Today’s Bible-study prep - my weekly At-Home day - meant heading into the woods and plucking a few pieces of new growth here and there (always mindful to not take much, and to vary my foraging sites). Fiddlehead fern, Pacific waterleaf, some Salmonberry, willow catkins.

A vibrant bouquet may feel dissonant with Good Friday, but something in the heartbreak of plucking a perfect salmonberry blossom felt like a cruciform reminder of this day’s devastation.

We’ll be pressing these delicate spring miracles into clay, then pouring plaster into the molds to make casts…each flower will be crushed and worn in the process, but the result will be a lasting impression of startling beauty…of the way our local landscape wears Good Friday, and the resurrection we have always known deep in our bones.