My first summer in Santa Fe had to teach me a few things, fast.
The first lesson was about light. I had come from a place where light is filtered — coastal haze, deciduous shade, the polite indirection of forested skies. Santa Fe light does not filter. Santa Fe light arrives like a witness, takes a position, and stays there until you admit what you actually feel. It is hard to lie to yourself in this kind of sun. I would not have predicted, before moving, that I would consider that a feature. It is.
The second lesson was about scale. The mountains here do not show off, exactly, but they refuse to let you forget where you are. You can look up from the kitchen sink and there is the entire profile of the Sangres reading you. It changes how you live. Decisions feel slightly smaller, in the good way — not because they are unimportant, but because the landscape has put them in proportion.
The third lesson was about quiet. Santa Fe is not silent. The wind does its slow announcement most afternoons. The high desert birds talk with a precision I am still learning. But there is an underlying quiet here that is structural — the kind of quiet that does not collapse the moment a person opens a door. I had not known that kind of quiet existed in a town. I have come to depend on it.
Sunrise Serenade
The sun peeking in, God’s flashlight gleams, A dawn’s soft kiss in quiet streams. Golden hues rise as day redeems, Nature awakens in tender beams.
Read it in Echoes From the Heart →I kept a small notebook through the first summer. It has, in pencil, a list of unscheduled afternoons that turned into entire poems. The first one was about a sunrise — though "sunrise" is doing all the work in that sentence and not enough. I had not realized, before moving, how much I was owed an early-morning sky that did not have to apologize for being beautiful.
The poem that came out of that summer is Sunrise Serenade. It is the one paired with this entry. The poem is not, strictly speaking, about Santa Fe. The poem is about the kind of morning a person can experience when they have stopped negotiating with the day before it begins. I have had more of those mornings here than I had had in the previous five years combined. I attribute that not to the geography but to what the geography gave me permission to do.
I am, summer over, more myself than I was when I arrived. Less of an apology in my own life. More awake, in the small literal sense of waking up and feeling already on speaking terms with the day. Less surprised by the part of me that keeps wanting to write things down. That last one in particular has surprised me. I had thought, after enough years of writing, that the impulse would calm down. It has not. Santa Fe has just made the impulse easier to honor.
If you are reading this and thinking about a move that scares you a little, I would say only this: the place itself does not change anyone. The place gives you room. The change is yours to make. Santa Fe gave me room. I have been doing the work since.