The Seed Pink Moon

On brightness

Well here we are together under the Seed Pink Moon.

How has this one been showing herself to you?

What has been revealed that may have, until now, been in shadow?

My child was born with the full pink moon three years ago now.

The pink moon of the April before our son came was a time of deep change.

I met parts of myself I’d long kept hidden from my own self. It was hard and heavy work to sit with those parts but ultimately that kind of grief work is the kind that I am truly grateful to get to do. It is the kind that resets me; that reminds me what it means to be here, to be human— what it means to live and to love.

My second book, CACOPHONY OF BONE, is a day book of a year like no other; a year like every single year that has ever gone before. A chapter for each month of the first pandemic year. I listed a handful of the names I’ve encountered for each month’s moons at the start of each chapter, and the moon that will likely always mean the most for me is this one.

The seed pink moon.

In the April chapter I wrote—

‘There is a kind of grief that brings us closer together, that calls us to action: that clears space for hope.

Much is and will be lost in these uncertain times. But there is so much we can still look after.

There is still so much that we can give.’

This evening, as the moon began to rise, and the bats dipped and dived as though they were small swallows, I spent some time with this exquisite poem by Ada Limon.

How much is given to us, to our world, through so little breath, so few words.

How she takes the reality of being alive here and now, and makes it shine.

Sows it in a garden that is there for all of us to share.

This, I understand, is how brightness works.

This is how giving becomes a given.

‘I plant three seeds as a spell’ . . .

This evening I put a story on Instagram about the grief that goes hand in hand with joy for me in this week every year since my son arrived. His birthday brings up so much for me.

This is the third seed pink moon since he arrived earth side and somehow each one is more intense; calls me deeper into the ways of tending to much that really needs my tending.

Like four years ago, on this same moon phase, I asked for nothing but was given so much back.

Four years ago it was seeds, sent from so many different lockdown homes to my small stone one in the heart of Ireland. This year it was words of support, solidarity, sustenance, sisterhood. An image of the most beautiful embroidery of these words from Mary Oliver —

‘we shake with joy, with shake with grief /

what a time they have, these two /

housed as they are in the same body.’

— and the embroiderer’s words to me: YOU’RE AMAZING MAMA.

Another friend write from Germany : Go gently, Kerri. You are enough. 🤍

And a voice note from a pal who knows well this story of grief and love; how they wrap themselves around each other so intricately, telling me how loved my son must feel; how we are trying our best and that is all we can do.

‘We are the weeds’ , Limon reminds us.

Reaching for the light, heliocentric and unstoppable.

Tall and resilient, beautiful in ways that might not seem a big deal at first but in ways that enter our consciousness, our gardens; a kind of beauty that takes hold and that gives off its own light.

Perhaps it is actually a weed, that place where the light gets in.

So tonight I’m going to bed full of a kind of brightness that is not as full as the moon, nor as golden.

A brightness that finds its way through darkness slowly , a trickle making its way back up after a long , hard winter.

And I’m asking you and me both on this seed pink moon —

💗 What is there still for you to look after?

💗 What is there still that you might give?

Finally, as you make for bed tonight, what do you need to let go of to allow your own brightness to become the gift it really is?

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G L I M M E R S.

Brightly x