aBout

aBout: RomBout Vercnocke. Womb Poet. Marian Herald. Teacher. Video  & Spoken Word Artist. DJ & MC. Shaman. WomBus Living. Spiritual. Romantic. Interested in web technology. Always wondering & wandering (in- & outside, up & down). Nederlands, English, Français. (In the picture above, on the right in the distance my previous WomBus, a VWLT31. We parted in 2010, and now I’m Wombus Living & Traveling in my VWCrafter35 -see header-, so still in the same family! 😉 )

phone +32476523222

rom@boutman.com

Chronology of my life so far: see bottom of this page.

This song and performance articulates best the way I try to live my life (in Dutch, with lyrics in Dutch, click for English subtitles):

and this:

en zeker ook het “onderweg” zijn,  en gewiegd worden, being on the road, “roaming in the womb of being” … ❤

There is also this painting, kind of my Soul’s Imprint:

Painting “Pax Tibi Marce Evangelista Meus” (= ‘Peace to you Mark My Evangelist’), oil on canvas, 100x80cm, on my request by my father,
and a crafted dish,  a present from my godfather at my birth .
The dish is a unique ceramic piece of art by Joost Maréchal (1911-1971)
– see: http://www.joostmarechal.be/ .
The tree in the middle is Yggdrasil (from Old Norse Yggdrasill), an immense and central sacred tree in Norse cosmology.
The two swans: in Norse mythology, white swans guide souls from another world to be born in our world.
On the painting some of the things I wanted my father to paint because they always had impressed me, he was kind enough to grant me my request:
Saint-Rumbold’s Cathedral (Mechelen, Belgium) after which I was named,
a moai from Eastern Island,
Saint Mark’s Lion holding the text “Pax Tibi Marce Evangelista Meus“, symbol of the city of Venice,
and the two swans from the ceramic plate.
And, important, all this is surrounded by the “SEA”, womb of all life on Earth.

Boutman from conception to…. (some defining moments of my life up to now)

+ Somewhere in the last days of summer, 1954, my parents made love, and my life on earth started, as is the case with every conception: a true miracle! A year before already my sister was born.

+ June 1st 1955: after 9 months of living in paradise, I came into the light. But it wasn’t really my choice: the gynaecologist, a woman who was a friend of my mother’s, had planned a holiday around the time of my birth, and to be sure it was she who would do the delivery, it was decided to induct the labour. Once, my mother gave me the phone number of the midwife who assisted to my birth, when I called her and told her my name, she remembered me and asked: “Did you become a singer?’, meaning my screaming after birth was very loud and long. Well, speaking of entering with a bang! There’s more: a few days before my mother gave birth to me, she drove her car, a Volkswagen Beetle, in a ditch, luckily for me and her with no injuries, but hej (big) bang again! Interesting detail: at the end of her life my mother told me she wasn’t really sure about the exact time of my birth. My birth certificate notes: ‘June 1st, 1am’, to which my mother replied: “Well my boy, I’m not sure, it was around midnight…), so it could have been May 31st (day by the way one of my grandchildren was born, at exactly 11pm!).

+ 1955-1958. The first year of my life (and later often, until I was about 11) was mostly spent with my grandmother, aunt and uncle (who was my godfather) on my mother’s side, because my mother was ‘always on the road’ with her Beetle as a ‘traveling saleswoman’, selling chocolate and biscuits to shops. And my father? He was at home, mostly living his life as a creative artist, he was a writer and a painter, although he was a certified lawyer. It would take me too long to explain this strange family constellatation, but the interested reader can learn all about it in the biography RARATONGA I wrote of my parents (1500 pages in Dutch, but friend Google will help with the translation). World War 2 (and its aftermath) was a defining turning point in their lives, and so cast a shadow on me too…

+ 1958-1961 Kindergarten (I intensely remember a day I didn’ want to leave my mother’s car to enter the premises of the school, she had to drive a few times ‘around the block’ to calm me down, and each time we passed school I ducked away between the backseat and the front seat).

+ 1960 my grandfather (father’s side) passed away, he had been living with us since 1958, and bought us a television set, which was bvery rare back then

+ 1961-1967: primary school. To be noted is an extraordinary experience. I was standing in line with the orther boys (2nd grade) and, for an unknown reason, my eyes where attracted high above towards the corner of the indoor playground. Suddenly I felt as if I where flying towards that corner. The best way to describe it is as ‘entering a wormhole’ > entering another dimension, lifted by a mysterious force, taking me to a place that I can’t describe in words. But it felt great and soothing,
almost like a kind of paradise. I always call this feeling ‘Oceanic‘. This experience has helped me in the rest of my life ‘here on earth’, especially in difficult moments and also works as one of the lighters to enflame my creative energy. You can read about it here (in Dutch). I even wonder sometimes if I ever came back… (which reminds me of the movie ‘Contact’, where Elly (played by Jodie Foster) has a very similar experience when she ‘travels through space and time’).

+ 1964 my grandmother (mother’s side) passed away

+ 1967-1974 Secondary school. I studied in the ‘classical’ direction: Latin & Greek.

+ 1969 I wrote my first poem at age 14

+ 1974-1979: University, leading to my Master Degree in Language (Dutch and English)

+ 1974 starting ‘my career as a DJ’ in my free time

+ 1977 my aunt (mother’s sister) passed a way, she was a real saint

+ 1979-2013: career as a language teacher in the 3rd grade of the Maria Assumptalyceum, a secondary school in Brussels. (In between, 1980: my military service).

+ 1980: marriage and birth of three sons (1982, 1984, 1985) they too married, and now I have 6 grandchildren.

+ 1989 my father passed away at the age of 82.

+ 1989 bought my first RV (bus), a Barkas B1000, start of a lot of raodtrips in the following years (and other buses, all Volkswagens), and still counting!

+ 1989-1990 struck by a flame of Love, kind of ‘Oceanic’…

+ 1991 my godfather (mother’s brother) passed away

+ 1993 bought a house, had a lot of renovating to do (the first year we had no central heating, the roof leaked, etc. …)

+ 1995-2005 my marriage began to disintegrate and ended in divorce

+ 1998 my ‘dark night of the soul’, you can read about it here (in Dutch)….

+ 2003-2007 a new relation, we parted as friends

+ 2010 sold my house and bought my present RV (a Volkswagen Crafter) and went to live in it at my mother’s

+ 2013 retired as a teacher

+ 2013 my brother-in-law passed away…

+ 2014 sadly the mother of our children passed away…

+ 2015 passing of my mother at the age of 95, during the last years of her life I took care of her, it was intense, but very rewarding, in a way I closed the circle with her, starting with my conception in her womb.

+ 2024 8th edition of VRUCHTWATER (my written work in Dutch), now fully grown to a 610 pages book!

+ of course there is much more to tell, you can find that through this website or my other ones.