Remembering Timm O'Cobhthaigh: A flowing comfort

I’m just back from a visit to Dad in Pennsylvania, a scheduled trip which had broader implications as both he and Fred are experiencing more involved health complications.

Not only was it a switch in climates, from Florida in full swing of Spring to Pennsylvania, still slumbering in the doldrums of late winter. Interior contrasts were stark, too. Here in Florida our house is bright and open, with many windows and soft colors. At Dad’s house it’s all pipe-smoke and all dark browns, Vermont barnwood walls, dark leather furniture, a monk’s table I used to read and wrote according in my early-morning habit. (That table and a claw-footed chair are the only pieces of furniture I’ve asked to inherit.)

The scene around 5:30 a.m. had everyone waking to their day, Loch their white-grey border collie – with eyes so piercing silver-blue – curling in a corner by one of the bay window overlooking the land, my father and Fred watching the news on TV and muttering to each other, catching the weather as well as daily jolts of Big Big News from Japan and Libya, Saudi Arabia and Madison.

News Out There –- on TV, in my ailing father’s life -- irrupts the news In Here; but that’s exactly why I went there, a Florida family responder here to do what little that I can: Help pick things and cook, commiserate, talk about whatever’s on my father’s mind.

Dad’s visit to the pulmonary surgeon on the day I got there confirmed the extent of blockage in both carotid arteries -– around 70 percent -– but the doctor’s decided not to operate since the risks of doing so exceed those of doing nothing. A reprieve in the latter-day way, bad preferred to worse (Dad’s vulnerable to strokes now, but the risk of one’s far greater if they tried to rout out those hard-clotted pipes of blood.)

I slept deeply most nights and got the bonus of daily afternoon naps – long floating naps, mmmmmmm. One night I listened to big winds rake the forest, a whale-deep sound, tens of thousands of trees bending in wind outside where on my block in Central Florida there are dozens … It was followed by the stillness of early morning, everything dripping, the standing stones and deep forest beyond brooding perhaps on the awful news from Japan, blood spilled on Libyan sands, the spectre of Dad’s passing, Timm walking ahead in the shadows.

The circle of standing stones at Columcille, photographed by Timm in 2007 on his last visit there to celebrate Dad's 80th birthday.

Time and age provide their distractions, like the sound of that TV blaring Big News from the other room; I had a thudding migraine for most of the visit as well: but it was so important to hold the old deep’s presence prescient in my mind, knowing that an image is physic, that (as Timm believed) beauty heals, that despite all outward appearances: That all is well—perfect--in God’s world, in the deep deep inner outer world of angels and ages -– not willed (as if the dying freedom fighters in Libya or drowned residents of Japan or goin’ down middle class of America were paying for a sin), but well, perfection welling from the goodness of the creation, the serenity of what is.

* * *

One morning as my father and I sat having coffee together after breakfast – sitting by the large fireplace in the other room (I hauled the stones for that fireplace up from stone rows off the field below the barn when it was built in ’75, wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow, who knows how many tons, my heart so sure it was one with the Earth Mother that I worked without a shirt and was heckled, to no end, by deerflies, and got such a bad case of poison ivy rash from pulling thick vines of the stuff off the barn that I looked like a human blister, son-lover of the Mother become her burnt offering…)

We were talking about power-of-attorney details, which my brother and I both have for my dad and Fred if they become incapacitated – “unable or unwilling” to make the necessary decisions, as the document goes. We talked about my duties as executor of Dad’s will and went through his paper archives, which he’s come a long way in getting organized. Our conversations--which used to brood long into the mysteries of Iona and Columba and Oran, a creative mythology in the daily making of talk—is more filtered by the concrete realities of strokes and dementia, comas and feeding tubes. Still, we can talk up a wide range of worlds; it's part of our enduring joy of father and son.

We paused somewhere in the conversation, or Dad did. He’d heard something. “Is that the winter spring?” he asked, in a way that made me think of Rilke asking the wind on the shores of the Adriatic in the winter of 1911, having just received the first words of Elegies. (“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angel’s hierarchies?”) But this was a lower, earthlier, far more substantially merry and musical sound, the breaking of the winter spring, the underground wells and springs which vein the hidden insides of Blue Mountain peaking from snowmelt and rain and finally gushing forth.

We put on coats and galoshes and headed out, and there it was, a gurgling stream coming from the drainpipe off the road and from one of many ports of those mountain springs on Dad’s land. We walked the land clearing away leaves and clutter so the flow could go as it needed to, up from the depths of the mountain and out onto the land, flowing into the pond by the St. Oran Bell Tower, down from it toward the St. Columba Chapel and into the woods, cutting a course near the path that leads to the Secret Chapel site.

Such a merry sound, that spring, amid the creaking bones of naked trees, the sky muddy, Dad moving slower, my head thudding with a stubborn migraine, the times in the outside world bad and worse (Lord what a mess in Japan), wintry ghosts stubborn in their rooks, still sighing No, Never, Not Ever Again … Against all that chilliness the spring answered back Oh But Yes from a dozen simultaneous throats, up by the house, down past the Chapel, from beneath the Burial Stone and out from Thor, the massive dolmen which gates the way down through the Glen of the Temple (my father accounts some 90 standing stones on his property – quite a playground).

The breaking of the winter spring is a memorable event for Dad. As we walked and shoveled and picked out leaves from the burbing conduits, he told me about the first time it did so in his first year hear back in 1975, on April 1 that year, a sound which surprised him so, discovering such cold clean musicality amid the mortificatio of cabin-fever and wounded starting over (he’d just moved there from New York City, giving up the visible life of business and world politics for the underground business Columcille so represents. A sound that enlivened his spirit with the prescience of spring.

The breaking of the winter spring is an event that is celebrated after all these years. He was relieved to find out he would not be going under the knife for his clotted and rotted carotids; but this sound, this music, was doubly, trebly redeeming.

Dad says you can drink that water from your hands, it’s so clean and cold and pure. Like the grace of God, the kiss of the Beloved, the serenity of a cat curled in sleep in my house two thousand miles away, like the end of this post which open out in every other direction from its final period.

Grace can’t be earned or created or willed. It’s a gift. All we can do is humbly surrender the big night music of our warring selves. Rilke was so succinct about this in his Third Sonnet to Orpheus (first series),

… Young man,
it is not your loving, even if your mouth
was forced wide open by your own voice — learn

to forget that passionate music. It will end.
True singing is a different breath, about
nothing. A gust inside God. A wind.

(transl. Steven Mitchell)

That wind was water on the land, a soul-music gushing from the heart of Blue Mountain and up from as deep and old a well within.

* * *

One morning, after Dad and Fred had driven off for a doctor’s appointment, I took Loch out for a walk on the land, that morning cold and grey, a few random snowflakes doing cartwheels down the sky. I checked on the spring(s) as it (they) raveled towards low and lower lands, clearing out accumulated leaves at stalling bends and falls with a red-bladed flat hoe. Loch sniffed and listened, nostrils flaring, ears in constant rotation, herding the land.

The St. Columba chapel, photographed by Timm in 2007.

I stopped in the chapel for a while and sit in front of Timm’s crypt, not so much talking to him as listening for him in the sound of all that winter spring water plashing outside, flowing from a mountain’s burst heart all down the land, eventually, I guess, all of the individual springs finding streams which meander into rivers. Not bad here – in north New Jersey there’s been considerable flooding of the rivers – just a wet reminder that spring’s on the way.

Timm's crypt in the chapel.

As I listened to that water inside the stone chapel’s resonant space, I remembered the end of a Wendell Berry poem I’d read earlier that morning, from A Timbered Choir. It was in remembrance of a woman who had just died, fifteen years to the day her husband had died, a good friend of the poet’s. The poem concludes,

May what was beautiful

in all they said and did

Or thought and left unsaid

Flow to them like a river

And comfort them forever.

Listening to all of that water flowing down and out outside, I thought what a benediction that too could be for Timm. Remember how a grade school teacher once complained that Timm was always the first to leap to the aid of a fellow student in distress? Remember, too, how that reach first-responder’s leap to help others remained with him to his last days working as congressional aide. From start to end, Timm kept a close eye on the needs of others, like a border collie shepherding the land.

I thought of Timm’s wide-eyed stare of wonder at animals at the zoo, and his wide-open lens taking pictures of flowing water—-how many pictures of water in motion are in his archives! I cried a bit and said his name and let all of that feeling wash down and out to him, wishing him the comfort of his own good deeds, his beautiful images, wherever he is now.

My picture of water flowing past the chapel, and a picture by Timm of water falling into the pond in 2007. See what he could see, so much better, abler, clearer?

I walked the grounds with Loch taking more pictures, following the water down to the big marsh off from the Chamber, up to the Manannan stone to hear it rustling in the woods, following te sound on one of the trails that took me to the women’s site (Loch taking off after a white-tailed deer who loped easily out of his reach – such a wonder, so beautiful, that wild creature), crossing small bridges under which the water burbled and laughed, winding through so much forest waste – fallen trees and leaves, the bareness of everything in winter – like a triumphal fairy-troop, threading the good news wherever I hiked, wherever I looked, through whatever I thought. Was it water, or was it Timm? Does it matter?

The spring flows down from the Chapel into the woods.

A different spring coursing down through the Glen into the woods.

I left Columcille on Tuesday, medical issues more known if not resolved – Dad on hold til the next scan three months from now (if his carotids inch too close to 80 percent blocked they will have to operate), Fred scheduled for surgery on next Monday to inject some kind of glue into the compound fracture in his spine. A good visit, with plenty of time for walk-and-talks with Dad, good progress on his biography (cousin Lily is leading that task now), good time to write and sleep and nap. Good to be there; good to come home.

Me, cousin Lily, and Dad, on the day we got together to work on Dad's book project.

Brother Will drove me to the airport and we had a good talk about many details and concerns about Dad and Fred as well as some good talk about our own lives … Will’s photography – rekindled when he inherited Timm’s camera -- continues to grow and mature, and I have become a mobile correspondent with Life and Love, the Times and Mysteries with Timm’s laptop computer. So our flourishings come from Timm’s silken waters, images of motion in stillness. It’s a good way to remember Timm here today: an brother stilled while in full motion, whose good works continue to flow in a winter spring which lets us know that Spring is not far away …

Of course, here in Florida, Spring’s sprung, with the air full of intoxicating orange blossoms and afternoons in the mid-80s. The sound of that winter spring – far away in the distance – is yet close and merry here in the gentleness and sweetness of days, in Timm’s enduring presence in our memories, our heart. Flow on, good brother, and receive your many comfortings wherever you have flown.