July in Santa Fe is not quiet. The monsoons arrive — afternoon thunderstorms that the locals speak of with reverence and the out-of-towners watch open-mouthed from restaurant patios because they didn't bring umbrellas and cannot process the fact that the sky is actually doing that. I became a local that July in the way that actually matters: I stopped being surprised by the storms and started watching for them. There is a difference, and the difference is everything. I find a geat calmness and cleansing in a great storm. The greater the storm, the greating the cleansing.
There is something magnificent about a desert monsoon that I was not prepared for. The light before one is a specific, charged gold I have not seen anywhere else — heavy and electric, the kind of light that makes you stop mid-sentence because the sentence is clearly less important than what the sky is doing. Then the clouds build. Then the rain arrives sideways and at considerable speed. Then the whole thing is over in twenty minutes and the smell of wet desert earth rises up and the world is clean and dramatic and brief. Petrichor. I use that word only when I'm showing off, which in July 2023 was occasionally.
Friendships that summer were quietly sorting themselves, the way friendships do when your geography changes. Some old connections had adapted to the distance in ways that felt like growth — the friendship contracting to its actual weight and finding that the weight was good. A few new ones were starting with the kind of ease that makes you wonder why you waited so long. My new friend Carrie, was just one of those new efforectless friendships unfolding the the moonsoon season. And the family that was the whole reason I'd moved here was close, and present, and already essential in ways I was still learning to take for granted.
The storms gave me another useful lesson that July: steadfastness does not have to be dramatic to be real. It can look like a text, a dinner, a patio chair left out for the person who will show up again tomorrow. That is the kind of unity I wanted the month to remember, and it is the kind of unity Santa Fe made visible every time the sky broke open and the people I trusted stayed exactly where they said they would.
Unwavering Unity
In the face of trials, I stand strong, Refusing to let hope be wrong. Though challenges may cloud our view, Together, we’ll find a path anew.
Read it in Echoes: Whispers From The Soul →I wrote about unity because I was thinking about what it looks like in actual practice — not the motivational version, not the two silhouettes at sunset with something aspirational happening in the background. The real version. The one that involves no photography. The text that says "you okay?" and means it. The ride to the appointment nobody announces. The showing up when it's inconvenient and unremarkable and nobody is watching and it costs you something to be there. That is the steadfast wall. That is the unity that matters.
July 2023 was full and hot and occasionally chaotic and better than I had earned, which is my favorite kind of month. The writing was going well. The life was going well. I spent evenings on the back patio watching storms announce themselves over the mountains and I thought, with a regularity I found both reassuring and quietly hilarious: I am glad I did this. I am glad I packed those boxes. I am glad I drove.
Find the person who shows up when it's inconvenient and unremarkable and keep them with both hands. They are the actual treasure. Everything else, however shiny, is luggage.