about the walk.

If you are reading this, then I am currently walking from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast of Turtle Island. I began in mid-April 2024 and have no clear end date, but likely in the winter/spring of 2025.  I have known that I would do this since I was 16 and, over the years, this knowing has pushed at my brain, waiting. In 2019, it became clear that this walk would begin in my 60th year.  I will be starting the walk this spring. 

I have spent a lot of time thinking about this walk in the context of the moment we are living in; a moment that is different and not different from many other periods of heightened violence and colonial genocide. It matters deeply to show up for the specificity of now, for every beloved whose body is under attack and whose line of descendants are threatened. This specificity matters even as, at the same time, I hold it against the chain of violence that arcs back through the past. No different….and different. 

I don’t know how we get to the other side of this cycle of violence, of the relentless push that so many of my kin have profited from: genocidal militarism for the purpose of resource extraction leading to climate chaos, rising fascism and so much pain…..there is no single strategy and often there is no clear strategy, there is becoming someone who does not act but is the action, who seeks to be in every cell someone who is built of remembering, resistance and repair. Without stopping. No matter your positionality and what your people have experienced or done. As I listen to this dream that has pushed at me for 44 years, I feel the many threads of connection to this land where I live and to the histories that have shaped my own life and the lives of those I love. I am learning that this is part of this developmental stage, this getting older part of life: we listen a lot more to the histories because they are so loud and so present.

On this site, you will find a map that shows, more or less, where I am. It isn’t live action but will be updated regularly.

There is a book called At The Fork in the Road that talks in depth about what I am doing and why. I finished it before I began so it’s largely about what is shaping this walk. To follow anything after I have started, you can track my blog on this site, Instagram @raffo-susan and Facebook at RaffoSusan. I will be posting things infrequently at those sites. If you’d like to support the walk, you can sign up on my Patreon.

I’ve answered some questions through the FAQ part of this website.