I thought of you then, as I had so many times during this journey. What would you say if you could see me now? Your worry for me in this moment would have been palpable. I was trusting my life to a horse I barely knew, in a darkness so complete it felt solid.
Mongolian Love Letters chronicles one woman’s ride on the Gobi Gallop – 700 kilometers through the world's most remote terrain on horseback – one year after the sudden death of her husband Charlie. Riding alongside strangers through hardship, she learns what it means to be terrified and keep going, and whether it's possible to love a life that looks nothing like the one you expected.
Spare, luminous, and deeply human, Mongolian Love Letters is a meditation on love that endures, the courage required to move forward, and the quiet ways meaning can re-emerge far from home, beneath an endless sky.
I thought of you then, as I had so many times during this journey. What would you say if you could see me now? Your worry for me in this moment would have been palpable. I was trusting my life to a horse I barely knew, in a darkness so complete it felt solid.
Mongolian Love Letters chronicles one woman’s ride on the Gobi Gallop – 700 kilometers through the world's most remote terrain on horseback – one year after the sudden death of her husband Charlie. Riding alongside strangers through hardship, she learns what it means to be terrified and keep going, and whether it's possible to love a life that looks nothing like the one you expected.
Spare, luminous, and deeply human, Mongolian Love Letters is a meditation on love that endures, the courage required to move forward, and the quiet ways meaning can re-emerge far from home, beneath an endless sky.
Dear Charlie,
How do I even begin to tell this story? Some letters are written in ink, others in miles traveled and mountains crossed. This one begins with the rumble of horse hooves.
The Mongolian Steppe had no mercy after sunset. The night consumed everything. The cloud cover meant no stars, no moon—just utter black with no way to differentiate ground from sky.
Darkness, however, did not mean silence.
The wind, ever-present, whooshed and moaned, cut only by the whinnies of our horses. I have learned that horses have different kinds of whinnies: soft nickers for greetings and loud bellows to welcome a friend at a distance. My horse’s sounds were becoming something else altogether. His high-pitched panicked whinnies called desperately for his herd. With each cry, his muscles tensed beneath me, coiling like a spring. He was going to bolt any moment. I could not let that happen.
Somewhere ahead, our team had disappeared. Beside me, Brandon’s voice echoed my fears. “I can’t see them anymore, can you?”
“No.”
I gripped my reins tighter and tried to project confidence I didn’t feel. Two years of planning, one devastating loss, and ten days of riding had led to this moment: lost on the other side of the world, trying to convince a nervous horse that I knew what I was doing.
I didn’t.
I couldn’t see my horse, let alone the ground beneath us. The flat terrain had vanished, replaced by a series of rises and falls that rolled beneath our horses like waves in a storm. Each downward plunge made my stomach lurch, my tired muscles screaming while I tried to maintain balance. The leather reins, slick with sweat—mine or the horse’s, I couldn’t tell—threatened to slip through my cramping fingers.
“It’s OK, you got this,” I said, my voice spilling out whatever soothing sounds came to mind. The words were nonsense, but I desperately needed my horse to believe them, and to believe he was better off with me than running full tilt into nothingness.
“But we must be going the right way. They have to be out there somewhere,” Brandon said—more to himself than to me, I thought.
He was right; they were out there, somewhere. Everything was out there, somewhere. Home was somewhere. Safety was somewhere. Our team was somewhere. But we were nowhere, navigating by faith and our horses’ instincts through the moonless night.
I thought of you then, as I had so many times during this journey. What would you say if you could see me now? Your worry for me in that moment would have been palpable. I was trusting my life to a horse I barely knew, in a night so complete it felt solid.
A tree materialized, a denser shadow against the void. My horse swerved. I caught my breath and forced out words of encouragement: “You got this. It’s going to be OK.”
I wasn’t convincing anyone.
Mongolian Love Letters by Rachael Lundin is a memoir of letters and delicate prose set one year after her husband passed away, set during the Gobi Gallop, a 700-kilometer trek through remote terrain on horseback.
Part letter, part thoughtful prose, and part almost-spiritual meditation, Lundin transports the reader to the Gobi Gallop, integrating them among the horses, the people, and the surprising, shifting nature around them. Together, they go on a journey through love, grief, and blazing self-discovery in breathtakingly beautiful landscapes, all through the lens of letters and riding horseback.
Despite its sparse nature, I was particularly taken with how immersive Lundin's writing was, to the emotions and to the senses. Her writing is incredibly raw and vulnerable and occasionally dips its toes into humor and intense insight, shocking the reader with a laugh-out-loud funny moment and a sob fest in another. Practically feeling the shifting weight of the horse as it moves forward, Lundin creates amazingly detailed scenes that flicker through the mind like a movie.
But while the writing is immersive, it's never propulsive in the sense of having to know what happens next or having to know how the story ends. Mongolian Love Letters values and prioritizes its journey, its vulnerabilities, its beautiful moments, and its lessons more than the final page, and it softly encourages the reader to slow down, to savor, and to enjoy, even in its most grief-ridden moments.
Though it holds intimate details and is a deeply personal story, Mongolian Love Letters has something for everyone. It's perfect for any reader longing to feel something: those who are feeling lost, or grieving, or hopeless, those who value the journey more than its destination, and honestly, those eager for a good story, and a beautifully, well-written one. What Rachael Lundin has created here is rich for the senses, a balm for the emotions, and a soft touch, reassuring that all will be okay if we only continue on the journey.