Melissa McCarthy was frustrated. She was disgruntled about the state of the country’s politics and irked by what she saw as people’s disregard for the environment.

So she decided to walk it out — across the entirety of the United States over the course of more than two years.

“My initial kind of frustration was in the realm of, ‘I don’t know what to do. I just have to go out and walk,’ and to express my frustration and devotion to the Earth,” said McCarthy, 68, who is from San Francisco and was ordained as a Zen Buddhist priest in 1998.

“It feels to me like a personal pilgrimage, as well as for the environment,” she said. “It’s an opportunity to pay respect to the earth.”

It was also an opportunity to connect with her fellow Americans. Watching the news from a television screen, she said, one gets a very skewed picture of the nation.