Tag: color

Creating Encounter in Colour: Robin Redbreast

On By Keren Dibbens-WyattIn Building Lakelight, Creating EncounterLeave a comment

pen and wash robin from paul green pfa dec 2018 30 15 small

Your sacred heart emblazoned in scarlet feathers, a bib of tomato-soup brightness where the embers of the Christ-child’s fire were brushed just in time from your chest. Caught light inside though, where the chambers of love beat loudly, bursting into song that lifts us higher than we know how to be. Beauty given breath from beauty, catching us up into the heavenly realms, a foretaste of flight and joyful worship we can only approach in wonder, sidling towards an understanding like an opera fan listening at the stage door or Moses peeking at God’s glory from a cleft in the rock.

 

Text and artwork © Keren Dibbens-Wyatt  Painting inspired by a reference photo by Paul Green, with kind permission.  The text is an excerpt from my book of devotionals, Garden of God’s Heart.

Creating Encounter in Colour: Sunflower

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A golden amphitheatre, a cloud of witnesses to the movement of the sun, charioting its way across the heavens.

Such an eye, and what seeing, beholding with your compound vision, the wonders of the above, and then folding in on yourself once the light fades, to contemplate all that has passed before you, storing the treasure up for later.

As you age, you learn that facing the right way is just one aspect of life, and you may safely receive whilst gazing even at the ground. Everything is, after all, soaked in the sacredness of sky. Countenance shining from holy transference, glowing with God, a Mosaic face, blessed by glory.

Spiralling seeds begun here will feed us, and flocks of birds, with concentrated wisdom. The sun’s sagacity caught and held, the wisdom of a blooming marvel. All of this within a head that knows when to adore and when to bow, how to let inner green and beauty go, thence to shrivel into ingredients for angel seed cake, still captivating every painter’s heart.

Text © Keren Dibbens-Wyatt  Photo from Pixabay

Creating Encounter in Colour: Rainbow Trout

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Speckled rainbow breathing water and knowing better than we do how to let it flow, gills gently moving in and out. Skin that reminds me of the surface of puddles settled under cars, driven off and leaving swathes of oily colour. Did God paint you to remind us of his promises, made to all life, no exceptions? Or have you just absorbed so much of the spectrum in your swim, bathing in pools kissed by sunlight, that it cannot help but ooze out?

Gliding in places we cannot find, secret eddies and glittering ponds fringed with the long tears of the willow that tinge and tickle your spotted hide with olive green, you spend your days gilded by mystery. You flick your fronded tail at disgruntled anglers, speeding past them with your raspberry stripes, making me glad we are now fishers of people, and can let you wend your rivery way onwards, supple and gleaming.

© Keren Dibbens-Wyatt  Photo from Pixabay

Creating Encounter in Colour: Straw

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Soft light brushing against tall, tender stalks, brittle with age. Time now, as they let go of youth, to seek out Rumpelstiltskin and learn how to spin this dry straw into gold. How does that happen except by heavenly alchemy; the way we tell one another our stories? Just as we turn to silver and start to fade into starlight, so the grasses of the field take on the flaxen wonder of pale auric shine, and we find it harder to bend, our voices becoming reedy and our roots less anxious to hold on.

We are all preparing for the journey onward, and in the mean time we will stand on the edges, border sea and sand, keep sentinel on cliffs and along byways, teaching the young the value of boundaries and tides, leaning arthritically into the sighing of the wind, which will soon carry us home.

Text and photograph © Keren Dibbens-Wyatt

Creating Encounter in Colour: Red and Black

On By Keren Dibbens-WyattIn Building Lakelight, Creating Encounter, Uncategorized1 Comment

I was not going to write a post this week. Honouring the dead with silence seemed more in keeping with the centenary of the end of WW1. Having recently completed a novel about that conflict, the horrors of it are all too fresh in my heart and mind. But, I felt moved to write this. Lest we forget.

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I stand on the battlefield, careworn and weary with my own soldiering, sheltering my palmful of treasure. I cannot know the horrors that drench this earth, but I will still stand here with you, shifting the weight of my ignorance from foot to foot, my hand curling around the black dots, waiting for the right moment to release them.

I will keep silence for just this little while, when you have kept it a hundred years. And when I am soaked in the greyness of the clouded sky, and the countless white crosses have floored my heart, I will close my eyes and feel the solidity of the sadness in this land. It rises up through my soles, it tugs childlike at my humanity, it wrenches my gut, it bayonets my heart.

And when that song of your untimely end has pained its way along my living sinews, and shuddered my synapses, and made me remember you, only then will I say, “Lord have mercy,” and throw my poppy seeds into the harsh November wind, that they might be carried like you by chilly winds of chance, and thrown into the mangled mud of no-man’s land, the possibility of red resurrection always there, bright flowers on unmarked graves and trampled terror.

Text © Keren Dibbens-Wyatt  Photo from Pixabay

Creating Encounter in Colour: Gold

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I keep on digging, paddling my way into the wet demerara, this sea-soaked sand, hurriedly flinging it away with my flippers. Must dig, must dig, must lay eggs, must lay eggs. This is the only time I feel like a human, with their never ending desperation to get things done so that the next task on the list can hove into view, each one humming away, bee-like on a never-ending Caucus route, crossing things off in hopes of one day finding the finish line, unaware it is immovable and inevitably the casting off of this life.

It is a rare thing that is truly time-constrained. Birthing is one of them. And so I work hard to bury myself in this deep golden grain, the soft and yet abrasive descendants of Abraham remaining defiantly countless, but so many fewer than they ought, by rights, to be. I am sure God, who no longer counts sins, counts these little ones and knows each mustard seed by name.

Having hollowed this hallowed place, I would like to lie down here and die, I am beyond every resource. There is nothing left, but the work only half done. A few shallow groanings, and I divest myself of what has been waiting, all this time, to become treasure. Gelatinous albumen the casket, calcium crust the mantling lock, and inside the gold that will feed each tiny cold-blooded life.

Exhaustion is burning every cell now, and still the work must be completed, the children buried, the brown caramel topping covered and smoothed down. There must be no x marking the spot, that enemies can find them, and no way for this mother to return to the nursery. Here I must leave my heart, and these small beginnings, and hope with everything that is good and holy to encounter familiar seeming tiny turtles when I am traversing the ocean, seeing and recognising the glint in my own eyes before me. Somehow, I lift myself, and turn.

Text © Keren Dibbens-Wyatt  Photo from Pixabay

Creating Encounter in Colour: Yellow

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yellow by Kate Kennington Steer for colour blog

Clutched tight, all that treasure, in the bud, now blooming as you open up and let go, and realise that all that gift is for giving, and none of it is worth a damn holed up, sepalled shut and lightless. The worth is in the shining, the reflection, the golden glow of a countenance brightly lit, prayer dripping from you as honeyed light

At first it seems that you will never be done with opening. Row upon row of eager sharkish teeth, pointing up delicate satin flintish arrows to indicate the way. Circles falling over one another to begin. Green transformed by the sun’s sacred alchemy into gold as it passes from the centre ever nearer the precipice of edge, fearlessly dancing further and further out.  Living with such abandon, the brightness of your seamless mandala changes us too, as we gaze on glory ever changing to glory.

 

Text © Keren Dibbens-Wyatt  Photograph by Kate Kennington Steer  © used with permission.

Creating Encounter in Colour: Black Orchid

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You are exotic, other-worldly, full of the grace needed to live moment by moment in a world that constantly threatens you with extinction. The wrong temperature, the wrong humidity, the wrong placement, and you will die, too alien for anything but the perfect biosphere.

Like Julian, mothering words of revelation in her cell, you are darkly deep and thoughtful, passionate about the divine that shines from you even as you absorb everything. All the colours, all the light, is held and unified into untold power and wisdom. Flower that is painted as night, all black satin sheen and the patina of starlight.

No wonder men will fall on their knees to try and dig out a piece of you, your roots delving further and further into the other realms in which you truly live, and which we, in our harried hurrying, cannot reach.

text © K Dibbens-Wyatt  Photo from Pixabay

Creating Encounter in Colour: Fireball

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Fire Sphere

I hold in my hand a ball of flame so hot and fiery, so vast and powerful, that it is rightly to be marvelled at. It is all your troubles, my beloved, called into flame. For just as a candle melts away as it burns, matter will always be transformed into different energy.

In the same way, all your sorrows and tears will become light for the world. Inside the white-hot sphere, at the centre of this new sun, swirls the rainbow that makes up the spectrum of your sufferings, and the hues hewn from hurt become a dance of joy, colliding colours in a kaleidoscope of changing shapes and patterns the universe has always known.

You read the desert father’s advice, “Why not become flame?” and you heeded it. Rest your weariness here in the palm of my hand, and grow with my powerful love even as you are rightly consumed.

Text © Keren Dibbens-Wyatt  Composite art by R R Wyatt  © used with permission.

Creating Encounter in Colour: Ocean

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Just as the ocean cries out in glorious Technicolour that she is not only blue, not only green, so I shout out to the world that cannot see who I am.  All of us are so much more! Can you not see the myriad of hues that curl under each rolling tide, that sing through the cells of one leaf, that rustle and hum in every emotion passing across my face?

Light and shadow wash over all things, creating tints with no name, and driving the machinations of artists’ colourmen, sweating over the alchemy that will never, no matter how hard they work, obtain true dawn-beach-gold. For who can mix a palette for every green in nature, or even on one tree? And who can capture the nuances of light and dark playing joyfully, dancing as dolphins, on the crest of one wave?

Holding the briefest of moments in our consciousness, were we to live forever, we would never exhaust the meditations dancing in the light.

Text and artwork © Keren Dibbens-Wyatt