Chaiselongue/Teleri Williams

I think what I most want to photograph is the ways that light, shade and texture interact and the shapes formed for just seconds at a time by shadows before the light moves on and the shapes change. --Teleri Williams/Chaiselongue, in a Blip of 30 June 2012.

On July 6, 2013, Teleri Williams, known on Blip as Chaiselongue, woke up, flung open the windows, and exulted, "What a lovely summer day!" Five minutes later, she was gone. Death came, and she was not, as she had once feared in a comment on one of my blips, "full of argument," but full of gratitude for Occitan sunshine and the people in her life. Her son was in town for a visit, her daughter happily married. Her latest photographic show is still hanging in the Mediterranean town of Gabian, where she and her husband Richard/Lo Jardinier had lived full-time for seven years, and part time for a decade before that. They recently celebrated forty years together. Then the light moved on and the shapes changed.

She first commented on one of my blips on August 19, 2010. After that, she scarcely missed a day. We followed each other's lives. We cheered for each other and encouraged each other. We shared passions for poetry, photography, and the vexed history of women artists; we shared the joys and worries of motherhood; we shared politics. In a email on 28 June 2011 she described her politics as "... a sort of (completely non-violent) anarchism." In Wales for her daughter's wedding on 16 April 2013, she made the kind of political comment so typical of her: "I'm horrified by the terrible events in Boston and thinking of those involved, but also think every day of those in other countries - Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Palestine among others - where people have to suffer such attacks all the time, often because of the failures of western politicians now and in the past."

I treasure her book of poems, In Sight of the Sea, about her eccentric, strong-willed, passionate grandmother who had an adventuresome restlessness Teleri called "a moving nature." If you don't yet have a copy, get one quickly before they're gone.

She wrote a poem about a "Bead Tree," (melia azederach) that ends, "counting my words onto paper." As a word-crafter and a poet, she counted her words onto paper in four languages, counted the syllables and the rhythm, made each word count: in poems, in Blips, in all that she wrote. For years she was protective of her poetry, wouldn't let people see it till she had revised, honed, and polished it for months or years. After she joined the One Street project on Blip she began to "let go of the words" into stunning "draft poems" she had the courage to let us all see. Search "by Chaiselongue tagged streetpoems" to see and read them all.

The color Chaiselongue loved, the sunshine she loved, is all over her blip journal. In this photograph I offer a moment of shade and texture just before the light moved on and the shape changed, as it always keeps on doing. I mourn for a woman I never met but knew well and loved, a woman who wrote to me when I was mourning M'e Mpho, "I wish there was something I could do, but you know and I know that grief must take its terrible course. All I can do is be here and send loving thoughts and support across the world."

I send loving thoughts and support to Richard/LoJ, and to their two children and their partners, across the world, as grief takes its terrible course. Many of us in this online community will mourn and grieve, celebrate her life, and post tributes. I am opening a Forum thread so that we can gather there for each other and for her family. I left her a heart for her Tour de France Blip while she could receive it; she sent me a heart for mine of Bella and the apple tree. Those hearts were our last communications with each other. Fitting.