Tag: Creating Encounter

Creating Encounter in Colour: Robin Redbreast

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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: Seaweed

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So many greens. The brownish tones of bladderwrack, whose name made me wince in imagined pain, little poppable polyps that we loved before bubblewrap was even thought of. The generic dark forest slime slathered across the rocks, coastal combovers, a slip hazard for flip flopped children, so we took ours off and risked gashes and jagged edges rather than not being able to feel our way with our soles. Sand caught on our feet gave us a tiny bit of traction, but we still slid off and flung our arms out to balance ourselves, rockpool tidal tightrope walkers.

Tiny crabs hid under fronds and someone, probably Monsieur Cousteau, had taught me that these were not leaves. Here were hidey holes for entirely new forms of life, creeping, like us, around the edges of ocean, wondering what was what. Even then, I knew my plastic bucket jarred against all nature’s magnificence, with its hard manufactured texture and artificial colour. The bullhead I caught in it, alien eyes bulging, was given a few strands of spinach green to hide itself in, until it was time to release it back into the sea. The capture of such treasure all on my own, in my smallness, fed my happiness all summer long, and taught me the beginnings of diving for pearls in mystic prayer, the joy of glimpsing life in salt water pools, and the realisation that all life is magical.

text © K Dibbens-Wyatt  Photo from Pixabay

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

Creating Encounter in Colour: Mud Bath

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God calls me into the loam pit, and I wonder at its name. Here is a place that sounds like home and is full of nutrients to drink up through my roots, to softly connect into with my mycelia. I sink and softly twist into the mud, as though I were truly the tree that I am being called to be, or perhaps a holy hippo, ready to roll and languish in the squelching goodness.

Brown the cool earth, the colour of everything mixed together, all skin colours and barked armour broken down into a melted pot of delicious oneness, so that none can claim difference to lord it over others, nor does anyone feel they do not belong.  Here we partake of the crib and the cross, the stillness of forests, the ages of oak and olive, the rotted matter of long gone leaves, we revel in the richness of all that has fallen apart, and prepare for resurrection.

Text © Keren Dibbens-Wyatt  Photo from Pixabay

Creating Encounter in Colour: Dark Purple, Inner Peace

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Inner Peace

The intricate patterns of the world cushion you, and fall away from you like fields under a rising hawk, as you close your eyes and head for another plane. The door is shut, and the ornate and frivolous are lost to you. Instead now the simplicity of semi-darkness will reveal its shapes and colours, as you sense the heaviness of draped eyelids and the feel the curve of world-weariness settling around the base of your inner eye.

Here is a dark purple iris place, now that your light is filtered by flesh and blood. Veins feed your imagination in a guided meditation and you are able to flush away the stress of life’s burdens into glands and ducts. To replace them comes a flow of peace, in soft magenta.

If you stay here long enough, cross-legged and calm, every breath aching with gratitude, you may beat away the butterfly distractions with gentle returns to centre, and start to grow roots into the good and quiet earth, humming softly with life. You may become so captivated by the velvet darkness that you will be ever more attracted to gravity, and yet lighter than the elements.

What soft light breaks into your stillness of mind and the awareness of every cell? And can you now, in the ruby pink melon-fleshed atmosphere, smile without using your lips, and sing of the unity you sense above, below and all around, without making a sound?

Above you, outside of you, a new focus forms, and rings clarity like a soft silver bell, echoing out.

 

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