Like Streams to the Ocean Quotes

“Have you noticed how when someone says, “My first impression of you was…,” you perk up with wild interest? We want to meet ourselves.”
― Jedidiah Jenkins, Like Streams to the Ocean: Notes on Ego, Love, and the Things That Make Us Who We Are: Essaysc

“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. —”
― Jedidiah Jenkins, Like Streams to the Ocean: Notes on Ego, Love, and the Things That Make Us Who We Are: Essaysc

“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.”
― Jedidiah Jenkins, Like Streams to the Ocean: Notes on Ego, Love, and the Things That Make Us Who We Are: Essaysc

“Being labeled is claustrophobic. It locks you into connotations.”
― Jedidiah Jenkins, Like Streams to the Ocean: Notes on Ego, Love, and the Things That Make Us Who We Are