#SHROOK RAN ZIP#

If, in these tumultuous days, you sometimes find yourself needing a hyacinth for your soul, I commend Tim’s photography to you. And you know God likes you if that someone is your friend. You know there is a heaven, and you know there is a God if you know someone like Tim. “I’m just trying to get Mom to heaven,” he told me. Click on the play arrow in the upper right hand corner.) (The link will take you to “Bath Day” on Tim’s Chirbit page. Tim once made a recording of washing his mother’s hair. That’s the soul radiance I’m talking about. Tim also bathed her frail body, did her toilet, slept on the couch beside her for the last three years of her life, one of the most saintly acts I ever heard of. He listened to the musical countless times with his mother, who had been stolen by Alzheimers, because it bathed her in happiness. That was Tim suddenly bursting into song on one of our scabland hikes. OHHhhhh OAK-LA-HOMA, where the wind comes sweeping down the plains… I have his visual Psalms hanging in every room of my house, making my heart glad and my spirit rejoice. They fill me with such gratitude, joy and hope that my home is something of a Tim Connor photo gallery. The heaven Tim sees through his lens eludes me until I see his developed images. Fragrance of sage and mock orange out there, and wild herbs volitilizing their oils in the hot sun, filling my nostrils like the sacred flower scent of a beloved wife.

#SHROOK RAN ZIP#

Once to the irritated rattle of a snake we almost stepped on-it sounded like a garden hoe grating over wood, Tim said I couldn’t hear it, even though in the gathering dusk I saw it zip across the trail like a snatched rope inches from our toes. I see the beauty of the good lonely, drink in its surpassing peace, often to the song of meadowlarks, honking of geese, overhead trumpeting of swans and Sandhill Cranes. When Tim clicks his shutter I look where he is looking and try to see what he sees. We’ve cried some, too, brotherhood-watering tears. T im, left, and Larry before meeting the rattlesnake. And our wanderings salve our wounds, and celebrate a precious friendship now five decades along. We are two beat up old men, hard used by life in some ways, but more blessed beyond measure. The good lonely for us is mostly the Columbia River plateau, the scablands gouged by the great floods at the end of the last ice age, but also the Palouse Prairie wheat world, emerald green in spring, fields of gold in summer, and the Green Monarch Mountains of North Idaho, looking down the forested barrel of the Purcell Trench where the hardest rock on earth finally yielded to collapsing ice dams, loosing the inland sea of ancient Lake Missoula, sculpting the land with roaring water hundreds of feet deep moving at freeway speeds. I have roamed with Tim what he calls the “good lonely” when he clicks the shutter of his camera and freeze frames wonder. That beacon regularly illuminates heaven, right here in our midst. And behind the light is the polished mirror of his soul, focusing his beacon on the world. The spirit of my friend Tim Connor is this great light.

Shrook ran