october 10 walk update

I am sitting in a library in Salina, Kansas. The land is starting to change from what I have long been familiar with - the mix of prairie and woodland that makes up the Great Lake Basin - to one that is drier and more open. Yesterday I had a moment as I was coming through Chapman, KS - an interdependent community of followers of the Assembly of God tradition - where I could see what people have been telling me for the last few weeks. The topsoil is thinner than back home and right below, there is limestone. There are places where the limestone is starting to come through the surface, this mix of grass and green and stone and dry that is familiar to me from traveling in South Dakota. The land is flat, sometimes flat in the way that seems to go on forever, and I think of how often I have heard people say and have said myself, lord do not drive through Kansas or Nebraska because there is nothing to see. Oh oh OH, there is so much here. So much. The land is beautiful in its relationship with horizon and sky that goes on forever. For the first time since I started this walk, as I moved along the side of the road yesterday, I felt that walking sometimes is slow enough.

If you have been reading these reports, you’ve heard me talk about the fear and worry that rises in people when they hear what I am doing. To a person they say things like: be careful, there are a lot of crazies out there. It is interesting to me that this is the word that most people use, again and again. Or be careful, there are bad people who are likely to hit you over the head and take what you have. When someone says this to me, I usually ask: have you met those “crazies” or those “bad people” or just heard about them? Almost every single time, people are referring to stories, sensationalized moments of intensity. I am not naive. I know that the increasing objectification of life, the two-dimensionality of people whose lives are reported on our screens, and the amount of exhaustion, despair and suffering means that people are likely acting out more than they did before. Or maybe they aren’t. All fear is looking for stories to bolster its beliefs, to keep the nervous system ramped up and vibrating so that there is no way to feel the pain, grief or loss that is beneath the inflammation.

I am noticing that further east, it was easy for me to settle other people’s fears against what I believe and know. Some of this was about moving through landscapes of people that I could read and assess based on past experience and some of it was the land itself. Having a day of loneliness and worry and then noticing the way the swamp oak is arcing from the side of the road, the woodpeckers and jays and deer tracks remind me of a series of relationships that have always been in my life, this settles that fear into something softer. I was talking with a friend of mine who is driving across the country and I named to them the importance of not carrying other people’s fear. I hadn’t put words to this unspoken demand until my daughter and I were staying with a Lutheran pastor (Missouri Synod for those who know) and he kept repeating over and over again, with maps and books and stories, how dangerous the lands were that I was going into. That I had to learn to get water from a cactus and that I had to prepare to see rattlesnakes and scorpions and that it was dangerous, desolate, with a potential to kill me. And that doesn’t even include the worry he felt about people, the ungodly ones. I know that there is much to learn about traveling through lands I am unfamiliar with. We should always learn about any lands we are moving into that are not the ones we have called home, but learning about what is different, what can hurt you and feed you, is not about being afraid of the land. It’s about building relationships. Someone also texted me about western Kansas and then told me to be careful, that I was likely to find people who would shoot me if they knew that my partner was a woman. 

I do not want to borrow other people’s fears nor do I want to carry their fears for them. At this point, most of the women I meet have a slight recoil when I say what I am doing and they tell me how dangerous it is, that I am brave, and that they could never do this thing. I am growing weary of this, even though I am clear about the difference between their fear and what I am experiencing. I keep remembering the two Haudenosaunee women who stopped me on the side of the road in New York to make sure that I was ok and then we talked about how they spend their free time driving to make sure that the people are safe. We talked about the vans that are looking for people seen as girls and women to steal them and sell them. We talked about how this is still not lifted up large enough or visible enough in this country and how little understanding there still is of the links between this and the ongoing colonization of these lands. And we also talked about my gray haired light skinned ass not being a target. That is known fear, something that exists in large and unreported numbers. That is not the same as what these largely white women are reporting to me. For most white women, the greatest danger is actually within our homes.

Be wise about what could happen but don’t carry anyone else’s fear. As I move deeper into places where I barely know the layers of life that are the land, the histories that shaped this land and how people survive and care for each other, it can be harder to assess when something is a person’s own fear versus a wisdom I need to listen to. This sentence is everything. It’s like a prayer to me, a moment of humility that reminds me that fear like love is relational and dependent on context and intimacy. The more we make it abstract, lifting stories that no one we know has actually experienced, the more we are reinforcing walls of smoke and mirrors that we dream fill with poisonous snakes and strangers with evil in their eyes.

This morning I had a conversation with a white man and we were grooving in our storytelling, feeling alignment on the big picture things - agreeing that anything that supports wealth over relationship, profit over people, is destructive - but then we completely and utterly differed when it came to the details of how we got here. Of “who is to blame.” It did my head in a bit, this total alignment mixed with absolute disagreement over what creates that alignment and what should be done. For him, the United States and the Constitution are the one thing that keep us from tyranny and anyone who attacks the United States or the Constitution is attacking the soul and spirit of this land. I am not saying anything that is new here but for me in talking with him, in noticing the profound agreement we had on naming the symptoms but the vast difference in how we understood the roots, something sunk deeper into my bones. Oh, I thought. OH. Everything is always about origin stories. Always. Whether or not we remember or are conscious of how much they inform our thinking, they are there, throbbing beneath our experience and understanding of the present moment. 

Anytime we hear a story, we have a few different options for how we respond. We can just absorb, becoming the stories of the people around us, with or without awareness. We can leave the stories behind in search of different stories and meaning-making that makes more sense to how we experience life. We can stay and wrestle with the stories, trying to change them, critique them, unpack them, deny them. Or we can feel trapped by them, held hostage by those stories but unable to leave them. This is an individualized experience, what happens when an individual meets a story and then has these various responses. I don’t know what would happen if I were raised within a collective culture where my individual experience of our origin stories was not the most important thing, where we were the stories instead of I. 

I was thinking about that as I was walking through Iowa and Missouri and eastern Kansas, passing massive Cargill grain silos including one, and here is the photo of it, that had hills of corn piled behind. Yes, all of that yellow is made up of corn kernels. Someone told me that it will stay there through the winter before it is distributed in the spring for planting.

Cargill is based in Minnesota. Minnesota, where I live, is a state with money. I hadn’t fully understood just how wealthy our state is until I started moving through other states. The southern part of the state, filled with farms and big cities, is more wealthy than the north, where a range of shifting industries and land usages has meant that people struggle. In Minnesota, there is a stark difference between the economies of north and south, between urban and rural, and between reservations and non-reservations, and no single story about those differences would work. And, at the same time, Minnesota still has more vestiges of the old US ways of being - where the whole is only as strong as the sum of its parts - than a lot of other places. Certainly more than Kansas, which I am learning is a state that has always pried itself on a kind of libertarian ethic of independence and labor. The individual’s right (or the individual families’ right) to create their own future. Minnesota has more safety nets for folks who are struggling than do most parts of the country. There is a reason why Minnesota is sometimes called Canada Light, although both Canada and Minnesota are changing. Here in Kansas, I have heard people say with pride that their state rejected dollars for Medicare expansion and COVID support and that hard work is the most important cultural element of the state. And there is always far more complexity than any of these sentences allow. 

So back to Cargill. Many years ago in Minneapolis, at the annual Coming Out Day Luncheon, sponsored by Cargill, a beloved friend who was receiving an award for their work around trans liberation and justice, shared a thank you speech that included calling out Cargill for their destruction of the environment and the things they create in their labs. This friend was shunned by the gay powers that be because she did not just accept the award without pointing out the contradictions embedded in honoring some lives as valuable while ignoring the impact on other lives. I keep thinking about her as I pass these huge grain silos, the size of small towns with little signs of life except that constant and overwhelming parade of semi-trucks going in and out, scattering corn kernels on the side of the road and kicking up clouds of gravel dust.

Cargill has been charged with violating trade agreements, price fixing, ignoring health codes and using forced and child labor. While each time there is a new call out, Cargill shifts its practices, the number of life-endangering practices just shapeshifting in the ways that large corporations can. Distributing contaminated food, participating in the destruction of rainforests in Brazil for further ranching, a vast array of pollution charges and land grabbing across the globe, Cargill is rich rich RICH, one of the wealthiest private companies in the world, and its destructive practices are part of what leads to the moment we are in. I think about this as I witness, as you are, climate change and escalated militaries. I am walking through lands where the water is polluted from Cargill’s actions. I am walking through lands where the remaining prairie continues to be plowed under and turned into more corn and soy. And Cargill is one of the largest food suppliers for the military.

A little less than a week ago, I was adopted by a fabulous woman. Kathy took me under her wing. She fed me, she brought me into her home community and she introduced me to people. I am so very grateful for the depth of relationship and learning made possible because Kathy saw me on the side of the road and wanted to reach out. She brought me to Cottonwood Station, a heritage site focused on farming and community in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. Cottonwood Station is one of a range of heritage sites all over the midwest and beyond. There was a huge one in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa and you can find them from the Atlantic to the Pacific. I have been trying to find information on the creation and expansion of these sites, when they were built and what prompted them. As far as I can tell, they are generally about 50 years old and, like so many cultural moments, they focus on pre-industrial agriculture and early settlement. I walked around, looking at machines made of metal and wood and thought how different it is to have machines that you can fix when they are broken. I remember when cars were this way, when you could learn basic mechanics and take care of things on your own. Now, with everything computerized, from cars to combines, nothing is fixable. It needs experts and money.

Heritage sites like Cottonwood station struggle to find young people as volunteers. Children and young people come and are excited by what they learn, but the labor of  teaching and keeping things going, that is in short supply. Before I started this walk, I wrote a book about the walk, about what I was thinking and holding and dreaming and imagining before I actually began. There is a section in At the Fork in the Road where I talk about the ways that change sped up about 50 to 60 years ago. You can see it in graphs across genre, the moments when generations of extraction and destruction created the context for an increase in extinctions, poverty, disconnection and loss. When I learned that many of these heritage sites were founded at the same time, a moment that also included the rise in liberation struggles for Black communities, Native communities, migrant worker communities, gender-based communities, etc, this picture of change started to get clearer. Or something in me started to weave together. Here was a moment of change, not the first and hopefully not the last, between an old way and a new way. The new way is so much faster, so much harder to be intimate with, to fix the machines and make the butter out of the supplies you have in your backyard.

While at Cottonwood Station, I met a very remarkable man. As soon as I was introduced to him, I noticed that his eyes were clear and present and aware. Experiencing him like this made me realize how rarely I meet people - and this very likely includes me - who are in their eyes, observing and present, rather than looking for/at something or someone or just turned inward. His presence was a balm and we got to talking. He asked me if I believed in a higher power and then we both started talking about the land and ancestors as the place where we experience this higher power. He told me stories, took me on a tour of the heritage site, and showed me where there were still two sweet chestnut trees, something you rarely see anymore because of how European blights killed them. I have five chestnuts in my pocket, ripe and so delicious. I don’t want to eat them because of how precious they are but I want to eat them because they are so good.

At one point he reflected that no one can be an actual Kansan unless they are born here and I reflected back that this means that the truest Kansans are the Kansa. He paused, looked at me and nodded. 

It was in one of the exhibits that an example of what I named in my earlier conversation showed up: how we can see the world in similar ways but have different origin stories for how we got here. We had just been talking about wild food and about the ways that wild food is disappearing as more and more woodlands and prairie are getting plowed under - paw paws are hard to find and people don’t know about the greens they can eat and almost all of it has been impacted by pesticides. We were in the symptoms together, feeling sadness and grief at the loss of swimming holes and chestnut trees and land that is not plowed under. Then he brought me into an exhibit that had three parts.The first part showed a pen and ink drawing of an “Indian” and a buffalo. Think of those images of the plains Native on a horse with headdress and muscled body hunting the buffalo and what is terrifying is that most of you know exactly the image I am talking about, no matter where you live, no matter your proximity to Native lives and communities. This, he said, represents the land as it was before the settlers came. The next part of the exhibit showed the tools used for surveying Kansas into plats, evenly measured fields ready for settlement. The tools were simple with a few resembling the survey tools you see people using today and others long out of use. The final part of the exhibit was a wall of different kinds of barbed wire. Created in the late 1800s, barbed wire enabled private land owners to own massive tracts of land for ranching and farming. It slowed down the movement of indigenous people and settler squatters and enabled ranchers to have huge herds of cattle without needing to constantly watch them. As a sort of side note, barbed wire was invented in DeKalb Illinois, a place I passed through and wrote about because of the town’s wealth turning into the DeKalb company which then became focused on plant and animal genetics as part of Monsanto and then Bayer.

As he was showing me this exhibit, he was proud. From blacksmithing demonstrations to a wheelwright to sorghum and apple sites to a general store and so much more, Cottonwood Station is a living story of a particular time in US history and it is done well. However complicated I sometimes feel about the layers of history shared and not shared in this storytelling, the exhibit on the control of private land hit me hard. Like grief and wailing hard, even though I was quiet. 

When he was done sharing the exhibit, I reflected that I saw that story differently than he did and that I was confused by what felt like his contradictions. We had just spent our first set of time together reflecting on the encroachment of the wild and the loss of ecosystem complexity. This was a spiritual conversation we had, one where I felt a deep appreciation for him and immense gratitude for what he shared. And then there was this exhibit, a story of how the wildness was taken from those whose cultural practices had evolved for thousands of years in relationship to this land and then turned into privately owned parcels that were then, generation after generation, further tightened and controlled until we had the moment we are in.

Here is where I will always be grateful to him and here is where he showed me something that I hope to model for the rest of my life. When he heard this contradiction I had voiced, he looked at me and he nodded and then kept walking. We went to the next site and then the next and then, as we were nearing the end, he turned toward me and thanked me. Telling me I had given him much to think about, and then we hugged each other in one of those very tight and physically present ways. When our arms and skin say I see you, like this, I see you.

Here is what matters, I felt deeply listened to. Respected, cared for, even though I was saying things that seemed to challenge some fundamental beliefs or stories that he held. This is standing out for me because it doesn’t happen very often. And I would include that with people I am politically aligned with and people I am not. The depth of listening in this moment hit me hard in large part because it was so unusual.

I am carrying this man with me as I walk. The presence in his eyes, the things he cares so deeply about, and his open willingness to hear from someone unknown to him who holds different origin stories for the pain we both observe. May I be open to what someone shares with me, even if it rubs against some of my deeply held understandings and stories.

How do we live on this land in a good way together? What happens when our memories are so incredibly different, our stories of how we got here and what it means that we are here? Well, we know what happens. Conversations about racial Justice are attacked and right now, any conversation about shifting the narrative of what the United States is and how it came to be is defined as an attack on free speech. We have generations of stories and Survivor accounts of people - Black people, indigenous people, immigrants, trans folks and more who are attacked and sometimes killed just for naming a story, a piece of history or an incident down the road that is too much for the person listening to them to bear. I know that this happens. I’m not confused about this. Here is what I am struggling with: when people voting for Trump say they are not racist and not violent and that the reasons they are voting for Trump are not about the stories we charge them with, we don’t believe them. We say they don’t know themselves. We say they are lying. We say they are ignorant. We say they are missing the point. I think that sometimes we are right but I also think that sometimes we are very very wrong. We are missing some things that are important and I’m not talking about project 2025 here. I’m talking about regular people who are as hungry as I am for something and this is what they believe will feed them.

This is an important struggle, part of the struggle of this walk. Because either I accept that life is really just a constant power struggle with each side taking turns as the winner or I have faith that something else might be possible. Which means I, too, have to change. As terrifying as that is.

And this is not about some kind of cultural pluralism that says whatever anybody does is OK because it is what they want to do. Violence is real. There are reasons to be afraid. But assessing when that fear is tied to real things in the present moment versus when it is borrowed or inherited from someone else, that is wisdom.

As I have written about before, one of the teachings I listen to and live with as I walk is the Prophecy of the Seven Fires. I write about this in At the Fork in the Road, a title that comes from the prophecy. It is not for me to be a teacher of this prophecy but instead, one who listens to it and learns from its wisdom. Please do not quote me on anything written here. Do not learn about this from me.

I had an insight over these last weeks of walking through Missouri and then Kansas. The prophecy teaches that the Seventh Fire, what many believe refers to the time that we are living in, and which carries a lot of wisdom specifically for Anishinaabeg people also names this time as a period when the light-skinned ones - and those who follow the ways of the light-skinned ones - will be at a fork in the road and will need to make a choice. One direction of the fork continues the path of technology, something I am starting to understand means many aspects of humans arrogantly believing that we are the Creator, these western ways that privileges what we can create with our imagination, resources and labor over how we balance with the land. The other direction means taking the path of Spirit which, as I am slowly understanding with more than my mind, means trusting the interconnectedness of all life and seeking to live with that interconnectedness in a good way. 

As I was sitting on the side of the road near the Missouri/Kansas border, I suddenly saw the way trauma impacts the nervous system. Trauma creates a binary, a moment of frozen choice which is then replayed over and over again. Trauma wants to integrate and heal and so it keeps showing up, taking every opportunity that might enable it to complete what is stuck in the past. As a practitioner, I’ve learned to support people who reach those stuck places, those moments when the frozen past is so completely defining the present that nothing else can be known. Slowly, with care and spaciousness, I invite the person I am working with to hold more than one thing at the same time: the frozen belief and something else. Holding this contradiction, working to feel it, to sense it, to be able to live with both at the same time, is incredibly difficult. And as we do it, something else starts to emerge. Literally, a new neural path begins to emerge. We are no longer defined by only the one thing, the tightness of one way of being/understanding a moment, but other possibilities begin to emerge. And what is important to notice is that there are possibilities that we never could’ve imagined before we held the contradiction. They are beyond what we have experienced and beyond what we have believed. That is what Healing does.

I hate Cargill and companies like it with a passion that is raw and vibrant. If I could, I would disappear every single one of them and dance on the skeletons of their buildings. I hate what all of these companies have done to the sacredness of the land, our bodies and the bodies of gophers and raccoons that are riddled with cancer. I hate how they make war more palatable, how they have created food that is toxic to life, how they follow belief systems that center profit and expediency and how they dare to call what they create as food.

I had already written this piece and was thinking that I was going to send it pretty soon. And then I was walking. There are a lot of stories on this walk that I don’t tell because I am so wary of them becoming more objects to prove different peoples points, or becoming poverty porn or triggering some kind of narrative about people who are struggling that takes away the complexity of their lives. I have met with so many people dealing with a range of addictions, poverty, houselessness and the experience of living in the world of voices and beings that is different than the one that I live in. I was talking to a woman who was pretty banged up. She is my age and looks a good generation or two older than me. I met her right after I left the library where I had written this piece. I noticed as I sat down with her that I was making a lot of assumptions, as so often do despite everything. All of those annoying and often unconscious assumptions. At one point as we were talking, she leaned over and took my hand and told me that she was incredibly happy and that I thought too much. And that all of that thinking would just make me sad. Or angry. Or tired. She recommended I just let it all go. I snort laughed and then something hit me in the belly.

I heard whispered in the air around us, this is not about getting anything right but about living with contradictions. There is no right. Huge marvelous oak trees grow in front of houses and factories that are covered with Trump signs or rainbow flags. We can have multiple things true at the same time. I thought about how much I hate Cargill and I remembered that, however much I might hate them, they provide many of the jobs around here. And clicking my heels together three times, yes, I am in Kansas and that is a Wizard of Oz joke, will not make them go away. And I thought about how much compromise as a political tool often doesn’t work because most of the time compromise is asserting a false strategy, moving quickly into action rather than waiting and waiting and waiting for something new to emerge. Letting the two parts of the neural network that have polarized, whether it is two parties or two opinions or two approaches to growing food. Like trying to cut a recipe into two as though the chemistry of a recipe can work by just being halved. I think about the David Suzuki foundation and multiple other places that are Indigenous-led and are bringing together western scientists and indigenous scientists and then laying their belief systems and understandings next to each other and then just waiting. One elder said to me once: we need to stay in conversation because it is westerners who will have the medicine that can potentially cure the poison that they have brought.

And I remember that poison and medicine are exactly the same thing depending on how you use it. 

I am going to end with the beauty of the Kansas/the Kaw river. I love prairie rivers, their flat broadness as they move through a flat and broad land. This river moves through pesticide and fertilizer overwhelmed landscapes, carrying far more than it ever consented to carry. I watched the river a week or so ago,  saw the herons and fish and watercress growing in the shade. Here, I thought, here is living beautiful river that is also carrying far more than a river should. Here is both at the same time and I thought, again,  if there was only one thing I could do with a magic wand to maybe move us ever closer to taking the fork in the road that leads to life and away from destruction, it would be to support each one of us to hold contradiction as part of relationship. To hold contradiction in a way that doesn’t feel confusing or weak but just a way of loving life in its overwhelming complexity.

Walking is not slow enough, and neither are most conversations or meetings. They are not slow enough and they are not intimate enough. We tend to be protected when we are in front of people we believe we disagree with or who disagree with us. I have no idea how to shift the scale of all of this, but if I could waive a magic wand, I would have a hell of a lot more people just going and walking and talking to real people, being in real relationship with the land, and being open to sitting with the contradictions and looking at them together. And then waiting. And then noticing each other’s children or loved ones, and appreciating them. And then waiting some more until something that neither of us could have imagined begins to emerge.

I know that some of this thinking would have horrified me in my 20s 30s and even 40s. I can feel myself trying to make sense of this developmental stage, this desire to find something that is more than a generational power struggle between each person‘s perception of good and evil. I am afraid that I’m getting too soft, afraid that I am losing some thing by trying to find this third way, this other emergence. It reminds me why it is so important that we are sitting together across generations and across life experiences, because I want the course correction when somebody hears my words, this struggle or attempt to find something other than war and I want to be reminded when war is the only thing to do in this particular moment. When I’m missing something very important because of my position, because of my age, because of my limitations. And then I also want to be listened to, just as I was listened to by the man at Cottonwood station, I want someone to listen to me when I say, in this moment, we might be terrified, but whose terror are we holding? Is it our own or have we inherited it? is it a piece of the story but not the whole story? Is there a chance we might be wrong? Does this moment really need a war? If maybe it doesn’t but if we are in the habit of it, I want there to be enough space and time to sit back and to wait and say, this time, is maybe some thing beyond what we have ever imagined possible? Even if just for a moment? 

But then, as the woman on the street said, maybe I just think too much.

“All law-breaking comes from that first evil thought, that original sin of placing yourself above the land or other other people.” - Tyson Yunkaporta in Sand Talk

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As always, here is my updated route