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!)