Come join the pet parade!

Breezy fair afternoon here in Central Florida, the cool weather making an unusually long stay. However, the college football games on TV show how wintery it can get -- at the Penn State vs. Michigan State game, it's snowing and 20 degrees. (And there are still fools in the stands without shirts, their team's letters painted in blue...) Thanksgiving next week, and we seem already deep into the dark season.

But enough of that! It's a beautiful day, actually, and we must have fun. So here's a set of photos Timm took of a pet parade in Silverton. Timm had an eye for natural beauty, a way of stumbling onto nooks and vistas of stunning and simple intimacies with the divine on this earth. Timm also had visual sympathies for the human and animal communities, and where those came together, as in this pet parade, Timm is his most whimsical and childlike.

Getting his lens into the heart of this parade meant getting down to pet-level; in many frames animals stare down at Timm, with their human tenders towering above. Timm's knees sure got a workout when he was doing this work, but they must have been quite calloused, because Timm seemed always willing to get down to where the action was nearest and dearest.

Timm's joy in these pictures is evident. Whatever our differences are in the human world, we are simplest in our emotions with our pets, most childlike, humane; we can easily laugh about our pets and their antics with each other, transcending all the things which separate us otherwise. Set the recent political campaigns aside, turn off the TV with its endless drone of bad news, and come watch the pet parade with everyone in town.

Oregon seems like such a cool place to live. No wonder Timm made it his home.

Only one who has transmuted their own suffering as Timm had could turn a lens upon such a warm world. This again from the back of one of the photo cards Timm produced a few years ago: "With all the pain that this life can bring, we must never forget that there is still beauty. It quiets. It excites. It heals. It touches something deep within. It is with this in mind that I share these photographs with you."

Thanks, bro. And in your stead, I return your favors to our world.