a pink moon

counting the omer, counting grief

April’s full moon—the Pink Moon. A fitting name, as our city has been an eruption of pink these past weeks, the camellias, magnolias, cherry blossoms. Now, after reaching their peak expression, they loosen their grip and drift down, gathering in soft drifts along sidewalks and curbs—petal snow I call it. The blossoms release, making room for what comes next: leaves, fruit, seed.

pink city for pink moon

We’ve crossed the threshold of the Spring Equinox, and the world feels as though it is taking a long, steady breath—awakening, opening. It’s always one of my favorite moments to pause and take stock. The first moon of astrological spring. A beginning, even if it doesn’t arrive neatly or linearly. Our little unit was struck by a big grief on this full moon. The kind that arrives suddenly and rearranges the air around you. Seder plans canceled as we curled up inside the home to nurse broken hearts after the loss of a pet companion of many years. Yes, a pet named Luna passed on from this life on the full moon, she was very smart.

The next day, I spent the entire day working on the first transplant of the season at the farm I work on. The first baby plants, coaxed gently from their trays and placed, one by one, into the soil (one by one, 3,000 times). There is something about that kind of work, repetitive, hard, but tender, that steadies me. Even as an unforeseen circumstance can make you feel unmoored, hands remember what to do. Make a hole. Set the root ball in. Press the soil. Move to the next.

I realized while we were on a walk to collect altar flowers for little Luna that Spring is such a poignant time to dive into a grief. There is no hiding from the truth of cycles right now. Seedlings pushing up, buds swelling, blooms opening everywhere you look. Things that disappeared in the winter returning, as they always have, throughout the years. It places grief in direct relationship with emergence and renewal —with the undeniable continuity of life. Not in a way that resolves anything, but in a way that holds it in its necessary context.

petal snow

I keep thinking about a poem my dear friend sent me at just the right moment this week, from Mary Oliver (of course):

APRIL by Mary Oliver

I wanted to speak at length about
the happiness of my body and the
delight of my mind for it was
April, a night, a
full moon and –

but something in myself or maybe
from somewhere other said: not too
many words, please, in the
muddy shallows the

Frogs are singing.

“Not too many words, please” feels right. April asks us to witness more, and say less.

various scenes of my Omer count throughout the years

Last night, I began counting the Omer. It is a 49-day practice, rooted in agricultural time—in the space between barley and wheat harvests that starts on the second night of Passover. A daily marking of passing days. It is a practice of attention as much as devotion: giving thanks for the earth’s abundance, while also acknowledging our precarity, our dependence. I call it a “sacred anxiety” —a counting toward something not yet here. That may not come if the conditions are not just right. It reminds me that it is such a miracle that all the details of life are right enough to fit thread the eye of the needle of existence.

At this time, we wonder what this season will bring. An early spring? More familiar rhythms of rain? Will we see April snow again like a few years back? Or will it echo that unsettling year the rains stopped in April and didn’t return? Farming has always been a delicate, and therefore sacredly anxious, dance with the whims of nature. But lately, that dance has taken on a more erratic rhythm.

There old markers of folkloric time that I’ve always held on to—plant potatoes when the dandelions bloom, sow peas when the forsythia flowers, May 15 is bean planting day—but now these dates carry a question mark at the end as the patterns of the earth are shifting. And we are left to pay closer attention and wonder.

I’ve been holding a line from Yael Levy who writes beautifully and daily about the Omer count: “Every year, the Counting of the Omer is the same and different.”

Last year, I counted the Omer while walking the Camino de Santiago. Five hundred miles, alone, with a small bundle of barley tucked into my backpack. Each night, I counted quietly before climbing into a new creaky bunk bed in a room full of strangers.

This year, I am not sure what the Omer will end up meaning for me, but I know that the first night, a grain of barley was just a single grain of grief set down.

UPDATES…

I will be selling beans and seeds at this very sweet spring market on Saturday April 18, 10am-3pm at the park outside of Cherry Sprout Market 7ss N Sumner St. Portland, OR. Come through!

xoxo,

Katie

FUCK ICE