the timboucher experience

Within the old guild systems which governed skilled trades amongst medieval Europe, you had three basic grades of craftsman: the apprentice, the journeyman and the master. An apprentice was a youth who was basically given as an indentured servant to an established master to work in his shop, doing odd jobs and grunt work until he had attained a basic understanding of whatever particular craft or trade to which he had been dedicated. The labor of the apprentice was considered as payment in exchange for the training and typically room and board that the master provided. Once that debt had been satisfactorily paid, and the apprentice having reached the appropriate age and skill level he became a journeyman. The term journeyman comes from the French journee, for “day.” The journeyman spent his days, then, working essentially as a day laborer for whatever master needed the labor in his shop or for his current project. There existed a custom – which still remains in certain regions – that if a journeyman appeared at the shop of an established master, that the master was required to take him in, and give him work and lodging. Working alongside many different masters supplemented the knowledge base gained as an apprentice and prepared the journeyman for the completion of his own masterwork. A technically and aesthetically perfect masterpiece, as decided by other masters in the field, was the requirement for entry into the guild. The modern scientific system of peer review, I would guess, has roots in this practice, along with many other elements of our higher educational degree system.

Before I left Seattle, I went on a week-long sailing voyage with my then landlord and drinking buddy, who often referred to me as a “squire”, though I wished for nothing more than to become a knight. Our stated goal had been to retrieve his Tahiti Ketch from moorage in Ventura, California and sail her north along the Pacific Coast to Seattle where he was going to sell her. Weather held us back for many days (which was just as well), bumming around the docks, eating sushi, discussing the merits of various types of boats and the names of different sails and knots. We went out for one day only, twelve hours. I piloted the ship at the tiller for about four hours keeping as best our heading as I could across the choppy waters while the captain slept below. Sunfish greeted us, dolphins swam in our wake, we motored along but never made it. It would be an uphill battle the whole way, our captain informed us (me). The wrong time of year, we would have to motor the whole way, it would take too long. I’m not sure what happened, if he changed his mind, lost heart, decided it wasn’t worth it or what. That may just be the life of a sailor, I suppose. You plans change with the weather, whichever way the wind blows.

I’d meant to stop and put to shore in Eureka, California – the next town over from where I’d spent a fateful month intoxicated on my own ideas about what love was or should be before I had to leave and couldn’t take it any more. It was, our captain informed us, one of the most dangerous ports in America. I don’t remember why, perhaps a very narrow channel in to the docks. I remember something about many boats having recently crashed there. Maybe he was just trying to scare me off my foolish course. Reality had already handily done that though.

When we eventually got back into port in Ventura, fully defeated, I decided I would make it up to Arcata on my own, and bang my head against the wall one final time. The captain gave me a few hundred dollars out of kindness and I headed north in a rented car, driving straight from Ventura up to Humboldt County and the “circus house.” Back when I lived there, the girls at work (I was one of the only people residing there with an actual job) informed me that this had been the craziest most notorious party house in town for the past twenty years. My own experiences there certainly bore that out.

I waited on the porch when I got there for my girl. She was never mine, though. Wild as the wind. Free as the flowers. Quiet as the redwoods whispering, “Go back home, why did you come here?” I’ve never thrown myself at anything less. Likely never will, until I regain my sense or heed the advice of my captain: “Never try to capture a goddess. Settle down with an average-looking girl.” I waited for hours, caught up the with the jugglers and assorted fools who’d not yet forgotten me in the clouded marijuana-haze of time that is Humboldt County. One of them warned me that she was with somebody else now. I listened, I waited, I didn’t expect much except to be further hurt. I would be. If nothing else, I hoped to retrieve some of my belongings I’d left there when I first fled months back: my black motorcycle boots – my “murder boots”, she’d called them – and some other items I now can’t remember. I wish I’d gotten the complete works of Shakespeare. I never found the boots. I think she sold them or gave them away. Somewhere a clown or other fool may be walking around in my murder boots.

She was with someone else, some stupid guy she worked with at the grocery store who we’d both made fun of while I was living down there. She told me I could sleep in her bed that night while I was there, and then promptly departed with him. “The bed’s half yours after all,” she said. I still don’t understand that statement. It doesn’t matter.

I didn’t sleep there, I jumped in the rental car, wanting to punch grocery store guy in the face, but blocking back tears. I heard him say to her as I stormed out for the second time, “You’ve got to choose your battles.” I wish I’d chosen mine a little differently. I drove up the coast to Trinidad, where legend has it that Captain Beefheart somewhere resides. I wouldn’t be surprised, a veritable paradise. Her eyes are a blue million miles indeed. I slept in a parking lot down by the water behind a boat house or restaurant or some combination of the two. At five A.M., the sounds of fishermen woke me up. Ocean haze had filled the valley of the lot where I slept in the backseat. When I woke, I had what might be described as an overwhelming sensation of the presence of Grace. Not quite a mystical experience, but not far off either from others that I would characterize that way. This one included a wave of clarity, beauty and stillness that overtook me and wrapped me up in it like the fog. And the message it contained was this: that Grace requires Time to unfold in. That is, the entity of Grace requires the entity of Time in which to exist. It’s a sequential unfolding. To experience fully the immaculate presence of Grace would be to exist fully outside of time and outside of the human perceptual experience. It would, like directly viewing the presence of an ancient Greek deity, destroy you in a flash. Time, then, allows Grace to be doled out little by little, as we become more capable of seeing it, more open to it.

When I got back to Seattle, or maybe it was before I left – the chronology of the unfolding of Grace in my life has become a bit jumbled – I got a tattoo of a heraldric rose on my right wrist from a dreadlocked man wearing a shirt that said “Isis” on it and had a pentagram. Some metal band, I guess. I took the mark of the rose upon myself, you could say, as a kind of stigmata, a reminder of the many wounds of love, the painful penance required by the Passion and transformation of Love and its mysterious dancing partner, Death. I say that because I discovered some months later while ruminating on the Tarot deck that the flower I’d taken upon my wrist as a reminder that all actions in this world must be guided by love, that the same flower in white appears on the flag of the Death card in the Major Arcana. The pope kneels in humility on this card, pleading with the beknighted figure, a king lies fallen at his feet, crown lost. The rose, it turns out, was also a tattoo sailors of old would take upon themselves before leaving their wives behind them and venturing out onto the wild seas, possibly never to return again.

• Functions of the Rose
• Compass Rose, Possible Mandala OS Symbol/Logo
• And Another Thing…
• “Good Good Lies” by Big Elk [Lyrics]
• White Rose