What's your intention for the month?
starting again
Happy first of the month! Every first, my partner and I convene a group of people to run into the San Francisco bay. People who first meet me and only know me as the host of this plunge often misperceive me as a hardo who loves cold water.
That couldn’t be further from the truth.
It’s precisely because I hate cold water that I return to the bay the first sunrise of every month. It serves as my monthly reminder that time is passing. In a city where the days and weeks and months blur together, I want to embrace the reality of the world spinning around us and give myself permission to start again.
As I began researching social rituals this month and ways to embed more of it into my life, I’ve thought a lot about the ritual that already exists in my life — namely, this monthly plunge.
It’s funny it’s taken me this long to consider introducing this ritual to my Substack community. Every first, we circle up on the Aquatic Park bleachers, reflect on the purpose of our time together, then each share our intention for the upcoming month. Once everyone’s shared, we run around the bleachers to warm up, assemble on the beach, then run into the water screaming our intention.
There’s something so euphoric about it all.
While I can’t replicate the feeling of running into the bay digitally (I strongly recommend starting the month doing something that makes you come alive), I’d like to start a monthly ritual here to mark the passage of time together and welcome you to share your intention for the next month with this community.
This month, I’m grappling with our mortality. I’m sitting with what it means to live from a place of finitude — not leaving words unsaid and dreams unfulfilled. What does it mean to ground into our highest truth over and over again? Over the years, I’ve increasingly moved into deeper alignment with my truth, but every now and again, I slip into inertia.
My intention for March is to ground into and live from my highest truth.
As you contemplate your intention for March, I’ll leave you with a song and text to ground into:
one grounding song
The opening stanza often confuses friends I share this song with — it’s worth listening to the full track, I promise.
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That′s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."
So here we are, on this pale blue dot. Tiny specs of dust coming into existence for a moment. Hurling through space and time, only to flicker back out after a few moments. These moments, these are all we have in this life. We work, we laugh, we cry, we make love, we write books, we build empires, we wage wars.
We often try to ignore the fact that these moments are temporary. That all our empires and the gross national product, our art and our literature, our $300 designer jeans, all of our knowledge and technology, creativity and legacy is erased. It′s all going to flicker out at some point with everything else.
one grounding text
Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
What’s your intention for March?
I’d love to hear what’s on your mind for the new month — let us know in the comments!
If you’re in San Francisco, join us for the April Fools edition of the plunge.
I love your idea for the cold bay plunge so much! And it looks like you're constellating some great community around it.
My intention for March is to open and embrace the full truth of what I'm feeling. Thanks for the prompt!
It's been a long-standing intention, but starting in March (and continuing anon) I want to start putting more of myself out there, doing things before I'm ready, and living VISIBLY instead of in the quiet comfort of my own under-tested abilities - TL;DR, put some writing out there, go to open mics, and get back dating!