile Journey to Discover if a Mother and Son Can Survive Their Differences

“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.”
― Jedidiah Jenkins, Mother, Nature: A 5,000-Mile Journey to Discover if a Mother and Son Can Survive Their Differences

“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.”
― Jedidiah Jenkins, Mother, Nature: A 5,000-Mile Journey to Discover if a Mother and Son Can Survive Their Differences

“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.”
― Jedidiah Jenkins, Mother, Nature: A 5,000-Mile Journey to Discover if a Mother and Son Can Survive Their Differences

“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.”
― Jedidiah Jenkins, Mother, Nature: A 5,000-Mile Journey to Discover if a Mother and Son Can Survive Their Differences