A Nation in Four Movements
Pressing into the nation’s most tender spots
Friends, bison, countryfolk,
We leave on the National Pilgrimage on Tuesday! Yay! It’s happening. Thank you for being on the journey with us, for your patience, your questions, your ideas, and your generosity. A question we get asked a lot is: How did y’all choose your route? Or more pointedly, how can you leave out Boston and Washington DC? Because we are car culture, how can you skip Detroit? Because our main religion is consumerism, how can you skip an Amazon warehouse?
How can you not bite the Big Apple, the heart of extractionary capitalism, the most glaring evidence of the nation’s misspent youth? How do you not visit Huntsville, Alabama where we smuggled in legions of Nazi scientists to build the space program? Or, how can you avoid California, the world’s 4th largest economy, with its extreme beauty and depravity, its center stage in global culture and innovation? And what about Florida man, the nation’s longest running joke and most irrefutable evidence of failure?
So why did we choose what we chose?
For those of you who have been following this journey for a while, you know this journey began as a coast-to-coast to e-bike ride and has gone through many evolutions to become what it is now. This happened because we listened, read, wrote, prayed, and started to see new possibilities. Similar to a parent listening to a child as they slowly reveal their soul over time, we listened to what the nation was telling us. We listened for what themes wanted to come out. First, we acknowledged that it had to be a road trip by car. What is more American than that? Of course, as someone who lives car-free, it brings me no pleasure to center modernity’s murder machines, but how else could we honor the breadth of our beauty and sew together the thousand open wounds?
We could have mapped out a dozen other equally rich routes, but this is the route we feel is right for this moment - our nation’s 250th. We needed a centering approach, a middle path, an honoring of the beautiful, broken, beating heart in the center. This is the approach we believe a nation on the ropes needs to remember itself, to heal, and do the most fundamentally American thing: BEGIN ANEW.
All this evolution centered around one old idea, almost forgotten now, that our nation is not a transaction. We are not a tax bracket or a border wall or GDP or election or policy. Our nation is fundamentally a people bound by a covenant, an agreement about who we are, where we’re going, and how we’ll get there. It is a promise made across generations, renewed or broken by the choices of the living.
As we approach our 250th birthday, this covenant is almost entirely unknown, and there is no clear path. In part, this empty marriage, this lack of identity, is because we are blinded by the trauma and pain of our unhealed past. We are a people who have never fully reckoned with who we are, what we did here, where we came from, or what we owe one another. The National Pilgrimage is how we begin to change that, not through dismissing it and pretending we’re only a nation of straight white Christians, not through stuffing it all down or spiritual bypassing or patriotic pageantry, not through argument or legislation or elections, but through the oldest human technology we possess: the journey itself. That is why we’re going where we’re going. We’re on a mission to reckon, own, submit, and lament - the first steps on our path to repair, redemption, and renewal.
Across thirty days, four legs, and thousands of miles, we move through the body of this country the way a doctor moves through a patient. We’ll listen, feel, press gently on the places that hurt, and take in the whole patient. We won’t rush to diagnosis or prescription; we’re just building a spiritual, emotional, and mythological dataset through feeling, witnessing and praying our way through. We won’t reduce our complexity to a discipline or a theory or policy. We will continue to listen to take in the whole organism- the people, the spirit, the land, the history, the culture, the wounds, and the ideals.
We’ll sleep under the stars and in state parks, eat deep dish pizza and bison burgers, participate in once in a lifetime ceremonies and commemorations. We honor our leaders, scientists, and artists. We’ll grieve those who died for us. We’ll bring our children and our ancestors with us. We’ll cry. We’ll sing. And when we arrive in Chicago on the Fourth of July, we’ll bring to a close our first 250 years, the right way, slowly, honestly, reverently and with lots of deep dish pizza and Italian beef. And on Monday, we get back to work.
Our attitude shifts from witnessing, lament, and atonement to connection and creation. We will renew the covenant during the National Assembly. On Monday, July 6th and Tuesday, July 7th, all of us (that means me, you, and your community) will name the values our country actually stands for now, what is true about us, where we’re going, and how we’ll get there.
Our route is not random. It is a liturgy. Our Assembly is not a performance. It is a national sacrament. Now let’s explore the journey in greater depth: four movement, four themes, four medicines for healing our wounds.
Movement One: The Birthplace of Democracy
New York – Pennsylvania – Virginia
Most Americans learn a single story about the birth of their democracy: a group of men in Philadelphia, quill pens, parchment, gallons of booze, a hot humid room that stunk of musk, horse shit, and tobacco, and the thunderclap of a new idea. It is a magnificent story. It is also false.
The first movement of our Pilgrimage begins further back, in the longhouse. At Ganondagan, in the forests and hills outside Rochester, New York, we walk the land of the Seneca Nation, the westernmost member of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Here, centuries before Europeans arrived, the Haudenosaunee had already built a spiritual democracy, a confederation of sovereign nations, bound by the Great Law of Peace that distributed power, protected individual rights, and required the hard, but necessary fortitude and patience to build consensus across differences. Our Founders, especially Washington, Franklin and Jefferson, worked with native folks and studied this model closely. To begin a pilgrimage about American democracy at Ganondagan is not to diminish democracy’s evolution in Philadelphia. It is to tell the whole story.
From there, we move to Seneca Falls, the ground consecrated by another unfinished revolution. At the Women’s Rights National Historic Park, where Elizabeth Cady Stanton and three hundred others gathered in 1848 to declare that all men and women are created equal, the question hanging in the air is the same one that haunted Philadelphia and Gettysburg, the same one that haunts us daily in our domestic and foreign policy:
Whom do we mean by “all”?
Twenty miles away, in Auburn at the modest house where Harriet Tubman lived and died, the answer becomes bodily and urgent. Tubman did not theorize freedom. She walked herself into it. She led people into it, again and again, through darkness and danger, following the North Star with a pistol in her hand and a merciful God in her chest who told her she would never fail to bring a passenger through. The Underground Railroad was not a metaphor. It was an act of moral courage, spiritual surrender, and operational excellence so staggering that we have barely begun to absorb it.
We then carry these stories south into Pennsylvania, to the Waverly Destination Freedom Underground Railroad, and into Philadelphia, where the Liberty Bell, Constitution Center, and Independence Hall wait like elders who have something difficult to say. The founding documents are extraordinary. They are also a compromise with evil. Holding both truths simultaneously, the soaring aspiration to freedom and equality and the brutal endorsement of slavery, native genocide, and misogyny, is the only honest way to prepare for a nation’s 250th birthday. These are not lessons for adults alone. We deliberately create space for children to stand in these places and ask their questions aloud, because a democracy must be able to explain itself to its youngest citizens.
This leg ends in Virginia, at James Madison’s Montpelier, the home of the Father of the Constitution, built and maintained by enslaved people, and at Natural Bridge State Park, and Floyd’s Country Store, where old-time music spills out onto the porch like it always has, insisting on joy even in the middle of a reckoning. This first movement invites us to remember that our democracy did not spring from nowhere, and it does not sustain itself automatically. It is a living inheritance, magnificent and compromised, and it demands full frontal nudity, compassion, and courage.
Movement Two: The Civil Rights Trail
North Carolina – Alabama – Tennessee – Missouri
As the first movement is about the origins and principles of our nation, the second is about the practice and the price of it. It centers the way we systematically extracted life force from Black folks in every imaginable way, and not for a greater good, not for some temporal short-lived reason, but as an enduring goal: the endless experience of comfort and luxury for a few thousand white families.
We rise early on a Sunday in June to worship and then drive to Birmingham, Alabama to walk the Civil Rights Heritage Trail. Birmingham is one of those American cities that contains multitudes, the city of Bull Connor’s fire hoses and King’s jail cell, of the 16th Street Baptist Church and the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame, of a Black middle class that built itself from almost nothing, of church ladies who led the movement through faith and organizational genius. To walk Birmingham’s streets is to understand that the Civil Rights Movement was not a moment. We are still in it and there is no neutral position. We must be for it, spiritually anchored, mentally disciplined, and courageously attuned to the “fierce urgency of now”. Or we must be against it. We must decide today as Parks, King, and Rustin did then, that dignity is non-negotiable, that equality and freedom are sacred and unalienable rights, and that “it is always the right time to do the right thing.”
From Birmingham, our route curves through Tupelo, where a Cherokee boy, Elvis Presley, was born in a two-room shotgun house and absorbed the Black blues and gospel tradition that would electrify the world. We’ll push on to Memphis and the National Civil Rights Museum. The museum is built around the Lorraine Motel, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered on April 4, 1968, standing on the balcony outside Room 306. To stand in that place is to feel the specific weight of what was taken from this country. King was thirty-nine years old. He had been to the mountaintop and pulled us up to see it for ourselves. Then we shot him in the face.
From here we follow the path of the Great Migration, up the Mississippi to St. Louis, where we bring the second movement to a close, and prepare for the third. We’ll explore Cahokia, an ancient highly sophisticated indigenous city that was larger than London, the practiced metallurgy and global trade.
The second movement is not only about tragedy. It is also about the long, grinding, beautiful persistence of Black culture, the blues on Beale Street, the jazz that came up the Mississippi, the food and the faith and the music that have done more to define American culture globally than anything else. As we reckon with the fact that our culture was born from unimaginable cruelty and oppression, we face the undeniable truth that we can also be deep, loving, creative, talented souls who chose goodness, truth, and beauty in the face of evil.
Our leg ends with a lament across the vast American interior, through Missouri, Kansas, and Wyoming through the flat, honest heartland, arriving in Cheyenne on Juneteenth. Juneteenth is the other founding day, the one that completes the Declaration’s promise of equality and was legally secured (until last month’s Louisiana v. Callais decision) by the 14th Amendment.
To embrace Juneteenth, after praying over Harriet Tubman’s grave, visiting the home of the ⅗ compromise, walking Birmingham, and standing at the Lorraine Motel, is to understand that the Civil Rights Trail is not history. It is a current. This second movement offers us this koan: America’s original sin was not a mistake made in ignorance. It was a choice we made deliberately, and its consequences have never been fully accounted for. Our debt has never been honestly settled. Until they are, we cannot renew our covenant.
Movement Three: Indigenous Soul
Wyoming – Montana – South Dakota
The third movement is the most ancient, and the most spiritually demanding.
It begins with a fast, in ceremony, at the base of Mato Tipila, the place that the Lakota call Bears Lodge in what is known as northeast Wyoming. We arrive the evening before, fast through the night, and begin the hike at 3:30 in the morning, in darkness. We will engage in a living spiritual tradition that predates the United States by thousands of years, and on land that the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty explicitly recognized as belonging to the Lakota, land that was seized eight years later when gold was discovered in the Black Hills.
Our great shame extends beyond countless broken treaties to the systematic genocide of Indigenous nations, through warfare, seige, disease, rape, torture, starvation, and internment, through the theft of 1.5 billion acres of land, through the forced removal of children to boarding schools designed to “kill the Indian and save the man.” Our pilgrimage will not compress this history into a museum exhibit, but rather allow us reckon with it. We will be present to it and carry it to the Little Bighorn 150th Anniversary commemoration, where ten thousand Lakota will gather, celebrate the victory over Custer on our nation’s 100th birthday, and their survival as a people who refuse to disappear, who refuse to forget the beauty of their philosophy, spirituality, language, rites, and rituals, the debt owed to them, and their central role in our nation’s re-birth.
Between these ceremonies, we move through the great wild body of this continent. We drive to Yellowstone, our first national park, established in 1872, which John Muir called “the wildest, most divine bit of mountain scenery” in all the world. We’ll spend two days in the presence of bison herds and volcanic pools and geysers that have been erupting for longer than any human civilization now living. The American national park system is, as historian Wallace Stegner said, “the best idea we ever had.” It is also an idea with a complicated history, built in part on the forced removal of the very Indigenous people who had stewarded these lands for millennia. Both things are true. Both deserve to be held.
After Yellowstone and the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Little Bighorn, we’ll enter the sacred Black Hills. We’ll visit Crazy Horse and Mt. Rushmore, we’ll hike and camp, and ask the hills for guidance as the worst of our impulses continue to shake the known world. We’ll leave the Black Hills for Wounded Knee, where on December 29, 1890, the United States Army massacred 300 Lakota men, women, and children. We’ll meet our friends at the All Nations Gathering Center, where we will join them in an Inipi ceremony, the sweat lodge purification ritual. We carry nothing into the lodge but our truth and our prayers. The third movement invites us to consider that the soul of this land is Indigenous, and it is still here, still speaking and teaching us, offering the nation a way of understanding and caring for all our relations in our next chapter.
Movement Four: The American Century
Minnesota – Wisconsin – Illinois
The final movement arrives in the cities, in the noise and the beauty and the unresolvable complexity of urban life.
We drive to Minneapolis to stand vigil at the sites where Philando Castile was shot dead in his car in 2016, where George Floyd was murdered in slow motion for eight minutes and forty-six seconds in 2020, and where Renee Good and Alex Pretty were murdered this year in cold blood by ICE agents. Four names. Four vigils. Four more entries in the long ledger of lives ended by racist state violence.
From Minneapolis, our route swings through Wisconsin, where we tour Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s home and studio, built into the Wisconsin hills with the kind of organic, democratic genius that believed architecture should serve the human spirit rather than oppress it. And then Chicago: the City of Broad Shoulders, the city that built the American Century - radio, TV, architecture, consumer goods, textiles, and manufacturing - and is still a great laboratory of civic society and working class solidarity.
In Chicago, our pilgrimage accelerates into a jubilant end. We’ll visit the American Writers’ Museum, with its exhibition Declarations: 250 Years of Writing Toward Independence, and board an architecture boat tour on the Chicago River to gaze up at the skyline that defines what Americans imagined the future would look like. We’ll eat deep dish pizza and hot beef sandwiches. We’ll listen to the blues at Kingston Mines. We’ll visit the DuSable Museum, the oldest museum in the country dedicated to African American history, and Chess Records, where Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry and Howlin’ Wolf invented rock and roll, changing the soundtrack of the world. We’ll worship at Quinn Chapel AME Church in Bronzeville, the oldest Black congregation in Chicago. We’ll watch the Cubs play the Cardinals at Wrigley Field, which is to say we participate in one of the most durable rituals of our nation’s culture.
And on July 6th, we visit the Obama Presidential Library on the South Side, a monument not to the 44th President or his policies, but to the idea of equality, the idea that this country, with all its failures and contradictions, can elect “a skinny kid with a funny name”, a Black man named Barack Hussein Obama, to its highest office.
On the evening of July 6th we open our arms to you. We welcome you to join us for the National Assembly, a nationwide gathering to shape a new moral vision for our next chapter. On the evening of July 6th and 7th, you’ll be placed in a group of six people to engage in a structured, facilitated dialogue. You’ll share your dream for the nation, offer your most cherished values, and collaboratively summon and shape a new covenant for the nation. It’s not a policy debate. It’s not about politics or elections. It’s about our nation’s soul. Think of it as a civic ritual. Think of it as a birthday present to future generations. Think of it as a thank you for all that our nation has given you.
On July 9, 2026, the 158th anniversary of the ratification of the 14th Amendment, which extended citizenship and equal protection of the laws to all persons born or naturalized in the United States, we gather. We read aloud our new covenant, the moral vision we collectively wrote. Not a law. Not a platform. A covenant: a statement of who we are, where we’re going, how we’re getting there, and what we’re doing next.
The fourth movement may offer us this: America’s greatest achievement, through its music, its architecture, its literature, its technology, its culture, and its democratic experiments, emerges from the collision and collaboration of people who were not supposed to be in the same room. The American Century was built by poets and engineers, citizens and refugees, slavers and liberators, by people from all walks who chose freedom and equality, who chose to set aside difference and work together. We built the interstate highway system together. We built the NASA space program together. We built land grant universities together. We built sanitation, electrical grids, and the Internet together. That story is not over. If we are willing to reckon and repair, we can begin building again.
Coda: What the Pilgrimage Is For
A nation approaching its 250th birthday has a choice. It can celebrate itself in the conventional way with fireworks and speeches and the comfortable lie of inevitable progress, the idea that we started imperfect and have been improving in a straight line ever since. Or it can do something braver. It can make a pilgrimage.
The difference between a birthday party and a pilgrimage is what you are willing to carry. A celebration asks you to leave your burdens at the door. A pilgrimage asks you to bring them in and place them in the center of the table. It asks for your grief, guilt, and the unfinished business. It asks for your deepest values and wildest dreams. It asks you to stay as long as it takes - until you are able to love them all, until you are transformed into someone new, someone whose eyes meet yours in the mirror and offer you gratitude and pride.
The four movements of the National Pilgrimage: 1. The Birthplace of Democracy, 2. The Civil Rights Trail, 3. The Indigenous Soul, and 4. The American Century are not four problems to be solved. They are four dimensions of a single truth: that we have made historic strides towards equality, but we have never fully put our shoulder to the wheel. Together, we can hold these in honest tension.
When we walk Ganondagan and stand at the Lorraine Motel and wake before dawn at Mato Tipila and hear the blues at Kingston Mines, we will marinate in their truths, and carry their impacts in our hearts as we drive to Chicago to summon a new moral vision. The National Pilgrimage and Assembly asks a simple question of everyone who makes it and everyone who follows it from afar: Are you willing to know this country as it actually is? Because only those who are willing to know it can love it. And only those who love it are willing to do the hard, necessary work of making it worthy of that love.
The road is long. The birthday is coming. It is time to go. Join us.
You can join us for the whole journey or meet us anywhere on the route. You can subscribe to the Bison Medicine Dispatch or follow us on socials for daily updates.
You can chip in a few bucks for gas money and help make this journey possible. We’re $15k short of what we need to complete the journey; we just need 150 folks to contribute $100. And most importantly, you can shape the next chapter of the nation by registering for the National Assembly. It’s free, online, and open to all. Register now to save your spot.
Big bison luv:)
Brandon
I interviewed Gale West on her understanding of the akashic record of the United States, its soul, and the experiences she’s had facilitating journeys on the divine destiny of the nation. You can watch it here.
This essay serves a dual purpose as the treatment for the similarly titled 4-part docu-series we’ll be posting while we’re still on the road. Yes, you heard that right! In addition to being pilgrims, we are filming, editing, and distributing a docu-series. Our House of Eight team has hired Rave Studios and 3 other remote team members who will edit in real-time and have the first video ready by the end of week 2 / Juneteenth. Our goal is to get thousands of people to see it, so they can register for the Assembly by July 2nd.
We put out some powerful videos this week intended to engage a broader audience: the three-quarters of us living paycheck-to-paycheck and are suffering from a chronic condition. In these videos we expose the truth, name the stakes, invite folks to join us. Our goal is to help folks get that we need to move beyond approved channels (protests, votes, taxes, volunteering), and into the deeper moral, spiritual, and cultural work this moment demands - the National Assembly. Have a watch of Someone Stole Half Your Paycheck and Your Vote Doesn’t Count and please share!