https://www.klcc.org/podcast/oregon-on-the-record/2025-10-21/new-study-on-digital-device-usage-check-in-on-liberty-walks

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

Back when this began, Liberty Walks made front page news here in Eugene, Oregon. Follow this link to read the article:...

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

The impact of Liberty Walks continues to ripple outward...

Back in early September, Liberty Walks made front page news in Casper, Wyoming.

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