Summer in the White Mountains: How Where I Live Shapes How I Create
Something shifts when you climb high enough… the air, the light, the way time moves. Magic lives at elevation.
I don't mean that metaphorically — or not only metaphorically. I mean it in the way the air feels different up here. The way sound travels. The way light moves through a ponderosa pine at seven in the morning and makes you stop whatever you were doing and just... breathe.
I've lived in the White Mountains of Arizona long enough now that the place has gotten into my bones. And every summer, I'm reminded all over again: this landscape isn't just where I live. It's where I create. It's in the soil of everything I make.
📷 Photo by Brien Faulkner
My Office Has Birdsong
My creative setup is not a desk in a quiet room. It's a patio couch with a couple of squishmallows, a firepit table that doubles as my writing desk, and whatever I'm drinking that day — coffee, matcha, an Alani Nu, a big glass of water. My laptop lives out there half the summer. My planner too.
And all around me? Suncatcher crystals capture the light and throw tiny rainbows across the yard. Dancing prisms spinning slowly in the breeze, scattering color everywhere. To my neurodivergent brain, this is not decoration. This is fuel. The visual stim, the movement, the soft sparkle… it settles something in me and opens something else, the part that can dream.
The soundtrack is birdsong. The clicking of cicadas. Wind through the maple trees. The occasional creak of my tree swing when I stop to read or journal and let myself just be for a little while.
I paint out there. I write out there. I've drafted scenes and email campaigns and course modules with cicadas in my ears and crystals spinning light over my shoulders. If my work has a warmth to it — if it feels alive in some way — a lot of that is this.
The Energy of a Small Mountain Community
There's something about living in a small, tucked-away place that does something to your creative nervous system. The pace is different. The people know your name. There's a friendliness up here that isn't performative — it's just... the texture of things.
I love walking through the woods. I love sitting at the edge of Show Low Lake — even now, when the water is low, when I drive past it and think come on, fill back up — there's a pull to it that I can't explain away. It's one of my favorite places on earth. The water, the light on the water, the way the shoreline holds a particular kind of quiet.
And the trees. My goodness, the trees.
There are oak trees nestled between the ponderosas in the woods. The maples in my yard come alive with red and yellow in the fall, and then there's my honeylocust tree — I watch her all year, honestly. The way she changes. The way she comes back. Something about watching the same tree move through every season makes me feel less alone in my own seasons. Less afraid of the bare branches. More patient with the waiting.
That palpable energy… I know it sounds mystical, but I believe it's real. There is a vibration to this place. A vortex quality. Something that hums at a frequency that makes creativity feel natural rather than forced. I don't push as hard when I'm in it. I receive more.
The Book That Carries This Feeling
When I wrote The Secrets of Starlight Lake, I wasn't thinking consciously about bottling the White Mountains.
But when I read it back? It's there.
The warmth. The adventure. The lake. The sunshine that feels like something more than weather — like a character. The sense that ordinary summer days contain extraordinary things, if you're paying attention. That's Starlight Lake. And that's here. They are, for me, the same feeling.
I think that's what place does for writers and artists — it doesn't just give you a setting. It gives you an emotional register. A key that everything else gets written in.
For me, one of those keys is summer in the mountains.
Where the Magic Lives Off the Page
If you ever find yourself in Show Low, AZ in the summer, go to The House. Strings of lights overhead, live music drifting through the warm air, corn hole tournaments, an ice cream shop, cold drinks, and burgers that are genuinely worth the drive. It feels like a summer evening made tangible. Like someone built a whole atmosphere out of the feeling of June.
There are places like that up here — little pockets where the magic concentrates. And when you spend your days surrounded by that kind of energy, it shows up in everything you make. Whether you're writing a novel, filming a scene, or painting a canvas at a firepit table with crystals dancing in the breeze and birds singing you in.
An Invitation
I believe deeply that where we create matters. Not just as a backdrop, but as a collaborator.
So here's what I want to ask you: Where does your place show up in your work?
What sounds, textures, lights, and rhythms are woven through everything you make… maybe without you even realizing it yet?
You don't have to live somewhere breathtaking for this to be true. Beauty finds its way into the work from anywhere. But it's worth paying attention. Worth noticing what your place is whispering into your art.
This summer, I'll be out on my patio, creating from here. Creating because of here. 🌿
Dalea Faulkner is an author, filmmaker, and creative living in the White Mountains of Arizona. Her novel The Secrets of Starlight Lake is available now. Her world is always, in some way, the mountains.
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