Tag: Creating Encounter

Creating Encounter in Colour: Blue Butterfly

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

Butterfly

Pain and exhaustion are consuming me today, and my head feels as though it is drowning in a blue mist, killing me softly.  I see a small blue butterfly, flitting in joyous abandon through the chalk meadow, as though a fragment of the summer sky had broken free and was dancing between the waters. I too, should like to be clothed in heaven and mantled in such azure delight.

Perhaps then, I might in turn see my fractured self break away on wings of lapis, the weight of suffering gradually becoming less and less, a blue ballast taking flight and allowing all to fall apart, as it finally should: my ashes softly scattering themselves amongst the bluebonnets and carrying me home.

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

Creating Encounter in Colour: Grey Cat

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I dreamed of a grey cat, who walks like a blueing mist, curling her tail around her favourites and brush-sabre rattling it at those she despises. She slinks by the edges of life and purrs at purrable things. She is fiercely honest, and embraces mystery with every silent padding pawstep. She knows when to sharpen her claws, and when to velvet them away. I have not looked her in the eyes yet, but I am sure they are round topaz wetness, liquid stone in the fog of fur, streaked with streams of moss, and that a sliver of onyx holds the centre in pupilled darkness.

She sleeps in sunbeams when they are slow enough to catch her, and curls up in shadow, happy in light and dark, her seeing clear by either. She always goes around and never through, shedding softness in a stormy carpet behind her for us to follow if we wish to, a cloud of fibrous unknowing. She does not come when called, and in any case, there is no name diaphanous enough to wrap itself around her.

I have only glimpsed the back of her, as she passes the cleft of my rocky hiding place, but as I died in my dream, I knew with all my heart I wished I had got to know her better.

 

text © K Dibbens-Wyatt  Photo from Pixabay

Creating Encounter in Colour: Lilac Lake

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Dewy pearls sit smoking on the grass in the misty morning light. Each one catches a piece of dawn’s lavender lustre  that smiles through tears. The nearly-Spring trumpets in clusters of crocus, each one a saffron-centred pale amethyst, royal resurrection reminders.  Here and there, the pretenders to purple, the soft lilacs of thistle and artichoke, the tips of clover, and the waving flowers of chives, bring their gentle song to the chorus of colour.

There is a pinkly light settling over the waters of the lake, letting us know it is the time for prayer, and we get up and wade out until the heaviness of water makes us start to curl up and fall down, diving without effort into our embryonic selves, able, in the weak light, to float between two worlds, breathe bubbles and watch the birds and butterflies swoop through the holy water.

 

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

Creating Encounter in Colour: Soft Gold

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The cool gold creeps its way across the grass and stone. The dew sparkles, the shadows recede, for they too, must obey the rules of death and resurrection, now fading and passing out to let in the sun. The light seems weak at first, but this is only the sweet gentleness that kisses the world awake and nudges at the edges of the shore, so that everything remembers how to glisten in new mercies before the whole tide comes rolling in.

Soft light breaks into an outpouring of bright light that cannot help but give the best and whole of itself: the sky by noon blindingly adazzle; the ground seared by the seal of golden approval, that having caressed every blade of grass awake, now deluges its heart of gold upon the entire garden. No wonder Mary, who knew him so well, seeing him coronaed in brightness, thought him first a gardener.

Text © Keren Dibbens-Wyatt  Photo from Pixabay

Creating Encounter in Colour: Red, White and Blue

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Devonshire or clotted Cornish cream, spread over the layer of waiting red preserves, strawberries captured in the sugary aspic of pectin and held perfectly on the tongue, a zing of luscious summer fruits alongside the soft dairy peaks, and all of it on the top of crumble-in-the-mouth scones, freshly baked and imparting their heat into all the rest, so that it deliciously melts.

Washing it down with orange picot or English breakfast, blue china pot warmed first before the leaves from far-off lands are heaped to infuse their flavour into just boiled water. Such is a thoroughly British late June sensation, bursting white, red and blue along with the clouds, sky and berries, a blessed Union.

And these are our colours, for which we send our lads and lasses to fight in distant un-Anglican places, and the flags that we plant in other people’s backyards, pinking the globe in British blush. We will bulldoggedly wave them at the Last Night, until we imagine Britannia rules okay.

You cannot have one United Kingdom without the other, past and present are bound together like the jam and cream before us, in a commonwealth of sweet and souring, even as we head out into hedgerowed rambling after the Sunday service, where we sang Jerusalem with ignorant gusto.

 

Text © Keren Dibbens-Wyatt  Photo from Pixabay

Creating Encounter in Colour: Grey Havens

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Through a glass darkly, a smoky quartz seeing, our lives disjointed by the refraction of not holding the lens of eternity. Our sight fogged still, when the elves depart to the west, and the boats wait for us in the cobbled harbour, the mists rolling in from the grey havens. Ships with sails made of gossamer, sparkled with dew in the twilight, twixt dog and wolf, the time to embrace and own our uncertainty, walking by the moorings in the cloud of unknowing.

It is only when we set sail, that we shall begin to see, and all the steel scaffolding we thought held up the truth will fall away, scattering lines, and letting the truth fall clanking like stars. Yes, then we shall see, and all shall turn to silver glass, ice sharp wonder and clarity beyond all our wildest imaginings, even the grass, as his dear fellow inkling guessed, too sharp to set foot on until we have realised where we truly are.

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

Creating Encounter in Colour: Gertrude’s Cloak

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Heather

This winter cloak is cerisely the colour of cherry pie innards, loganberries and deep Scottish heather. A long, velvet brocade that drips with the heaviness of too much wine, dizzy with its own lushness. When she sits on the gilt throne, it drapes grape-ishly along the floor, curls coquettishly into heaving shoulders of patisserie layers, as though folding in on itself in mille-feuille delicacy.

Such lightness with such weight, and the King’s silver clasp that holds it on my lady, joining across hard sternum, is thorn to its roses, ringing bells discordant at mourning, a wedding feast too close on the heels of funeral meats. A heady aroma rises and falls here, undulating like the cloth, akin to Jesus’ gambled garment, which knows no seams.

Let us not be caught unawares by the forceful fragrance of crushed petals, the impassioned poisoned perfume of ambition. Not unsexed but fully rounded, seductive, the spell of a persuasive smile and the perfectly timed drip-dropping of venom into one’s ears.

So much read that is not there, even betwixt the lines, her character moulded and imagined by so many male players and professors over the centuries. Sister to Magdalene, even she does not know how she has been played, and enfolded in plans long laid out, enveloping more than her body, cloaking her in foul deeds.

 

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

Creating Encounter in Colour: Blue Pool

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

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Come lay yourself down on this lilo of leisure, close your screen-weary eyes and float to somewhere lostly deep. The pool is azure punctured with zaps of lightning sun, refracted zig zags of gold lapping at the lapis lazuli tiles. All is Mediterranean wonder and bright cobalt ceramic.

Feel the celestial coolness below you, imagine how the floor of heaven must feel to feet of bronze coming home after walking the earth on a summer’s day. Let your soul right itself, a Spirit levelled horizontally as you recalibrate your centre and plumb the depths in your mind’s eye. All other measuring can be released as the foolishness it is, attention given to cool turquoise surrounding you with softly undulating mammatus clouds of water, ripples kissing your sun-drenched skin and imparting life to arid places.

text © K Dibbens-Wyatt  Photo from Pixabay

Creating Encounter in Colour: Honey

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

Hunny Bear

They are gentle souls we slip into like a gateway to that idyllic childhood we never had, always patiently waiting. He sits spooning hunny from one pot into another, often missing by way of his mouth.  A bear does need to eat after all, and there is quality control to think of.

Like Jonathan in the forest, your eyes will sparkle anew on eating the sacred gathered gold poured from flowers. Tea and story time is all a-drip with butter, honey and imagination, running and plentiful, deliciously treacled on toast, drizzled on scones and sustaining us through the reality of being grownups, which, frankly, is bothersome.

And in the middle of Rabbit’s rabbiting and Owl’s pontificating and Eeyore’s gloom, unperturbed by Tigger’s bouncing and Roo and Kanga’s family, holding hands with Piglet’s blinching, is rotund saffron Pooh, calmly joyful and serene, reminding us that wisdom and tolerance are better than even just a little brain.

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

 

Creating Encounter in Colour: Red Shoes

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

1 red shoes

The red shoes hang on a nail by their trailing ribbons, looking innocent for all the world, though no-one is looking at them today but this tired old ballerina. She knows them only too well and will not be fooled again. New, they were the colour of nascent shell, or the inside of a kitten’s ear, all velvet oyster pinkly grey. Nude as Eve’s Edenic soles, and probably as old. Once worn and worn once, they ripped en pointe feet to shreds and quickly filled with scarlet offerings.

The world will not cease its vampiric feasting, once it has begun to make you dance to its manic tunes. Our only hope is to rip the ribbons that seemed so delightful from our calves, and tear the suckering soles from our souls. In one wrench, band-aid like tossed aside, or hung here on the wall like trophy antlers, the hooks that barbed us.  Only the free can see them for what they are, and the rest gawp at the bloodied rags, astonished that we no longer wear them.

We refuse to dance ourselves to death, and now walk healing paths in streams and forests, barefoot. If we must wear red shoes, they will be ruby slippers that have sequins missing, and when tapped together, take us home.

 

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