Wolf moon

January's full moon (“Wolf Moon” in the Native American cycle) arrived in the complete swash of Timm's absence, a luminous door which showered our house and garden with blue light. This morning it is obscured by clouds, the sky drippy, draping the first tendrils of the next cold front over us. But the past three nights were beautiful, the moon rising so fat and majestic from the east as the twilight emptied to the west, heaving up and over the sky on its westward track, following the day, proposing an alternate brightness, the lucence which resonated in absence, mirroring a distant light.

The following images are like that moonlight -- reflections of Timm's eye for beauty, ghostly now in remembrance for those of us who still do. Each image becomes a moony bulb in its own right, keeping Timm's memory alive with its beauty, over time becoming an independent image, falling past awareness of who the maker, the observer, was.

It is the fate of the dead to fade into oblivion; we remember them a while, in grief, tending their memorials. This Friday is the eleventh anniversary of the death of Beth's nephew James; she’ll drive out to his gravesite and leave some fresh flowers there. When we visited his grave at Christmas, flowers adorned a number of other graves; but many more were untended, their markers tarnished darkly.

The world carries on, entering the next day of sunlight, the next cycle of weather, another phasing of moons. Given the age of this earth (if you accept the scientific measurements), our lives are but the merest flicker of the candle, a flash of light which comes and goes so fast that the world can hardly notice.

Perhaps our attention to life, our wonder and awe and praise of God’s creation, our love, our beginnings and endings, is how the cosmos comes to see itself.

That Timm was able to bouquet so much of the world’s beauty: so worth remembering here.

Now, like moonlight, we see the Photographer in what he saw, here and forever …