The Sunday Letter · November 1, 2026
Set It Down at the River
There is an old story the Zen teachers have told for centuries, and I have thinking a lot about it this week.
Two monks were walking home to their monastery after a long rain. They came to a river that had climbed over its banks, and at the edge of the water stood a young woman in a silk robe who could not cross. The monks had taken a vow never to touch a woman. The older monk did not hesitate. He lifted her onto his back, waded through the current, and set her down on the far bank. She bowed, and the two men went on their way.
The younger monk said nothing for miles, but his jaw worked the whole way. By evening he could not hold it any longer. “We are forbidden to touch a woman,” he said. “How could you carry her?”
The older monk looked at him with great kindness. “Brother, I set her down at the river. You are still carrying her.”
I have been the younger monk more times than I care to admit, and I suspect you have too. Somebody wrongs us, and the hurt lasts a minute, or a season. Then we pick it up and carry it for twenty years. We carry it to bed and to the breakfast table. We carry it into new friendships and new marriages, and then we wonder why our backs ache.
This weekend, families all across Texas are setting out marigolds, candles, and old photographs for the ones who went before them. All Saints’ Day falls on this Sunday, and All Souls’ Day on Monday. It is a season for remembering, and if we are honest, a few of the faces on our own altars belong to people we never quite forgave. A father who could not say the words we longed to hear. A friend who left when the money ran out. Sometimes the face is the one in the mirror.
For a long time, I thought forgiveness meant pretending. I thought I had to say it did not matter and that it did not hurt. I could never make myself believe it, so I never set anything down.
Forgiveness isn’t pretending it didn’t hurt. It’s noticing that what you are was never the thing that got hurt.
I wrote that line a while back, and it keeps finding me. The hurt was real. But there is a part of you the hurt never touched. It was there before the wound, and it will still be there long after the last person who wronged you is gone. The mystics called it the Self. I have spent this year writing a novel about it, a story fifteen years in the coming, about one soul that walks through four lifetimes and slowly remembers what it always was.
So here is my invitation for this week. Think of one person you are still carrying. You do not have to call them. You do not have to tell them they were right, and you do not have to pretend it was fine. Just notice, for one quiet minute, that the part of you doing the noticing is whole. It always was. Then set the weight down at the river, and see how far you can walk without it.
If it climbs back on tomorrow, set it down again. The older monk had practice.
David
P.S. What has helped you set something down? Hit reply and tell me. I read every one, and with your permission I may share a few, without names, in a future letter.
A Line to Carry
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First Light on the Slope
The sun comes up over the far hill, and the clouds burn orange from one end of the valley to the other. The pigs have been at work since before the light. They root along the slope with their noses in the dry grass and grunt to one another about what they find. A big black sow lifts her head toward the sun and then goes back to her business. Down below, the side-by-sides and the red tractor sit in a row where the men parked them last night. Nobody has turned a key yet. The engines will start soon enough, and the day will fill up with them. For now, the only sounds come from the pigs in the grass and a dove somewhere in the oaks.
A man can spend his whole life running toward a quiet he never reaches. He tells himself he will rest when the fences are mended, and the bills are paid, and the children are grown. The work never ends, so the rest never comes. We treat stillness as a reward we earn after the work is done. The pigs in the grass know better than that. They work and listen at the same time, and they see no difference between the two. The dove keeps calling from the oaks, and the light comes down the hill one tree at a time. The engines can wait a few more minutes, and so can you.
—David Ahearn
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