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