We are almost through it now.

The monsoon season that arrives every summer in the high desert — that annual gift of drama and moisture and that particular electric scent in the air before a storm — is winding down. The afternoons are still warm, still capable of building those great towers of clouds that gather over the mountains by mid-afternoon and make the whole sky look like a painting someone wasn’t quite finished with. But there is something different in the light these last few days. Something that wasn’t there in June. A quality of gentleness, almost — as if summer itself knows it is nearly time, and has begun, slowly and without fanfare, to let go.

Before it goes entirely, I want to sit with what it gave.

What the Rain Asks of Us

There is something the monsoon does to you if you let it. It asks you to stop.

Not in the polite, voluntary way that a wellness practice asks you to stop. In the way that a wall of rain moving across the valley asks you to stop — because there is simply nothing else to do, and nowhere else to be, and the sound of it on the roof and the windows and the dry earth outside is so complete, so fully present, that anything you were doing before it arrived seems suddenly beside the point.

I’ve stood at my window more than once this summer and watched a storm come in over the hills — watched the curtain of rain move across the landscape in that unhurried, inevitable way it has — and felt something in my chest release that I hadn’t known I was holding.

This, I think, is one of the things the monsoon teaches. Not through instruction, but through demonstration: this is what it looks like to arrive fully. This is what it looks like to give without holding back. This is what the world sounds like when something that has been waited for finally comes.

What Were You Waiting For This Summer?

I want to ask you something, and I’d like you to sit with it for a moment before you answer.

What arrived for you this summer that you had been waiting for — perhaps without quite knowing you were waiting?

It may have been something obvious. A visit from someone you love. A decision that finally became clear. A conversation that had needed to happen for a long time and finally did.

Or it may have been something quieter than that. A morning when you woke up and felt, for no particular reason, more like yourself than you have in a while. An afternoon when you sat still long enough to notice the quality of the light. A moment when you looked at your life and found, to your own surprise, that it was enough — not perfect, not finished, but genuinely, honestly enough.

The rain doesn’t always arrive as a storm. Sometimes it comes softly, almost sideways, barely noticeable until you realize that something that had been dry is no longer quite as dry as it was.

What the Desert Did With What It Received

One of the things I find most moving about the desert after rain is the speed of the response.

Within hours of a good storm, something shifts visibly in the landscape. The color deepens. The grasses lift. The creosote releases that scent — that ancient, resinous, incomparable scent — that is the desert’s version of a sigh of relief. And along the roadsides and hillsides, wildflowers appear that weren’t there yesterday. Flowers that have been waiting, sometimes for years, for exactly this amount of moisture at exactly this time of year, and which now bloom briefly, extravagantly, without apology, because this is what they were made for and the conditions are finally right.

They don’t wait to make sure the rain will last. They don’t hold back in case the drought returns. They simply bloom, in the moment of time they’ve been given, as fully as they are able.

I think about this when I think about what we do with what is given to us. The moments of grace, the unexpected kindnesses, the arrivals we had stopped quite believing in. Do we receive them fully, the way the desert receives rain — opening completely, using everything, wasting nothing? Or do we hold back a little, protecting ourselves against the possibility that it won’t last?

A Gratitude That Goes Deeper Than the List

This time of year — as summer prepares to hand itself over to autumn — I find myself drawn to a particular kind of gratitude. Not the surface gratitude, the list of obvious things, the blessings I’m supposed to count. But something deeper and quieter than that.

Gratitude for the storms that were difficult. For the weeks when the sky stayed stubbornly clear and the ground cracked and I had to trust that the roots were doing something important even when nothing visible was happening above the surface. For the moments of genuine relief, when what I had been waiting for finally arrived — even when it arrived differently than I had imagined it.

Gratitude, even, for the dryness. Because the dryness is what makes the rain mean something.

I’ve found that the gratitudes worth keeping are rarely the easy ones. They are the ones that required something of us first — patience, or faith, or simply the willingness to keep going through a long dry stretch without any guarantee of rain.

Those are the gratitudes that change us. Those are the ones that, once found, tend to stay.

Before Summer Goes

We are almost through it now. A few more weeks of afternoon storms, a few more mornings of that particular summer light, and then something will shift definitively — the angle of the sun, the quality of the air, the temperature of the evenings — and autumn will have arrived, quietly and all at once, the way seasons always do.

Before that happens, I want to invite you to do one thing.

Take a few minutes — just a few — and ask yourself honestly: what did this summer give me that I haven’t fully received yet? What arrived, perhaps softly and without fanfare, that I was too busy to notice completely?

The wildflowers don’t wait for the perfect moment. They bloom in the moment of time they’re given.

This is still your moment in time.