In many traditional societies around the world, the turn of August signals a definite change in the landscape both exterior and interior. While fall still seems a world away, right now doesn't feel high summer, either. The crops are really starting to roll in (visit any farmer's market to see the abundance of produce on the tables), and the light is just starting to take a noticeable shift toward the golden sunshine of autumn.

We can consciously reflect on our internal expression as an extension of the world around us. What are we harvesting? What is coming to fruition right now in our lives? As we turn ever so slowly toward the darker half of the year, what are we still hoping to enjoy before that dark, dreaming time of winter?

Yogic practices teach us to be aware of the world around us and to recognize that we are part of that world. All too often, in a culture hell-bent on comsumption and ambition, it's hard to pull back and sink into the flow that courses through the quality of light, the cycles of the moon, the birds outside our window, and the blood pulsing through our veins. During the next month, consider ways to embody the flow of the natural world more deeply - eat peaches and let the juice run down your chin, bask in the rays of the morning sun while doing a sun salutation, listen to the songs of crickets and frogs, can tomatoes, live this harvest time to the fullest.

Here's a parting poem titled "August" from Mary Oliver's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection American Primitive:

When the blackberries hang

swollen in the woods, in the brambles

nobody owns, I spend

 all day among the high

branches, reaching

my ripped arms, thinking

of nothing, cramming

the black honey of summer

into my mouth; all day my body

accepts what it is. In the dark

creeks that run by there is

this thick paw of my life darting among

the black bells, the leaves; there is

this happy tongue.