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A Love That Walks—as Monks Reach Washington, I Remember How We Began in Hot Springs
My husband and I were driving back north after getting engaged. We had fallen in love months earlier when he was in Chicago for the summer. One night, we stayed up talking until morning and never stopped. After that, I flew to Austin every month.
In November, he proposed.
In December, I flew down to drive with him back to Chicago to start our new life together.
We decided to stop in Hot Springs for the evening. We were engaged and married a few weeks later, making it feel like a pre-honeymoon. A pause before everything moved forward. We chose the Arlington Resort, directly across the street from the entrance to Hot Springs National Park. My husband had stayed there once before, arriving late and leaving early, never having the opportunity to explore the area.
We arrived late, just before the kitchen closed. My husband was in pain, already living with what would later require surgery. I was in an autoimmune flare, my insomnia relentless, my nervous system buzzing like it had nowhere to put the energy.
Walking has always been my medicine.
When my body will not rest, I move it.
But my husband needed rest. As he rested in our tiny hundred-year-old hotel room, I walked the hotel. I didn’t know the area and didn’t want to leave the building, so I wandered the long hallways of the Arlington. Up and down staircases, getting my steps in until sleep was possible.
I woke early the next day, still feeling the buzz. I told my then-fiancé that I was off on an adventure to find us some breakfast. As I walked out of the front door of the hotel, I could not believe it: The Hot Springs National Park was directly across the street.
I grabbed our breakfast and headed back to ask him how he did not know this information, and that I needed to walk.
So, I packed up my gear and walked.
I walked all the way up the mountain, letting my legs take over, rather than my thoughts which usually insist on control. When I reached the top, I went higher, riding the tower up to see the whole place laid out beneath me. Then I followed the hot springs back down, tracing the water as it disappeared into storm drains and stone and old buildings, into history and ingenuity, until it led me back toward our hotel.
The Arlington is old and solid, built in the early 1920s, designed around the hot springs themselves. The earth’s heat runs through it, warming the building the same way it has for generations. The hotel does not fight the springs. It works with them.
That night, when I knew he was resting, I walked the hotel again, this time being a little more brazen, slipping into open rooms and walking around the pool. I found my way into parts of the old spa they had left accessible, spaces build around geothermal power way before we had language for sustainability. It amazes me how they were able to pump steam through the walls, redirecting heat.
Energy borrowed, not extracted.
I was wide awake. My body hummed. I kept thinking about how much people understood back then—how to harness the earth’s power without draining it, how to design around what already existed instead of forcing something new into place. It amazes me that we figured this out long before modern technology, and how easily we have ignored it since.
The next day, the mountain felt almost empty. I headed out again to walk the promenade. I walked it again and again, pretending I was there a hundred years ago.
Before dinner, I told my husband he had to go see the hot springs with me, that we had the whole mountain to ourselves. I would not stop talking about how empty it had been all day. Then my husband stepped outside with me…and a bus pulled up.
A group of tourists, including monks (or so we were told), stepped off and moved toward the springs.
Several of them removed their shoes and placed their bare feet directly into the water. I could not keep my hand in that water for more than a second. It was scalding, alive. I remember wanting my husband to feel it too—to understand just how hot it was and so that he could grasp how extraordinary it was that they could sit there with their bare feet in it.
They sat peacefully, as if they knew something we didn’t.
We did not interrupt. We exchanged simple pleasantries and quiet smiles. Their presence changed the air. It was strange, actually. I don’t really have an explanation for how it felt, only that we both sensed it—an overwhelming calm.
A shared stillness.
It was wonderful and weird.
I remember very clearly thinking that this was a good way to begin a life together.
As I watched the 19 Buddhist Monks arrive in Washington, D.C., the memory of our trip flooded me. The monks led by Bhikkhu Pannakara walked from Texas to D.C. on a spiritual journey to promote peace, love, compassion and mindfulness. They arrived in the capital in a quiet single-file line with crowds gathered all along the route.
They looked like the kind of presence that makes people lower their voices without being asked to. The did not demand respect like so many politicians, they simply received it. It was beautiful and strange for these times.
They were not protesting, they were reminding us, offering a call back to unity and hope at a time where division so many times feels like the default setting in this country. Their walk was not easy. One monk losing a leg on the journey and still rejoined for the final stretch.
The more I read, the more I learned of the quiet stories of the monks moving through towns and highways and weather, resting, accepting water, asking nothing of anyone, teaching nothing loudly.
Just walking.
I think about that now, and about how at the time, I did not know how much pain would shape our marriage. I did not know how often love would look less like fixing and more like understanding, sitting with discomfort instead of rushing to solve it.
Love has always been our medicine.
Not because it erases pain, but because it makes room for it without letting it take over everything.
I think about Hot Springs and those bare feet in water I could not tolerate. About insomnia and finding relief through motion. About a man in pain choosing presence anyway. About monks trusting the distance.
I think about power and awareness and global consciousness. About how careful I am with my water use, my energy consumption, and even my AI usage. Long before we were here, people already knew how to live in conservation with this planet instead of arguing with it.
There is a kind of power that does not announce itself. The springs do not advertise. The monks do not persuade. The mountain does not hurry. Heat rises and water flows. People learn how to move with what already exists.
And somehow, that is what our love has learned to do as well:
A love that walks. A love that adapts. A love that sits in the heat.
Because love, like peace, is not something you arrive at. It is something you practice. Step by step.
~
author: Amy Sullivan
Image: Author's Own
Image: Author's Own
Editor: Molly Murphy
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