Hello. HELLO!! My goodness but hello….

I am sitting in a library in Gardner, Massachusetts. This means I am writing on a keyboard at the community computer rather than on a phone and the finger stretch feels indulgent. Thank god for libraries. Thank god for librarians. 

It’s been 25 days of experiences, most nights spent with different people and in different homes or churches or fields. I don’t yet know how to sum things up so you are going to get bits. Lots of bits.

When I have talked with folks during this walk, the first question they have almost always asked is this: how is your body? I love that this is what people ask, from people I already know to someone I just met on the street or in a sandwich shop. How’s your body, they ask. Is it hard?

Somedays it is. Somedays it isn’t. My feet feel like they are reshaping in ways that are both fine and confusing. I went two and a half weeks without any blisters and now they are cropping up everywhere. On some days, like yesterday, after 13 miles I am so exhausted I almost crawl the last few miles. On other days, my feet are sore at the end but I still have energy. I learned right away that if I don’t do my exercises - hello Lex Horan - that my hips get wonky and so I am diligently doing my hip and leg and arm practices which is keeping my body mostly balanced. The hardest thing to do is go slow enough and rest enough to be in this body doing this walk for the long term. It’s embarrassing to say that because lord, this is what I DO, but there you go. It can be hard to stop in the middle of the day and just sit for an hour. Partly this is because in land that is so privately owned, there aren’t places to sit and rest for an hour. This is even with the privilege I have to go into a cafe when it is there and buy something so that I buy the right to rest. I have been grateful for glacial rocks because sometimes they will be perched on the edge of someone’s yard and they offer a kind of base where I can sit and it doesn’t look quite so curious.

And yes, I have now had the police called on me five times as a suspicious stranger and yes, the minute they see my white middle aged lady-ness (a word I never use to describe myself but there you go) and hear what I am doing, they leave. And yes, I am doing all of this as the Supreme Court is deliberating over whether or not unhoused people have the right to sleep outside when no shelter beds are available. All of this. All of this.

One of the many conversations running through my brain while I am walking is about this: the extraordinary privilege protecting me as I walk. I expected this. I am not surprised by it. And the visibility of it, the constant reminders of the many beloveds in my life who would be having massively different experiences for all kinds of reasons, I ask everyday: how can this walk serve the truth of this? How can this walk in some way, in the smallest of ways, be one very thin thread that is part of what many are doing to weave something different on the other side?

So I have had conversations with the police who have stopped me about what they perceive as threat and most blew me off but one guy showed up clear and honest and talked about dealing with people’s perceptions of threat versus real threats and how much he hates how people get scared of folks they have never actually met.  I told him about our abolitionist work in Minneapolis. That was a good conversation. A good day.

I have also told friends that I have finally encountered that thing I have heard about - when you are talking with someone and you say a thing and they just kind of still and look into the distance before, a few beats later, completely changing the subject and yes, these have been white folks with some economic means… I’ve heard of it but don’t remember seeing it. 

And yesterday I saw an otter, swimming and giggling in its otter way in a river alongside the road I was walking on.

I have been well taken care of by Unitarian folks and UCC folks, even though I am neither but I have friends who organize in these churches and they’ve helped me out. I’ve also had far more conversations with non-native folks about changing how histories of colonial violence are represented in these many small towns than I anticipated. And I have been surprised and then surprised that I am surprised to see how tightly some of these towns hold on to stories of the single settler woman or family that was supposedly killed by indigenous people fighting against their encroachment. Sometimes these statues have fresh flowers placed on them and I stand there shocked at how fiercely this memory of victim is being tended, while around me stretch farms and roads and plants that were never on this land before the 1500s.

One of the things that keeps amazing me is this: walking is not slow enough. Let me say that again, walking is not slow enough. If anything, walking brings me closer to how complex every community is, to the land itself, how it shifts after a few footsteps. I feel like I am just passing through so many stories that I’m not going slowly enough to listen to. Sometimes I get pieces of them when I get to meet people, or like when I was sitting on the side of a hill and a vibrant bluebird flew by. I used to see bluebirds when I was a child in Ohio, but I don’t see them in Minnesota. Or the half hour I spent watching a vulture fly on the airstreams above a pond, back-and-forth, back-and-forth. Those are moments where I get a little more, but only like the first paragraph of a greeting. Walking is not slow enough and I did not expect to feel this so strongly. It is making me think about everything, how moving at the speed of trust is an aspiration and how I don’t know that we can do it without stopping long enough to hear the stories around us and then to become part of the stories ourselves, something that takes time, so much time.

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I am now in Northampton, finishing the first month of walking. Today is Sunday and I started four weeks ago yesterday. I am not tracking miles but it has been something like 360 with my meandering walk between and across rivers and towns. I have talked with many beloveds who grew up in the places where I am walking and we talk about their hometown, about the land, about history. I have been startled by how many native-settler alliances I am hearing about or seeing, how many folks are working together to shift the stories that are on plaques and in history centers so that the true and long history of the land is held and not only colonial stories of conquest. I did not expect this.

I still don’t know how to turn all of what I am experiencing into reflective stories so instead, let me tell you what comes next. I am taking a week off to be with family. After that I am walking more or less like this: Catskills (the town), Howe Caves, Ithaca, Ganondagan, Cleveland area where I grew up and have family, Fort Wayne Indiana and then I don’t know for sure. If you are curious, you can connect the dots to see the basic trajectory. What I just named are what I know. Everything in between will emerge.

I want to tell you so many things, about what it feels like to fall in love with people again after only really loving nonhuman kin who are strangers…. Physical unconditional love, not just global scale love. What it was like to encounter my great great grandparents in a cemetery when I didn’t know they were there, to meet people who admit to being nervous about housing a stranger but want to discern the difference between trust and danger a bit more thoroughly. Visiting Turners Falls, the site of the first large scale indigenous expulsion and massacre by the colonial state, grieving, honoring, remembering, accounting…. and then also learning about how the waves of colonization emerged and seeing that there were moments where this story, this violence and profound moral failure might have happened differently and it didn’t. 

I want to tell you so many things and ask so many things, about who your people are and where they come from and what you want to remember and carry forward and what is in need of repair and accounting and what you are learning about what all of that means but for now, I will say hello and thank you. More will come in the weeks ahead. 

If I will be near you and you want to say hello, just reach out. 

With care and one step at a time,

Raffo 

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At the Fork in the Road - download the book here.