Clearing a field for the healing to begin

Timm had sympathies for the suffering of his fellows that extend back to early childhood. As I've mentioned before, an early teacher was critical of Timm's hyper-readiness to leap into action and comfort a fellow child who was distressed. His heart felt deeply for the world's, and that sensitivity ran deep and wide in him.

As I've also suggested before, those deep sympathies may also made him more vulnerable to pain, magnifying many events beyond the norm. This may have played a part in his difficult tale of damage and abuse (inflicted by others and then compulsively re-inflicted by so many accidents) that unscrolled a thorny road which took many years to awake and recover from.

It's no wonder that Timm got his degree in social work, and that much of his work was in human services -- domestic violence case manager, social worker for the State of Oregon, juvenile probation officer, recovery mentor for men transitioning back into the community, district aide for Congresswoman Darlene Hooley. Throughout his service was distinguished by his ability to connect and empathize with the plight of others. Their difficult healing -- or lack of it -- was deeply his.

In 1990 Timm -- at age 26, freshly graduated from college--was working as a counselor at the Hope Counseling Center in Loveland, Colorado, conducting chemical dependency assessments, facilitating therapy groups and providing therapeutic education to the community. It wasn't easy work, for he was exposed to some truly awful upbringings. So many kids are damaged by drug and alcohol addiction in the family, sexual abuse and violence. Kids so warped they become time bombs of those very afflictions. He was much disturbed when one of his clients was found dead in a field of self-inflicted shotgun wound.

A world of pain - yet Timm was certain that healing and transformation was possible for those who would reach out to a healing hand. On Feb. 26 of that year, Timm writes in his journal a difficult passage about pain and its transformation:

I know that there is still beauty. I am sure it's there -- it's just that my eyes are covered with the mire and sludge of a dying world. No, not dying: already dead. (He strikes out those last two words and writes:) decaying. Day in and day out I am called to answer to another's silent scream. Their pain fills the confines and engulfs the surrounding space. A lifetime of misery, a lifetime of pain. The grief of knowing it should have been different - a tender sprout - yet to season. Innocense and life itself ripped from their grasp. Brutally beaten, torn, defiled - then left. They pick up the pieces and try to form an existence. Callous upon callous grows. Harder to scream, harder to be heard. They carry out their pain from kin to young - the tragedy goes on. Sometimes changing form - but always there.

My heart is rent within - a grief I cannot express - for it is not mine. I hurt and bleed over the defilement, the perversion of beauty and life. If each heart is so precious - why are some more valued than others? the young still cry - the old surely fade: from cradle to the grave they slowly wane.

I know my Redeemer lives - with heavy heart for a dying race. So much blamed on Him, that's not his right. He calls - but they do not hear. He reaches out to find his touch scorned. He's there & He's not quiet.

For I know that beauty still exists - for my Redeemer lives.

The hand of that Redeemer was one Timm continually reached for his own healing, again and again and again over the years. Faith allowed him to reach for that hand and trust allowed him to continue his work of coming home to a place within himself that was secure and life-affirming and good.

There is a relationship between individual and his Creator, I believe, where we have a responsibility for one side of it, to do what work we can for clearing away the damage in order for the sunlight of the spirit, which is always there, to enter back in. Recovery is hard work; it's slow and meandering, with old patterns and distortions losing their spell after repeated exposures to painful truth. It's daily bucket work, one pail at a time hauling up that old ocean of woe so that clean fresh water can pour back in, changing abyss into blue seas.

The key element, I believe, is a daily surrender to the task: to stay vulnerable and open and receptive to change. Day after day, year after year of this work and slowly a different world comes into view, one where love and joy is possible. Pain is not erased but our attitude about it changes; rather than medicate or flee from it, pain becomes the midwife of growth, a beam to let us know where we stand in our path.

Healing that heart allows us to truly enter it at last, coming home to ourselves; it also allows us to enter the world, giving back that transformation through love and service of others. This is recovery talk, but wounded healers are also what is deeply needed by a despairing world. Timm increasingly took up that task in plural ways, in so many jobs which served the suffering, in his AA service, in his photography which had the simplest of mottos: Beauty Heals.

In 1996 I wrote a poem about what it means to become a lover of the world full of hope for the real possibility of change. Coming home - rescued from the deadly cycle by a Power greater than ourselves - we become citizens of the world, and bear a responsibility for showing our gratitude by doing what we can to make this a better world, to give it back in better shape than we received it. The poem was part of an anthology of poems I had assembled which envisioned a certain nurture of nature as physic for a culture which has soured and sickened due to its remove from its roots. A vatic parallel, perhaps, to what Timm was engaged with in far more practical and direct work. Here's what I had to say about it:

CLEARING A FIELD

What has been spoiled through a man's fault
Can be made good again through a man's work.

-- I Ching

I walked out beyond the margins of this day,
out beyond its dying too-dry metaphors,
out beyond the spilled raptures of communion,
beyond cankered oaks and river sewage,
beyond the clearcut orchards' riot rot,
beyond the phosphate mines and sugarcane farms,
beyond the landfills and drained wetlands,
beyond the sere rim of this bad world
into another, green and strange and wild:

out beyond my suburb's heart
I found a dark arousal,
beyond all wasted ends a door to plenty,
beyond the exiled flesh a steaming bath
deep in the body,
a field ripe with possibility.

There beyond what's known too well
I found paradise -- a dark and fertile field.

I exceed all boundary because maps forego the world.
I resist all seductions for the smile I cannot find.

I harvest heart and heather for one exquisite hour on the page,
hacking and burning and turning a soil of words,
watering with the thunder and coo of lyric storms,
praising what is made well, whether by God or by hand,

whether saline or sulfrous, be it living or dead,
whether jissomed or breasted or sprouted or lathed,
celebrating this shaking bed of past and future,
tearing down the barbed wire between word and world,
bathing in the similitude of sea wash and tears,

singing of the wished for and the cursed,
ushering in the fallen in its prime,
sweating over the necessary and luxuriant,
praising flower and fruit for their succulent tropes:

I worship this raw world born from dead words,
turning the loam with this humble poem,
watering the furrows with my broken joy,
heaping dung on shame so that wrongs may become fertile,

walking back and forth between
the firmaments of word and world,
the son of two makings, clearing a field,
bellowing this hoarse and off-tune bucolic song,
adding to this morning's fair breeze
the stirring acre of a new world's bliss
soon to flex in darkness and squeeze down
and a green tendril cracks the wakened ground.

And here is what Timm's pictures reply with, extending the hand of the Redeemer through the beauty of His grace, the eye-level experience of heaven in the perfectly created world.