Officially ending the walk

After nine months of walking and a few other things, I am done. I am now sitting here in my home in Minneapolis. There is snow on the ground, it is currently five degrees outside, and the walk almost feels like a dream. Like something that didn’t happen. Some of that is because of the truth of the moment that we are in - not really a moment but still, an escalation that has been building for a long time. Some of that is just because I am here, in my home, sitting in warmth at a table, and there are few things in my daily life that remind me of what these past months have been. 

So, this will be my last blog post of this walk, a closing of sorts with some information of what comes next. And what comes next is going to include a lot of writing about a lot of different things so if you are still receiving these in your inbox, you’ll be hearing more of me in the coming weeks.

The last weeks of the walk

The last time I wrote a blog post about the walk was on November 10th. I’m actually pretty stunned by that except that I know I was also posting on social media in the meantime. After November 10th, I entered a period of being companioned on this walk. First my partner, Rocki, joined me for a week around her birthday. Then I had a week or so of walking on my own before I was joined by a beloved in Tombstone, AZ, another friend in Tucson followed by a few days staying with two other friends in the same town followed by another friend joining me for a walk from Tucson to Phoenix. In Phoenix I was with family and friends before being joined again for a walk from Phoenix to Salome and then again walked by myself for awhile before being joined again by my partner and another friend to support my walk across the Mojave and finally, all of this was followed by the unexpected gift of a few days of retreat at Dhamma Dena in Joshua Tree. After months and months of walking alone, it felt so good and right to have those weeks of companionship right before the end. I got to talk - a LOT - about the walk, reflect on it, make connections and share some of what it has felt like while actually walking with a few different people. I was always clear that I wanted the last few weeks to be solo again because that is what the first seven months of the walk had been, minus the two weeks with my daughter and a few days here and there with others. It’s also clear that you meet a lot more people when you are alone than when you are companioned so the timing of walking with people at this point was perfect. It helped me do the lift as my energy was starting to flag; helped me move through a lot of miles that might otherwise have been a bit more trudgy.

When I set out on my own again, I left Joshua Tree heading for Doheny Beach State Park. There are a few things that define these last weeks. First, it was in the midst of this walk that the wildfires began in the Santa Ana Mountains. I was camping at Lake Elsinore when the winds that most drove the fires began to pick up. I was in a campground along the lake, one of those places that I have talked about frequently on this walk, where a community of folks without a lot of cash were living together in a glorious example of mutual aid. The old white guy in the trailer next door to me, a trailer surrounded by old car parts and a few tents, stopped by my tent to offer me a can of peaches that he had just got from the food shelf. A woman on the other side of the campground came by to make sure I knew where the good water was at the site. In the middle of the night, the winds picked up. I had heard about the Santa Ana winds, reading about them in books, and so the words “dry heavy winds” were familiar but the feeling of them was not. They were not like winds that I had experienced before and they were so strong that in the middle of the night, two of the trees next to my tent crashed down, one missing my tent by maybe ten feet. I got up early the next morning, packed up my cart, and started heading towards the mountains themselves. You could see the smoke rising at one end of the mountains but I was still pretty far away. Moving into the mountains meant moving into the remains of a wildfire from a few months before. It was eerie. I passed by sites where the houses had burned to the ground and at one point, there were burned out trucks and cars piled on the side of the road. Again and again I noticed, I am not from this place. This is not land that I know. Once I got past the old fire site, I walked until getting to an RV park. All of the electricity on the mountain had been turned off to prevent sparks causing additional fires and pylons crashing in the wind. There was also no cell service because the road I was walking on, route 74 or the Ortega Highway, is surrounded by national forest and park. When I got to the RV park, the camping area was technically closed but one of the local folks told me just to go set up my tent and name him as a friend if anyone asked me what I was doing. He also told me stories, just like people in the other RV park and others I had met alongside the road, of trying to get out of California because of how much he and his family could no longer afford to live there. I was surprised by the amount of almost hatred I encountered by folks who were trying to figure out how to stay in places where they had lived for 20, 40 years and sometimes generations. There was a hunger, a commitment to the land and an exhaustion with the economics of it, a rage at the wealthy and a rage at what wealth kept doing to California. These were also folks who saw Trump as the answer and sometimes, we could talk about that. And sometimes we couldn’t. 

In the morning, I left the RV park and kept heading west. That was probably the most frightening day for me, largely because of how much I don’t know about wildfires. At one point, I watched as smoke started rising on both sides of the highway, increasing in intensity and even, on one side, with the slightest orange glow. There were cars passing me and I thought, seriously, if there was real danger and evacuation or something was needed, one of these cars would probably slow down and let me know. But I wasn’t sure. There was no cell service. No people and absolutely no prior knowledge on how to read the ways fires shift and move in the mix of mountains and wind. I probably walked the fastest that I had walked yet in this walk - covering 16 miles in about four and a half hours. For my body, that’s closer to jogging. Later, when I could see where the fires were and where I had been, I realized that I had never been in danger but as I was walking, I didn’t know that.

As I started to come out of the mountains and get closer to Caspers Wildlife Park, my stress about the fires began to relax but something else began to happen. For the first time on the walk, I started to experience cruelty. For many of the months of this walk, people have perceived me as homeless or unhoused. I’ve had folks offer me food, money and check to make sure that I am ok. I’ve also sometimes had folks very clearly avert their gaze, their body language tightening up as they weren’t sure how to place me. I’ve also spent a bunch of time with folks who were unhoused who wanted to make sure that I was ok. One guy just outside of Elsinore told me he had been living on the streets for 30 years and saw part of his job as checking in on the people who were still new to this life, making sure they were ok and had what they needed. We talked a lot about what I was doing and what was different/the same about folks who were unhoused because, of course, the broad diversity of reasons and experiences for homelessness are way bigger than the stories most housed folks hold. This being perceived as unhoused was a pattern throughout the walk but getting to southern California just on the other side of the mountains, that was the first time I experienced cruelty. And what I mean by cruelty is this: people pretending to aim their cars at me on the side of the road, gunning their engines as though they were going to mow me down, and then swerving away. Or getting really close and then laying on the horn or screaming out their windows to frighten me. Once I realized what was happening, I mostly got angry because I knew that this was an everyday thing for unhoused folks in the area. That this cruelty said something about a dynamic that was part of this place as much as the wildfires and the extraordinary beauty of the land. When you read this, thank you for any care you have for me in the reading but really, hold most of it for those who aren’t doing what I am doing - walking through a place and then returning home. Sadly, once I realized what was happening, I wasn’t surprised by it. I know this cruelty shows up everywhere, including in Minneapolis. Maybe it was just a lot bolder here.

And then came the last two days. Camping with more winds followed by an early morning wake up, a visit to a plant nursery that focused on native plants and cared for land that also had resident sycamore and oak trees that were older than the earliest Spanish colonization of this place, and then following the remaining steps to the coast. Along the way I met and hung out with a coyote for about an hour, walked past extraordinary wealth in Mission Rancho Viejo and San Juan Capistrano, and then started to move towards the ocean. A few hours before I got to the beach, I met a man who asked me if I had a welcoming party waiting for me. I told him that I didn’t and that I didn’t want one. That I wanted my ending to be quiet. Not extraordinary. Not getting a lot of attention. Just letting whatever happened… happen. 

You know how when a baby is first born, if they have had an uncomplicated birth and have been able to come through with minimal intervention, they move into a state of quiet alertness? They are wide awake and alive, just right in the middle of what is happening and… absorbing. When you are at a birth - whether your own or one you are supporting - it is so palpable. This quiet alert state fills up the room. It happens at other times in our lives, too. Meditation and other kinds of stillness practices can increase the likelihood that it will emerge. It can show up in bodywork sessions or just when walking in a quiet and alive place and suddenly, there it is. Everything is quietly connected and aware. That is what happened when I sat down on the sand. It didn’t feel like exclamation points and balloons. It didn’t feel like headlines and big emotions. It just felt…. Quiet. Sweet. I told someone later that it felt anticlimactic but in the best most nourishing way possible.

I camped for two nights at Doheny Beach and on the evening of the 13th, I told myself that when the sun went down, it would mean that the walk had officially ended. And the sun went down. And it was done. And I went to sleep.

After the walk

It felt good to write this out like this. I have been so grateful for the amount of care and attention I have received from many of you with this walk. A lot of people have sent me cheers and kindness throughout these last months and helped me, with their words and responses, to understand what I was doing. So writing out the ending like this is also ending a particular kind of relationship, if I can use that word, that has been in the ether around my sweaty body.

I spent another bunch of days in and around LA, including meeting up with new and older friends and learning more about the land and about the impact of the fires. I met a lot of people who had been displaced by the fires and sat with a lot of people who were grieving. I gave my cart to a man who was living on the streets and had just been evacuated from his space because of the fires and had piles of stuff surrounding him in a parking lot in Venice. A few months previously, a friend and I had named the cart “Ruby” for its red sides and so Ruby went on to live with Newton. 

I left LA to spend three weeks with my mother and her partner in Washington State before coming home to Minneapolis. One of the things I haven’t shared is that during the time of this walk, my family moved into a new living situation. We are in a collective living space, bought by three families together - families who have raised our children together and done more collective shit over the years than I can possibly list here. They are all settled in and I am now weaving myself into that settling. I visited briefly in August in the middle of the walk, but haven’t lived here yet. Now I do. Last weekend we were planning the garden for the spring and talking about the berry bushes we will plant and that felt like another root in this new space. This is a new neighborhood in Minneapolis for me and I am elated to learn that there is a house of radical nuns a few blocks over who I am itching to meet.

While I was in Washington with my mother, I wrote a gratitude letter that I sent to people I had met along the way who had shown me care and kindness. This includes people who have supported the walk through Patreon. In that letter I also wrote out the “data” of the walk: how many miles, how many pairs of shoes and other things. Go ahead and take a look. It’s all there.

What comes next

Whooey, that is the question we are all holding, isn’t it? For now, I am not going to reflect on the bigger picture of political social and cultural change happening in the United States and elsewhere. I post about it on the socials and, like all of you, am orienting and finding ways to be with my people and listen for what is possible in each and every present moment. 

In Liberated to the Bone, I write about how there are three ways I think about attending to healing which helps me navigate moments of chaos and confusion. The first is ending violence, the second coming into the present moment or remembering who we are and the third is creating the conditions to shift the histories that prevent us from being well and good in the present. The movements that I am long part of are very very good at attending to violence. We track it, name it, can provide analysis for it and build strategies to address it. When we are strong and good with each other, we build collective care and safety strategies and vehicles and we are good at naming when violence - from direct concrete violence to lack of access to the intensity of genocide - is taking place. I am grateful for that and this wisdom and practice will continue to inform and shape how I am in this moment, alone and in community. The movements that I am part of have started to bring the second piece more and more into our work. It has been powerful to be on different organizing calls and to notice space given for grief and rage and pain and conflict and loss. There are more and more places where folks pause or invite us to remember our bodies, our senses, our ancestors and what is still beautiful in our lives even as we are afraid. There is still more wisdom for us to gain here, but that is definitely part of a practice that keeps growing. It’s the final bit- creating the conditions to shift histories - that can be a bit fuzzy. It’s also what I think the walk is about and where I want to focus in the coming years. 

I was just talking with a friend about all of this in the middle of working on this piece. They asked me what, in this context, I meant by the third piece of that framework. I shared - it’s that part of organizing that we don’t always do as much as we used to. Where you are meeting people, not with a campaign or a goal, but because you are building relationships or connection or possibility for no reason other than the fact that you are alive together. And then seeing what emerges. It’s the conversation I had with the rancher that I talked about in the blog post Riding the Red Wave. It’s the hundreds and thousands of small intimacies that showed up in the walk, the places where we pushed or didn’t push each other as we listened. It’s the man who let me camp in his campground for free and then kept saying to me over and over again, remember this is a Republican who is giving you this free space, remember that we are kind and not monsters. It’s the way that in all of these encounters, each of us on the other side of a dangerous political divide, some part of us shifted to allow the other to be more complex than just the single story it can be too easy to hold. 

At one point I reflected to a different friend as we walked together, the kindness that shows up on walks like this are in no way revolutionary and yet, without these moments, revolution is a lot harder to achieve. It’s the ongoing living of that question that guided the walk: is it possible for us to live with and on this land in a good way together?

What’s dangerous about this third part of the work is that, unless we are in deep relationship with the fact of the violence and those directly impacted by the violence and those fighting to end the violence, we can easily veer into liberalism. Particularly those of us also protected by the social systems we are trying to change. I noticed this on the walk, how sometimes my hunger for connection and intimacy could override some of the other things that were there between us. How important it was to stay awake and to hold all of it at the same time. A friend of mine, the person I talked the most with on this walk (hello Lex), was often pushing at my thinking when my words started to smell a bit too much like the cultural relativism that says everything is ok, it’s just all different. I adore him for that because everything is NOT ok and not all ways of surviving, however different they are from each other, are ok and within that, there has to be space to meet…. Somewhere other than on a  battleground. 

And sometimes the only thing we have is a battleground and then that can be part of healing, too.

This is what the book will be about, using the walk to try and dig deeper into this third part, this creating the conditions part, this work that is about building or remembering or deepening the connected truth of our lives so that, when there are choices to be made in the heat of the moment or at the election box or when teaching our children or whenever, maybe there will be a little bit more that is real about each other that might shift the tide. After all, as I said again and again in my writing about the walk, we read about the folks who mainline hate and disappearance and separation as their focus but there are far more people who voted for Trump who are not grounded in hate but in fear and isolation. And I, like many of you, have done a really shitty job of remembering their complexity as I have been building my frameworks and strategies.

I feel tender about this. Things are going to get harder and we are going to lose people and that is true. As I wrote about in that last blog piece, there is a mix of powerlessness here even as there are deep realities and potentials for collective power that builds towards something else. I look forward, every day, to learning how to expand the risks I can take. I look forward to every single pushback and pull forward that comes from the impact of these words.

Here are some other things I already know will be happening…

February 16, I get to be one of the 11 people holding a prayer circle for these times. I participated in these circles a few times on the walk and they were - and continue to be - so sustaining. They came into being after October 7th and in solidarity and love with those living in Gaza and have continued forward as a place to practice and connect and remember. I am honored to be asked to be part of the next one, and nervous as all get out, but grateful. 

March 5th is the deadline to apply for the second Healing Histories Project cohort. This image is pulled from social media and there are other images there so head over to their page. The cohort is a seven month long program that brings together people from a variety of care- and health-related worlds to support our capacity to build interventions on the Medical Industrial Complex. This is work I’ve been involved with for years and am excited to do some teaching and facilitating again. I got to support the first cohort during the first three months and then the rest completed as I was walking. The application is at bit.ly/MICapplication. All of the dates and relevant information is also here.

And then later in March, I am going to be sharing some things from the walk that are specific to histories of work and labor. I’m doing the March 12th date, “How do we live on this land in a good way together?” I am shitty with titles and so after going back and forth, I just decided to use the question I held on this walk. It’s a question that is not done for me. 

I don’t have dates for them yet, but there will also be a live share back on the walk in Minneapolis and an online share back. I should have those dates determined over the next few weeks. Remember, it’s bloody cold here right now. We move slower.

In June, I am doing an event with Ancestral Medicine. I have been very grateful for their work as I have been walking and have had multiple conversations with Daniel which have been supportive to this walk. The details aren’t online yet but I’ll let you know when they are.

And in October, I am going to be facilitating a retreat through the Kirkridge Center called With the Land: remember, relationship and repair. This is a radical Christian retreat center so it will be the space to be in conversation with others about our relationship as part of the land and while all are always welcome, the through line will look at what this means within the context of a Christian retreat center.

And finally, a whole host of you signed up to support me with this walk through Patreon. I asked you for your support and you gave it. Your dollars were part of how I bought food, paid for campgrounds and all of the things that being alive and not working for ten months means. I am going to transition my Patreon to focus on supporting the writing of this book, but I wanted to wait a minute and do something slightly ritualistic. Hello, those of you who have been sending me cash for this walk. Thank you. You are released. The gift I asked for is complete and I am grateful. Please, go ahead and end your pledge as that period is finished. You are welcome to stay or come back to support the writing of the book as yes, that would be very helpful, but that is not expected. That is not what I asked for originally and so that ask has been met and fed. Thank you.

And there is more to come. I am working on a piece about collective resourcing right now that looks at the relationship between the public safety net that the State created in the 1920s and which has been gradually and continually eroded since then with our focus on mutual aid and colletive care. I also feel tender about this one but there is so much about the moment we are in that reminds me of when Bill Clinton was president and he went and destroyed the welfare system. I remember how many of us KNEW the system was broken but when he destroyed it, we were suddenly in the position of fighting to preserve something that hadn’t worked in the first place but which was better than nothing at all. Echoes of that race through me each time I read the news. I want to weave together the work and learning I did in the 1980s and 90s and early 2000s, primarily focused on economic justice, with more recent learning primarily focused on healing justice.

I will end here with gratitude and care. Thank you for walking with me. Thank you for caring. Thank you for supporting and wondering and telling me in so many ways that this meant something to you. I have friends out there who are still doing their walks - in particular, Mimi Allin is doing a three year walk, spelling the word “love” out across the span of Turtle Island in solidarity with Gaza. I was grateful for their comradeship as we sometimes reached out and compared notes. A few folks have reached out to me because they want to do something like this. If that’s you and you have questions, feel free to reach out. This is how we all learn.

And I plan on walking again.

In solidarity. With love… and with the deepest of gratitude.