There is a particular quality to August light that I have come to recognize over many years of watching the sky change with the seasons. It burns steadier than July's wild abundance, less scattered, more concentrated, as though the sun itself has stopped reaching outward and begun gathering its power inward instead. I have learned to trust this shift as a teacher. August does not ask us to expand endlessly outward the way early summer does. It asks us to root fully into ourse

There is a question I have been asked more than almost any other by those who come to work with me. How do I protect myself from the world without losing the very thing that makes me who I am. They have often already tried closing off, and it has left them feeling safer in body but strangely hollow in spirit, as though they traded their aliveness for their armor. I understand this trade, because I made it myself once. Early in my walk, I believed that sensitivity was a wound