Moments de Lutz*: What a lovely summer's day

On Saturday evening, I was lying in bed reading Cheryl Strayed's Wild. I came across a quotation from a Mary Oliver poem; I knew there was a volume of her poetry in the bedroom bookcase, so I pulled it out to read the whole poem, The Summer Day, which ends:

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

I flipped through the book, and it fell open at When Death Comes.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

I read and pondered. And the next day, I learned that Teleri Williams, chaiselongue on blip, had died suddenly and unexpectedly on Saturday morning, her last words as she flung open the shutters, "What a lovely summer's day!". I read Kendall's tribute to her friend, and she linked to the very poem I'd been reading, with Teleri commenting that she expected to be "full of argument" when that moment came. But she wasn't, instead she was leaning into the light, full of joy in the world.

Teleri didn't see herself as a wildlife photographer -- she was more interested in humans' interaction with their environment. But recently she and I had been exchanging butterfly blips. When I looked at this one on the computer, it was a pale echo of her last one, with its characteristic intense colours, the hallmark of a chaiselongue blip. So this is for Teleri -- I'm glad to have met her, and I still can't quite believe that she is gone.

There's a forum thread dedicated to Teleri.

* Moments of light: Teleri had recently started a photo blog with this apt title.