“Overwhelmed with shame, rage and grief, I couldn’t stop thinking: This is not who we are! Over the weeks that followed, I realized those words were actually an affirmation. Indeed, this is NOT who we are. We are so much better than this. The urge to walk became a pilgrimage: an act of faith in the we that is so much better than this. An act of faith in ‘We the People.'”

This is what Esther Myobun told me when I caught her by phone last Friday, entering Nebraska on foot from Wyoming, God’s country, one of our most majestic, awe-inspiring states, with 2-mile-long trains pulling numerous cars brimming full of black coal under spectacular blue skies. I wrote about Myobun’s pilgrimage in my last post, which began to take shape after the President and Vice President of this country took down Volodymir Zelenskyy, President of Ukraine, in a news conference. Again, look up Liberty Walks to see what ensued for Myobun after that public humiliation.

“What practical result do you think your cross-country pilgrimage is achieving?” I ask, remembering my own 8-week Ramadan-like fast over Gaza this past summer, whose practical results were also questionable.

“There’s nothing practical in what I do,” she says. “But what I’ve seen again is, while not everyone reacts wide-eyed and inspired by the pilgrimage, they are exclaiming: ‘Wow, you’re doing that!’ This is the reception I get in the middle of a ranch in rural Idaho, where someone is filled with grief after her husband’s death, and she feeds us. She wants to reach beyond herself, to step outside of her bubble, and now she’s in my heart; there’s a friendship there. That connection is what pilgrimage is.

“We do our grief through pilgrimage. We’re so siloed. Loss causes us to open beyond what we think we are. I see people’s grief, and at times it gets misdirected, but we’re all at a place where we’re increasingly isolated and longing to break out of the isolation.

“Am I going to lose this country? Are we all going to lose this country? Are we going to lose each other?”

How many of us express our worry and even despair so directly, especially “are we going to lose each other?” Because isn’t that what this country really is, each other? The human beings, not red states vs. blue states, not Republicans and Democrats, not evangelicals vs. everyone else. The words are simple and direct, without the ideological prism we insert time and time again. Each other means everybody.

In March of 2016 there was a furor over a North Carolina bill that required high school students to use the bathroom of the physical gender they were born with, now how they identified. A young man’s family sued, and the issue got lots of attention all the way to the White House.

My blogging mentor, Jon Katz, a liberal and spiritual writer living in rural northern New York, told me: “It’s good to protect trans people, but what about the dairy farmers around my area whose price for their main product and livelihood, milk, hasn’t risen in years? They’re old before their time because of years of relentless labor, only to find they can’t make it anymore, sell their pasture-raised cows to big industrial farming conglomerates who won’t let the cows step on grass ever again, go home, and kill themselves. Who from the bicoastal, educated, New York Times-reading public cares what happens to them?”

“I got to connect with something because my heart is broken,” says Esther, “only I can’t do that work of connection if I think I have the answer and all I want is to strengthen my position. I have my opinions, but when I try to shore them up and put the stake in the ground, that stake can be driven through somebody else’s body. I make the red states my enemy, Trump my enemy.”

What are the rest of us doing? How many of us post snarky messages on Facebook about the orange man in the White House, highlighting the latest outrages or indignations? It’s so tempting for me to bait Aussie about her great hero.

The Gate of Sweet Nectar, the Zen Peacemakers’ unofficial liturgy, invites everyone to the supreme meal: “Sharing your distress, I offer you this food, hoping it will resolve your thirsts and hungers.” Instead, many of us “share” our anger and frustration on social media. That may feel like something, but what, pray, does it really do, other than providing very short-lived satisfaction and relief at telling the world off?

“This is also part of my clarifying what faith is in my practice. ‘The Great Way is not difficult for those who don’t pick and choose,’ says a famous sutra. That is the koan. How to live beyond for and against when living often means we have lots of for and against. Where I came to is that this is actually atonement, coming into full acknowledgment of one’s karma.

“I carry all the things, the neuroses, the family origin, second generation Holocaust trauma—it all informs everything that I do; that is where I have to firmly plant myself. I don’t deny it, but I also don’t have to act out of it, I just have to live it. At a visceral level, the pilgrimage is my meeting my karma fully and living there.”

“Your final stop is Washington DC, during the Thanksgiving weekend. Is there a destination aside from DC?”

“I think there is one, but I don’t know what it is. Something is unfolding, Mind knows, but I don’t know. On some level I want to be part of saving the American experiment. That’s pretty grandiose, but I think there’s a role for a kind of spiritual renewal that needs to happen here and that I want to be a part of.”

Do these words sound too fairytale-like? Too whoo-woo? Twilight Zoneish? Too spiritual?

“The beginnings of a movement are always dark and half unconscious, characterized rather by a blind unrest and sense of discomfort than by a clear vision of the means of relief,” the philosopher Jane Ellen Harrison said. Everything great starts like this, with a readiness to undertake a journey without knowing the destination.

“[T]he sense of control has always been what we reach for in the absence of faith,” Maria Popova writes in her fabulous Marginalian. There is a faith there in something way beyond the narrow limits of human rationality, even beyond imagination. Some people call it God; Bernie called it not-knowing. Again, look up and support Liberty Walks.