Timm's flowers: A bouquet of angels

Over Timm's long -- and mostly untutored -- apprenticeship to the craft of taking pictures, he learned how to shoot the lush, orchestral, hallelujah-and-amen vista; learned to shoot the commercial gig with its marketplaces and eateries and everyone-is-happy, come-to-visit our town summery street scenes; learned to shoot a high school senior portrait, the intimate close-ups of kids at play, the serious intent of adults having fun too.

Timm also learned to revel in God's wonders from up close, using his macro lens to photograph flowers of stunning power and voluptuousness. The ones selected for this post should provide a compelling enough proof.

To see flowers as Timm could is to reveal what the poet Mary Oliver calls a "happiness" with "no end":

One day in summer
when everything
has already been more than enough
the wild beds start
exploding open along the berm
of the sea; day after day
you sit near them; day after day
the honey keeps on coming
in the red cups and the bees
like amber drops roll
in the petals; there is no end,
believe me! to the inventions of summer,
to the happiness your body
is willing to bear. ("The Roses")

The perfume of such a flowers as Timm photographed somehow manage to leak through their two-dimensioned calyxes; we hover, around them, like bees, drenched in their sweet music, falling again and again into the vortex of beauty. There we are awakened, enkindled, enthralled, raptured -- even, in a way, reborn, through the eye that cries Yes to the creator's bouquet.

Like Timm's own too-fleeting life, his flowers blazed their glories in the instant that he captured them; their moments have all passed their natural prime and fallen: except here, in the everlasting -- OK, sustaining -- garden of Timm's angelic floral images. I lay his flowers here at this memorial, remembering Timm at his best.