The heart's wilderness

Here in the throes of Tropical Storm Fay – not so much a wind as a heavy rain event ((we’re due for 4 to 8 inches of rain today)) – I am for some reason happy, buoyed to think that this dark rainy stuff was Timm’s weather, not so much in volume as pitch. We’ve had dark, brooding skies for three days now, long enough for the mind to shadow into melancholy motions. Maybe that should be depressing, but when I stopped into Starbucks to get a grande Komodo Dragon with a shot of expresso, I felt suddenly bright, I dunno, close to Timm maybe, there in that coffee shop with fellow sufferers of the rain, also weirdly smiling. Go figure …




Timm was earnest to speak and act from the heart: yet it was a perplex organ for him, an interior wilderness he both yearned for and feared.

"Let the warm sun seduce you like a lover./Let the beautiful transform your heart," he writes in "Go Out": and yet, he also writes "the heart is a deceitful thing" in his journal, paraphrasing the New Testament scripture. Desire for God, desire for woman, desire for beauty: the raw instinct wells up, like a spring, forceful with yearning, carrying in the full spectrum of Eros to Agape. If it springs from our breast, is it godly? When we seek to requite our desires selfishly or wantonly, are they holy?

No doubt that Timm was a natural man, in love with the outdoors, imaginatively singing of native peoples and heartland connections. He was also a thinking man and a man devoted to his faith. Is the heart's wilderness blessed by God? I think of the St. Brendan “Navagatio” tales, where the sea-wandering monk conducted Easter services on the back of whale for seven consecutive years: a fearful ceremony, to be sure (his monks were terrified), but also an act of faith which Timm surely would have understood. To found a church on the back of whale is to locate the sanctum of God deepest in the heart.

* * *

Timm wrangled hard with his heart's wilderness. As a devout Christian, he felt there was something slippery and evil in there; the Tempter and Author of Lies got a hold of us through our desire to know more than we should. Yet if God is omnipotent, then surely he rules that wilderness as well. This from a file on his laptop titled "The reason for creation," dated June 2003:

Why did God make the material realm that we define as "creation"? What was its purpose? I have always believed that we were made to give glory to God, but that doesn't answer the bigger question of why everything else was created.

It's interesting to note that when Satan and the angels staged their celestial revolt against the great I AM, that they were not destroyed but merely banished to Hades. It seems that they would never come into the story again, but they did.

For whatever reason Satan was allowed back into the story with the freedom to tempt man to commit the first sin. Then the Bible ends with their final judgment based, according to Revelation, on his deception of man, a penalty that completely writes them out of the script. That's odd that it would happen at that point and not following their original rebellion.

Perhaps that is the reason for creation. For what ever reason, God could not do more than banish Satan and the angels at the time of their sin, but would need something else to happen. Perhaps his Holiness still needed appeasement prompting Him to make this universe of time and space, knowing what Satan would do, allowing Yahweh to finally be done with Satan once and for all. Maybe, that's where we come in.

Are we - humanity, Man -- thus angels or at least agents of the Devil's own fall? When we err, when we sin against the will of God, do we yet fulfill His grander design? And if creation was designed for our fall, then is even our falling good? What does that say about our desires? That even when they're toxic they are yet His, at least of God's own design? The following poem dated March 7 2006, shows Timm struggling to identify with the whole man, with his deep instinctual nature, recognizing that he restricts and limits his desires at his peril.

The Wildness of My Soul

How long I have forgotten the wildness of my soul
Under lock and key I've attempted to keep it stowed away
It rages; it howls, its sinews strain against the will of mine to repress it.
Only allowing tame glimmers that I dare to conjugate.

But after awhile I ten to forget the creature that paces inside
And with sublimation I find a hidden place inside
I pull back the curtains and dust off the window
Allowing the noon day sun fall across the beast
And up he springs like a powerful geiser
Exerting his force yet again.

He rattles the bars with his pent up passion
Shake s the foundations with his power
His voice calls to my all to stand up and fight again.

His kind is not accepted in our tame and timid world.
He frightens us with his barbarism and reminds us we are weak.
He makes a scene with hardly a care for convention
He's incorrigible, he is me and that's why he was banished.

But I can't help feeling he is who I was created to be.
Only through accepting that will I then truly live.
Out of the center and not from the man I truly wish I were.

A dark animal here rises in Timm, the way Iron John, a naked man with hair so long it drapes his body, rises from a pond in the fairy tale recorded by the Grimm’s Brothers. A primal man, perhaps even daemonic. For years Timm was in therapy for sexual abuses which he felt had been committed against him; he also attended Sex Addicts Anonymous, weary of the self-woundings of desire. This are difficult revelations about Timm – he writes about these things a lot in his journals – yet at the same time his anxieties are strangely unspecific, the memories too murky, the actings out seeming flimsy, at least on paper (perhaps there was much more that he just didn’t feel safe to write about). The anxiety, I believe, was more mythic than actual, part of Timm’s own coming to terms with his wholeness.

I believe -- and think Timm was coming also to believe -- in the daemonic in the Greek sense. Desire was one of the majestic forces in Timm's life which he struggled to understand as both slave and master and finally could only surrender to, and in so doing find a measure of acceptance of himself as a natural man, essentially part of God’s creation. In so accepting he could become himself a creator, a lover of beauty and a healer through his own photographic gifts of beauty.

In the mythologem of the wounded healer, we give back from the center of our wounds; over time, through growth and God's grace, our hurt parts become wombs of love and creation. Without his wounded parts, Timm could not have become such a giver of nature's beauty. He became the lover he always desired, maternal and paternal, nourishing and giving, making the heart's wilderness real for us all.