I came home from Peru in late May with a finished manuscript — Book 2, actually done, no longer a document I was in a negotiation with — and the particular hollow satisfaction that follows any large creative output. The first weeks back were the long exhale. I was not depressed. I was empty in the specific, blameless way you are empty after labor that earned the emptiness honestly.
Santa Fe in July is monsoon season, which means afternoon thunderstorms that arrive like they were invited and immediately rearrange the furniture. The air goes electric and sage-damp, the desert does its impossible summer trick of turning briefly green, and the mountains do something dramatic with the clouds that I have watched a hundred times and still stop what I'm doing to look at. I spent a lot of that month just outside. Watching. Letting the thunder reset whatever had gotten too tight. There is something about a good New Mexico storm that recalibrates a person more efficiently than any number of intentions.
What July did for me, more than anything, was restore the value of aimlessness after an intensely purposeful stretch. Finishing Book 2 in Peru had left me grateful and a little hollowed out in the way all major creative completions do. Santa Fe's storms gave that hollowness somewhere to go. I let the afternoons break open over the mountains and tried not to turn every internal shift into a productivity lesson. Sometimes a month is allowed to be recuperative without having to disguise itself as strategy.
The monsoons helped because they are so dramatic and so brief. They arrive, take over, rinse the city clean, and leave behind air that smells newly possible. That became a kind of emotional rhythm for July too. Tension would build, thunder would come through, and then I would find myself looser than I had been before. Not every recovery period needs to happen quietly. Sometimes it happens with weather and a chair on a patio and no ambition beyond being present for the storm while it does its work.
The Joy to Live
Though pain may press upon my chest, And sorrow weigh on every breath, I find a song within my soul, A quiet joy, a life to bless.
Read it in Echoes From the Heart →I needed that reminder more than I knew. After Peru and after finishing the book, I could easily have mistaken emptiness for failure. July corrected that. It let emptiness become spaciousness instead, which is a very different inheritance. The storms were part of that correction, and so was the city that kept giving me somewhere to sit still enough to feel it happen.
That is why this month belongs in more than shorthand. It was not simply downtime after a project. It was the season in which Santa Fe taught me how to inhabit the pause after completion without panicking. That lesson is worth recording in full because it has made every later creative lull less frightening than it would have been otherwise.
I paired July with The Joy to Live because the month was less about captivity than about recovery of gladness after a demanding season. Home, storms, and the relief after Peru returned a quieter joy to me: not euphoria, but the grounded pleasure of being alive inside my own life again. That is the emotional truth I wanted the poem to carry.