I'm writing this on a misty morning on what we might call "Day 159." I am now zero miles from home. A week ago, after a day of winterizing and packing up Libby for storage (she'll stay in Virginia until we can come back and get her in a few months), my husband Ezra and I boarded Amtrak and headed toward the setting sun. I started to get the sniffles on the rails... all of which blossomed into a nasty head cold over the weekend. Of course it did! This is the Pilgrim version o

Pilgrimages don't really end, I think - any more than the air we breathe ends when it enters our lungs. I'm writing these words from the gorgeous home of Mary and Dave Hale in Falls Church, Virginia - just a few blocks from the Washington & Old Dominion Trail that we'll be hiking tomorrow... as we trek our very last 13 miles to the Lincoln Memorial. So. The end of the trail is almost literally in sight. But the pilgrimage has been all those things that cannot, that should not

Not on our mailing list? Sign up here . 2774 miles from home - and only 73 miles from D.C. Holy moley! Distances have become so strange after all of these footsteps. 73 miles is the distance from my house in Eugene to the capitol building in Salem, Oregon. It's crazy to think that the nation's capital is the same distance away right now. And there's something surreal about our trek over these past few days. The land feels saturated with history - with Brigadoon-like magic -

We're now less than 150 miles from the Lincoln Memorial. My 2020 Chevy Bolt - without the upgraded battery - could get us there, and probably back - on a single charge. This is crazy, friends. How is this even possible? How did we make it this far? I've been thinking about what it means to climb the big mountain. Compared to where we crossed the Cascades (McKenzie Pass, 5325 feet) - or where we crossed the Rockies (Togwotee Pass, 9658 feet) - the summit over Chestnut Ridge i

Every morning, before we start hiking, we circle up - take three breaths - and read "The Way We Walk." Part daily affirmation, part devotion, part pep talk for the 20 or 30 miles ahead. Go, Pilgrims, Go!! The other morning, Bob paused as he read the lines about "Kindness." We earnestly wish to make connections across differences. I've been thinking about those words lately. To 'make connections across differences' is not, exactly, to overcome differences. It's not, exactly,

Just a quick note to offer thanks to Jody, Deb and Sue for their hospitality on our last evening in Cambridge. Yum to sloppy joes and chocolate peanut butter treats - yum to fresh salad - yum to Sue's amazing beef vegetable soup. We left Cambridge Presby with tummies and hearts full. A strong community. Sustenance for the epic trip into the Appalachians that would follow over the next couple of days.... (To be continued....) Deb presiding over a bountiful kitchen at Cambridge

I just now received a text from Sue - the church administrator at Cambridge Presbyterian. She wanted me to know that she'd left us some snacks and a container of her homemade veggie soup: food waiting for us after a chilly day of hiking. This in addition to the snacks and drinks already piled high for us in the Church kitchen - and the dinner that we'll be receiving later today. It doesn't get old, dear friends - this outpouring of love and nourishment! Cambridge Presby was f

I dreamed the other night about Cordyceps - you know, the fictional mutation that creates a Zombie apocalypse in the video game and TV series The Last of Us . Yikes! Dystopian apocalyptic nightmare dreams! I don't remember the dream clearly - I woke myself up quickly, shaking the spores out of my mind (yuck!). But I remember absolutely distinctly that visceral sense of Us vs Them .... The Cordyceps dream was about this moment - about me and my country, me and my neighbors. N

We're in the big city now: I write these words from an Airbnb in Columbus, Ohio. Today we walk through the rest of the city - ending up at our hosts for the next three nights and diving into a rich weekend of interactions with two different faith communities. In Omaha, on the (as usual) good advice of my friend Bridget Keegan , I began reading Caroline Fraser's fascinating biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder - gaining more insight into the vast prairies and high plains through

2357 miles. Let's just let that soak in for a second. We will be in D.C. in fewer than 500 miles. That's a shorter distance than our travels through Idaho alone. How is this even possible? How, when did all of this happen???? There's that concept Malcolm Gladwell popularized in 2000: the tipping point, "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point." Somehow things tend to toodle around, same-old same-old... The world just being busy in its business of worldin

It’s easy to get complacent and all-knowing about small towns - even when you're slow walking through the countryside at 3 mph. It's easy to think: oh, here's another one - struggling to rebuild after industry left - good schools but not a lot of young families - historic churches with declining, low-double-digit congregations - Dollar General but fortunate to have a good grocery store (*in Frankton that would be Harvest Market, boasting the best meats in Madison County - by

Ryan Gage of Lafayette, Indiana's Star City News met the team on the road on 10/29.

Holy Hoosier! We're really making tracks now! The last three days have seen us crisscrossing west central Indiana... a fact that sneaked up on me as I found myself crossing the Wabash River and realized that seamlessly we'd slipped into a new state and a new time zone. It's very very strange, friends, to suddenly "lose" an hour and wake up the next day to sunrise at 8 a.m. Among the many bizaare aspects of pilgrimage, our relationship to time - to sunrise and sunset - keeps g

I've been wondering, lately, about HOME. About what transforms a place - a community - a building - into a home . But this weekend I found myself pondering a different question: what makes a place - a community - et cetera - a sanctuary . The word "sanctuary" has acquired a heavy political connotation these days, given our national tension and contention regarding immigration.... But in my usual spiritual nerd fashion, I want to be more etymological here. I'm thinking about t

Each morning, before we start walking, we take three deep breaths - the first for ourselves, the second for each other, and the third - expanding our circle of care and concern - for all the people and critters and land that we encounter along the way. The thing about breathing - besides that it's kind of essential for carbon-based forms of life - is that it reminds us that things expand, things contract, inward and outward.... That's the rhythm of all life. And so here too o

Is it because we're getting closer and closer to D.C. - our final destination? Is it the increasing population density - so that now the small farming towns we pass through are less than an hour's drive from major cities like Chicago? Is it all these college campuses? We've passed through Western Illinois, Illinois State, Illinois Wesleyan - heading tomorrow on to the University of Illinois, then Purdue, Ball State.... I'm losing track. Is it the increasing racial, ethnic, po

Friends, I think that the proverbial house is on fire. My co-pilgrim for these last 109 days and counting - Bob Hall - does not . In other words, despite our shared and strenuous endeavor: Bob and I have some serious differences of opinion. I've said before that the "microcosm is the macrocosm." This little world of our camper van enacts the very same realities as the big old world of the United States of America. Faith in "We the People" begins with the "We" that we actually

In the title of every blog post I measure my distance from home. I’m now 2050 miles from home. I think about home everyday - about my family, about the black locust tree by my house, about the gorgeous Oregon summer that I largely missed. But these past couple of days, I've also just been thinking about what "home" is. For more than 2000 miles (!!) I've been walking through and around small, rural towns. Farm towns, ranch towns, manufacturing, logging and mining towns. I've s

3.4 miles per hour. That's pretty much my pace. Sometimes it dips down to 3.3 or 3.2 (there are snacks to be eaten, photos to take)... Sometimes it revs up to 3.5 (the temperature is perfect, the road itself is thrilling and lovely). But basically, this pilgrimage is incremental and steady. One footstep. One footstep. Yet all the same: there are days where everything accelerates . Days when so much happens, when there are so many experiences, so many encounters: it's like a w

Over the past decade or so, popular culture has embraced ideas like minimalism and life-hacking - people creating ' capsule wardrobes ' and chucking out items that fail to ' spark joy '.... We're all trying to slow down, to cut back, to find our focus in these overwhelming times. As my all-time favorite life-hacker - the immortal Ferris Bueller - puts it: " Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it . " Oh yeah! One common h

Friends, I am a melancholic. The other day in Des Moines , Bob and I were joking that I see the glass half-empty and he sees it half-full... and together we have half a glass . It's true - my chaplain heart tends to resonate most with the expressions of grief and loss, with the vulnerable yearning I encounter along the way. Joy for me often announces itself only and most fully as the resilience that reaches out from the dark - the lotus that can only grow in and through the m

Before this pilgrimage, pretty much all I knew about Iowa I learned from Meredith Willson and The Music Man . Of course - this is like learning about my hometown, Chicago, from watching Catherine Zeta Jones vamp it up in that musical ... Not to mention that Willson’s Iowa was based on his birthplace, Mason City - north and close to the Minnesota border. We, on the other hand, are mostly traveling through southern Iowa, close to Missouri and crossing over the Mississippi nex

I write this on October 7th - mindful of the war in Gaza, mindful of the possibilities of peace, mindful too of troops in cities most dear to me: Chicago (where I grew up) and Portland - just up the road from my home for the last thirty years... my home in the state I love best, with its coast, forests, rivers, mountains, valleys, and high desert. The gorgeous state of Oregon. We all love something best - and these days, on pilgrimage, I'm finding myself more and more consci

Iowa has greeted us with luscious rolling farmlands and terraced fields. And with wind. And with weather. But we'll get to that in a moment. Early on Day 91, outside of Macedonia, IA - one of the oldest towns in the state - we met Gary. Gary is a retired farmer and engineer with an easy laugh and a broad smile. He told us about the history of our route - Pioneer Trail road, the old Mormon Trail . Later I visited the old Macedonia graveyard, and saw the grave of the first Mace

The average length of a human stride is 2.5 feet. With my trekking poles, when I'm walking big and strong, my strides may be as long as 3 feet. A yard. That's also just exactly the difference between the height of Libby, our rolling RV refuge - she stands 10.6 feet tall - and the 7.6 foot clearance of the portico at the Quality Inn in Council Bluffs. Guess who forgot all the above computations when picking up our newest pilgrim, Chris Kellow? That's how Day 90 began for me. B

It's a zigzag path, this pilgrimage. You're going straight for mile after mile after mile. Highway 126 through the Douglas firs and over the Cascades. Highways 20 and 26 for countless desert miles - over the Rockies - through the Sandhills of Nebraska and across the Cowboy Trail. Highway 275 past feedlots and accompanied by semis. And then, as happened on Day 85, as we approached Omaha, you're zigging and zagging on and off state highways, down country dirt roads, up suburban

What I know about Nebraska could maybe fill a thimble; walking through the land for 24 days gives me an intense, but spotty perspective.... like one of those ubiquitous grasshoppers that dart up and out around me as I hike the highway. Sharp and quick glimpses, but perhaps no real big picture. I just keep hopping along. Even so - I think I'm right to say that Nebraska is full of surprises, from its politics to its municipal parks. Nebraska is unicameral and technically nonpa

Good g rief. What a weird expression? What could it possibly mean for "grief" to be "good"? Stay with me on this one. Today is Rosh Hashanah - the second most sacred day in the year for us Jews. The "head" ( rosh ) of the year. We open the year, we celebrate new beginnings, by opening the gates of awe: commemorating the creation of life itself by marking a time of introspection and teshuvah : a word that we take to mean repentance , but that literally means "returning." In t

There are no accidents. And I don't mean that in some cosmologically potent way - as in, "everything happens for a reason." These days, as I move through space leading from my heart as much as from my head, I'm not sure that what we call "reason" is helping matters much. These days, reason won't ensure that neighbors get along: our starting assumptions, our sources of information, our boots-on-the-ground experiences differ so radically that finding common ground has become,

76 days out of 150 1451 miles out of 2847 We are now officially more than halfway  to Washington, D.C. We've crested the ridge. As my co-pilgrim Bob likes to say: it's all downhill from here. And yet. We've been grappling with some rainy days and I've been feeling rainy and waterlogged too. I've found myself thinking about intimacy, about love and friendship. All the people who know me best in the world are now more than 1400 miles away. I'm walking through strange lands, as

"A town can't survive without a grocery." What keeps a community alive? How do strangers become neighbors? How do neighbors become friends? John Rotness tells us: "A town can't survive without a grocery." I believe him; he knows about such things. He was one of the good folk of Hay Springs who helped establish the town's cooperative grocery store, Farm to Family . When I visited Farm to Family the other day, a little kid and her mom were buying some treats, and a few minute

I'm writing this from the gorgeous backyard of our hosts for the last two nights - Sandi and Wayne Muirhead, trustees of the Gordon United Methodist Church. Collared doves and blue jays greet the drizzly morning. The heat has broken; it feels like Fall. We are still in the warm embrace of the Methodists, still in the extended care of Pastor Peter Mtuamwari. Sandi and Wayne have essentially adopted us, feeding us dinners and breakfasts, encouraging us to use all the hot water

It's hard to imagine true violence, when you're walking alongside the road. The human-paced stride of the walk, the buzz of the cicadas, the wind and roar of passing cars, the occasional horn blast from a semi or (thrillingly) the whistle of a train, the fluctuations between bright sun and cool shade: all of this movement, noise, variation brings a rhythm to my hours on the road - a cadence that fundamentally affirms life, affirms the open landscape and the opening heart. But

People. I'm sitting in a spacious church basement, drinking filtered ice water and feasting on the leftovers from two full days of Methodist hospitality. The refrigerator and freezer are literally packed with food for us. There's more food for us stacked on the countertops. Tonight's supper: hamburger with mashed potatoes - but don't forget the cheese and butter and salt and pepper, all smooshed into the taters: this is the carb-iest bowl of delight you could imagine. There m

Van Tassell is not the smallest town we've walked through in Wyoming (at population 22, it's easily three times as populous as Lost Springs ) - but it is the last town we walked through. We crossed into Nebraska today. And suddenly, there's momentum. What an extraordinary feeling! Labor Day is behind us. The light is lowering. The air cracks a bit in the morning. The high plains of dust and sagebrush are yielding to rolling grasslands. We are almost at this journey's halfway

I've often said that I come from the land of "snark" - as in, I grew up in your typical American Jewish family, living in a pretty typical midwestern suburb, well-schooled in the wit of lowered expectations, complete with self-deprecating humor and a sharp, cynical tongue. It makes sense: my parents were German Jewish refugees, who hardscrabbled their way in an America that offered refuge and opportunity, but also plenty of prejudice and obstacle. So we grew up, in our home,

A requiem - before anything else - before I share about the restorative two days we've spent at a vibrant community church in Douglas. A requiem for all the beautiful no-longer-living things alongside the road. A requiem because, as much as this pilgrimate is a walk of love and life, it is also - necessarily - alert to loss and grief. And, so. The litany of lost and gone: Road kill that I've come to expect: deer, skunk, racoons, swallows, magpies, nighthawks, butterflies, mor

It's been a busy time. We've just spent four days in and around Casper, Wyoming. We've replaced a ceiling fan and airconditioning unit in Libby (ouch$$). We've been photographed and interviewed by the Casper Star Tribune. We've gotten soaked in thunderstorms, had to dry out our gear twice, and then were doused in synchronicity and serendipity - what some would call "trail magic." For instance: we ate lunch at one cafe - only to be recognized a day later in Walmart by the peop

One thousand miles. It's hard to make sense of that number. My British friend Andy puts it in perspective this way: if you left London headed toward Baghdad you'd be in Warsaw or Krakow by now. Hmm... If that were my trek, I think I'd probably take a more southerly route, and be somewhere in Slovenia. But hey, the point is: America is BIG . We've been on the road for almost two months, and we're still just in Wyoming. Indeed, the America West is beyond big. This trek is, in

Grand Teton National Park... Both Elijah and Kate had some remarkable close encounters of the mammalian kind when we were in the Tetons. Bison , elk, moose, black bears... But then there was this extraordinary moment... Elijah was driving to meet us before the day's hike. It was 6 a.m. Check it out (and note the moment where he calls me to tell me what's, um, holding him up!)

We are spending two nights in a beautiful setting that is literally a "refuge": Machaseh Retreat Center, in Shoshoni. "Machaseh" ( מַחֲסֶה) means refuge in Hebrew: a word especially beloved by the psalmist, who uses it often as another name for the Sacred: "our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble" (e.g. Psalm 46:1, KJV). So where is the sacred in this pilgrimage? Liberty Walks is nonsectarian and nonpartisan, a civic-minded endeavor. But it is also an act o

Okay. First of all. We are now one-third of the way to Washington. And even so. I've been thinking a lot about pilgrimage and pain. There's a hairshirt  component to traditional pilgrimages - the pebble in the shoe or the impulse to crawl on one's knees, as if the journey toward one's inmost truth required self-emptying. As if authenticity were won through heroic achievement - as if discovery demanded purgation and even penance: the mortification of our 'grosser' corporeal se

Why oh why Wyoming? This landscape is hitting me deeply - and I'm not entirely sure why. It's not just the proverbially big sky. It's not just the Tetons, or the striated sandstone buttes, or the reminders of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and a sudden realization that, in the scheme of things, we're actually not that far from Devil's Tower (340 miles northeast of here). It's also the corrals of horses who stare at me languidly, assess my predatory potential, and then oc

Yes, I'm covering three days in this post.... Apologies, but two of those days have been "zero" days - days to run errands and just to rest. We've been 'banking' miles for a week now, walking our tootsies off so we could linger in a single place - and these past three days have all found their anchor in the same Wyoming town: Dubois. Dubois maybe takes itself just seriously enough. The unofficial motto of Dubois is "Where real cowboys work and play" - and its main street feat

Over the weekend it rained, it stormed (lightning on the mountain top, oh my), it even hailed. We crossed the Continental Divide on Day 45 at nearly 10,000 feet. We were photographed and filmed by our wondrous documentarian Elijah Reed and his pal Löic (they'd joined us for the weekend). In the early morning hours, Elijah filmed a grizzly up close and personal on the road not five feet in front of him. He was in Löic's car, foot on the pedal, ready to gun it as needed. Late

"Manifestation" is one of those new age words that I've always been a bit allergic to... What some folks call The Law of Attraction - the capacity to conjure up the life we desire - implies an ability to manifest your dreams out of thin air. But what if your vision boards and daily affirmations don't bring you the white picket fence and the perfect green lawn? Is it your fault that reality isn't bending to your will? Literally the word "manifest" just means clear or eviden

Writing this on the morning of Day 42, August 14th. We're staying two nights in Ashton, being spoiled rotten by the incomparable hospitality of the Ashton United Methodist Church. Rev. Dale Clem and his wife Kelly brought us into their home, plied us with iced tea and root beer, hot showers and clean laundry - and then the community blessed us with one of the best meals we've had on the road. (Kelly's zucchini lasagna was astonishing... My only complaint is that it was finite

I don't want to blend too many of our separate adventures into one blog post, but the last two days share a common host - the Upper Valley Catholic Community. We pilgrims spent two nights in two different churches in two different parishes, feeling the warm love of the broader Upper Valley community. Given the centrality of pilgrimage in the Catholic imagination (think of the Camino de Santiago ), touching base with traditional images and icons over the past two days has felt

Oh, the luxuries! We really hoofed it last week, adding extra miles to our walks where we could - which wasn't a hardship, because we're still splitting walking/driving responsibilities. The longest hike we each did was still just 15 miles. And yet - the effort paid off massively, with two fully free days to unwind in Idaho Falls. Of course, "unwinding" is a very subjective term. For Bob that meant a little more walking (!!) - but this time, just leisurely strolls ... along t

I'm writing this on the morning of day 37, August 9 , from the Community Church of Mud Lake. We've walked more than 700 miles - with the Lemhi mountains at our side and our back, through windy hilly passes, past dusty hay fields and nuclear research sites, through county fairs and alongside a busy state highway. We've hiked to Sage Junction, where Highway 33 meets Interstate 15. Later this morning we're driving about 40 miles to Idaho Falls. There, we'll bunk for two nights,