It’s a new month! I love the first of every month because of all the grand and glorious intentions I set in my journal. I want to set beautiful intentions for a new month that have to do with praying and soaking in God’s words.
(I want to rise above the lesser intentions of eating less carbs.)
I love rituals (my husband and I have a morning coffee ritual, for example), so for the first of each month, I ritualize it by praying for my family and asking a special blessing on this new month. I discover this morning that there’s a Jewish ritual for the first of each month found in The Book of Blessings: New Jewish Prayers for Daily Life, the Sabbath, and the New Moon Festival, by Marcia Lee Falk. In translation from the Hebrew (Tefillat haChodesh), it goes like this:
May the month of ___________
be a month of blessings:
blessings of goodness,
blessings of joy,
peace and kindness
friendship and love
creativity, strength,
serenity,
fulfilling work,
and dignity,
satisfaction, success,
and sustenance,
physical health
and radiance.
May truth and justice
guide our acts
and compassion
temper our lives
that we may blossom
as we age
and become our sweetest selves.
May it be so.
I would like for July to be a month like this. I will look back on it in August and say that it was a month of fulfilling work, health, radiance, and a particularly defined blossoming into our sweetest selves.
May it be so.