“It was after Trump’s and Vance’s humiliating take-down of Zelensky at that famous meeting, when Vance accused Zelensky of being disrespectful and not grateful enough for what the United States had done for him. That moment was shocking to me. Trump has repeatedly broken the norms for civil society, and we usually say: Same-old same-old, but this was so heartbreakingly beyond the pale of what I understood our nation to be, our leadership to be. Something just flipped in me, and what had felt like a strategy or practice that was working for me all along—do my Zen practice, be a teacher—was no longer enough. It was an Orwellian moment, disorienting, a moment of grief.

“The next morning, I woke up with this strange impulse to walk to Washington. It began with saying: Why is no one on the streets? Why is no one doing anything? Why are we still sitting still? That was the first version. But as I sat with that, I thought of pilgrimage. Pilgrimage always starts with grief, a sense of loss, because there’s something primal about the urge to move, the body knows something in those moments, so what started as an act of outrage shifted into this pilgrimage over the following weeks.”

“Your brain is trying to catch up with your body,” I tell Myobun Esther Tishman. Zen teacher, chaplain, former academic.

“It’s funny, because I was never an activist,” she says.

Myobun is walking across our country, sometimes on her own, sometimes with a few people who walk with her. She started in Oregon on July 4, our Independence Day, and plans to make it to Washington, DC by the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, the last day of November. “Of course,” she adds when I tell her I’ll probably be in Tacoma Park, Maryland that weekend and maybe we could meet, “anything can happen.” Today she’s entering Nebraska from Wyoming.

Look at Liberty Walks for her route across this country, passing through many states, with photos, videos, and her gorgeous blog posts about the people she meets and the surprising conversations she has with them, many of whom are evangelical Christians. Her reports are deep and generous. She, a second-generation American daughter of German Jews who survived the Holocaust, labels it an act of faith in the United States.

Read her blog, tell your friends, follow her route, and discover that an America exists that we’ve lost touch with, preferring to generalize about and often look down at fellow Americans. Who knew that in Shoshone, Wyoming, there’s a retreat center created by Dale and Charlotte Bascue called Machaseh, which in Hebrew means refuge? It ministers to churches, pastors, and pilgrims in the sweeping central Wyoming plains, “where sagebrush and sand and stone give way to the irrigated green; where wind howls through and the sun beats down.” They also have their “girls,” plump and happy hens, and they give food and shelter to Myobun’s small group for a couple of nights.

They’re walking through the Christian heartland, which brings up old memories for Myobun when she, a Jewish woman, loved Christianity and identified with it in her early years. Later in her life she began to train in Zen.

“I’m encountering what’s life-giving and what’s toxic about Christianity, with which I identified long ago. MAGA, or whatever it represents, is very entrenched in the history of Christianity in this country, and certain flavors of Protestantism and evangelism are painful for me. As a chaplain, I pray to Jesus all the time with families, I was even baptized a long time ago.

“What’s it like for folks to assume we’re all Christian here, and I’m Jewish and Buddhist, and when I say it, they express a millennial vision of Jews and Israel connected to the apocalypse, and I encounter evangelical fervor and even a little aggression, though very little? Every religion has the beauty as well as the potential to do such harm, but right now I’m walking through a very Christian part of this country. How do we appreciate the good things and work through the toxic?”

“What about physical pain and difficulties?” I ask her on the phone.

“I’m 60 years old and have terrible bunions on my feet, so I get bad blisters. I have to slow way down, soak my feet at night, put ointment on them, do my regimen, and pay deep attention to how I walk through discomfort; it’s a very strong mindfulness practice to work through the foot pain. Luckily, it’s not orthopedic pain, harming my hips or knees. Also, just dealing with the sun on the open road, always walking, being bored, feeling I’m done and I don’t want to do this anymore—Zen practice helps here. It’s like being on retreat.”

Myobun shared a great deal more, and I was very moved by the depth of her views on faith and how she deals with feelings of helplessness and upset. I will post about it more on Monday, quoting her extensively. Meantime, make sure you check the website of her pilgrimage. She needs places to stay and some money for supplies (I donated), but more than anything, it will inspire you: Liberty Walks.