Colorado

I received in the mail last week from Christie a box containing a number of Timm's older journals. (Thanks, Christie!). They reveal a much rougher, distorted, difficult and worrisome chapter of Timm's life. Difficult reading but also essential.

Timm had quit drinking and was recovering in AA, but at the same time all of his past was coming up through him; without the active compulsion of boozing to keep it down, it kept leaping up, like a basketball no longer held by force underwater.

For Timm, his past was immensely thorny and unresolved; themes of abandonment and abuse and rage continually thread through these journal writings, all of them in counterpoint to the work of recovery and therapy, of work and, for one extremely difficult season, marriage.

In March 1993 Timm wrote in his journal,

I'm home sick today. It's a beautiful early spring day, complete with blue skies, 50-ish temperatures & the first daffodil blooms of 1993. It's strange how in the middle of all of this, I face the sharp pangs of homesickness for the Rockies. Today is not quite as bad as yesterday's pangs - but yet they remain. I think a lot of it has to do with familiarity and connectedness. Colorado was familiar. I lived there for eight years and have many special memories. I could also connect with the cowboy/granola lifestyles. (?) Here, I'm still not working full time so I don't feel I have much of a vested interest. My circle of friends is also limited with no one my age counted amongst their ranks. But in light of this I still feel that this is where God wants me.

The "cowboy/granola lifestyle" is intriguing. At that same time Timm was looking into starting a business he called "God's Own Granola Company," inspired by a dream. He filled out forms and did market research, looking into buying a bakery that turned out to be in bad financial straits. He hoped it "might be able to fund a transition house/group home somewhere down the route."

Staying - and believing in - the moment apparently was always a difficulty for Timm. He was incessantly tooling about for a different job, a new line of work or occupation; his flight instincts were deeply grooved in him as well, with a constant need to get away from his difficulties and roam in the wilds.

About the same time he writes in his journal about a dream that works into a recurring motif:

(I'm) walking on a road wand a big empty dump truck flipped over and came skidding right at me. I was unable to jump clear of its box. (In another dream) I was working again for Domino's Pizza, in Fort Collins, and was trying to find a particular dorm on the Colorado State University campus. One problem was that my car lost its brakes and I kept zipping through stop signs & lights ... A lot of feeling out of control, and being carried along by something else.

In reading this, I get the sense that Timm knew that what he ran from would always be what he ran to; there is no escape from one's self, one's torments and fictions, one's longing for intimacy and love and communion one God necessarily takes place within the continental boundaries of the self.

Timm's habitual response to pain and difficult was to run away. During his high school years Timm spent afternoons after school out of the house, exploring outdoor nook and cranny of Central Florida. He moved, almost incessantly, from Florida (where he graduated from high school and home life) westward, first to Indiana (to attend Fort Wayne Bible College), to Wyoming (where he had his near-fatal accident near Jackson Hole in 1981), to Colorado for eight years while he earned his BA in social work from the University of Colorado, then on to Washington State and Oregon where he settled, in his own manner, at last, a few scant miles from the shores of the Pacific Ocean.

He left quite a litter behind in his trail - jobs, apartments, doctor bills, girlfriends, hopes, scattered ambitions, other wreckage from compulsive behaviors. Seen from the perspective of Timm's death, it's easy to say that Timm's history was the placque that he built up by trying to leave it behind, amassing difficulties which snowballed by trying to flee from them.

But who doesn't have their dark molting years? If anything, I only feel more akin to Timm when I read these mid-story journals, when he had ceased running geographically and was struggling to stay put spiritually and emotionally. Many people say their life became much more difficult when they sobered up; gone was the escape hatch. They had to take the facts of their life by the horns and grow up.

Timm did that, I believe; the brother I came to know over the past few years was someone who in great measure gone to his knees again and again praying for the strength and grace to squarely face the round of his demons. I believe he faced off not with those he believed had wronged him but with those erring parts of self which had done as much to poison him - resentments and fears, selfishness and all of the vices which attempt to get needs met in all of the circumvential ways. Slowly, over many years, this process rinsed Timm's heart clean of his history, allowing him to live in the present with a contentment and serenity he could only have dreamt of before. The time, as it was said at the end of Shakespeare's "Macbeth," was becoming free.

* * *

I haven't come across many pictures of Colorado in his archives, but the scanning process has really only just begun. These few here - which may or may not actually be from Colorado - do express, I think, the sort of far wilderness in which Timm found solace and comfort. The wilderness Timm must have dreamt when he was in high school finds a full enough canvas in these photos - places closest to God. In time Timm discovered such places were reflections of not some outer destination he hadn't yet reached, but of an inner world he could celebrate and further with images of beauty and the joy of coming home to take residence in one's own heart.