Tag: creativity

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: 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: 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: Honey

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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

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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.

Creating Encounter in Colour

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

Relic chapel

Shortly after I began practising prayer and meditation as a central part of my life rather than an “add-on” the Lord started talking to me about colour. He reminded me how my favourite film as a child was The Wizard of Oz and hinted that my life was soon to be transformed from black and white to glorious Technicolor in the same way that the world changes for Dorothy when she travels from Kansas to Oz. After living so many years in what seemed a grey and deserted wasteland suffering with M.E. this came as very welcome news. The Lord drew out of me the realisation that colour is something that makes my heart leap.

As a child one of the most exciting things I could possibly find in a shop was a set of colouring pens or pencils. The range of pens all lined up shouting out their colours like a packaged rainbow was thrilling to me. It made me joyful. As an adult I had my capacity for joy stolen from me for a long time, due to this long and terrible illness and a crushing divorce. For years, my only consolation was doing cross stitch. The huge range of colours of embroidery thread were soothing to my soul, as was the act of creating. Next came a new, loving husband, thank God, and my new hobby, crochet, and although I could only do a very little at a time, the colours of all the yarn were balm to my wounds.

For my 40th birthday seven years ago, my parents bought me a retreat at Aylesford Priory in Kent. This was before my latest relapse which has left me almost entirely housebound. But back then, when I was sitting in the Relic Chapel which has the most beautiful coloured stained-glass windows (see my photograph above). I was thinking about prayer and colour when I felt the Lord strongly imprint a commission on my heart and I knew it was to be a writer. The first thing he wanted me to write about was colour. I duly wrote a short book which brought me great joy.  I’ve not yet been able to publish it, since it needs colour printing which is very expensive!

Three years ago, the Lord brought out of me a talent for art, and no-one was more surprised than I! My passion for colours had finally found its full outlet. I am deeply grateful. A few times over the years I have come back to writing here and there about my heart for colour, but now seems a good time to marry that with my love of art and photography, and this blog about Creating Encounter with God as well as resurrecting bits and pieces from that very first book.

My intention, God and health willing, is to post a piece a week on both this blog and at Fresh Mercies, of my trademark poetic prose, reflecting on colour as prayerful meditation. I hope that you will find your heart lifted and enjoy my little offerings. See you next week for piece one!

God bless you,

Keren

 

Creating Encounter in Colour

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

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Firstly, apologies for the blog having taken a short break. My M.E. has been so bad that I have got very little writing done and I have had to let some things slide. I have also taken some time to pray into how to keep up this weekly blog. The outcome will be about how we create encounter God in colours, which is something close to my heart. I will be sharing a piece once a week on here and on my Fresh Mercies blog, all being well, and now and then adding extra pieces here (including guest writers) at Lakelight on the continuing theme of encounter. I hope you will enjoy the journey!

(photo from Pixabay of the Glory window in the Thanksgiving Square Chapel at Dallas)

Creating Encounter: Sculpture

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I have an unlikely ambition for someone as weak and disabled by chronic illness as I am; I should like to sculpt. I have ideas for wood, stone and bronze, that would be pieces of interactive art. I don’t know if they will ever be a reality, and if I ever did have the space and resources, it would be most likely that someone else would have to do the lion’s share of the work. Nothing is impossible with God of course, but some things do seem so far removed from likelihood as to be, not so much pie in the sky, but as we say in our house, flan on the moon.

What is the appeal of sculpture, and how might we let God teach us through it? I think that the idea of carving a substance until it is exactly the shape it ought to be, the one we envisage in our minds or imaginations, is a great analogy for understanding how our Father shapes each one of us, if we will allow ourselves to be moulded by his artist’s hands. The Bible speaks of him as the potter, with us as the clay, and we can take great hope from this idea, knowing that when God throws a pot, no matter how it initially splats on the wheel, or how lopsided it might look during the spinning, when the master is done with us, we will be perfectly ourselves.

The same is true if we see God as the great sculptor, finding us as a slab of marble and hewing us into some kind of rough shape before chipping away and then smoothing us out into the shape that was hiding in the grain of the stone all the time. Michelangelo said, “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” as well as, “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

Perhaps when we learn to see with God’s eyes we might be able to perceive the angel that is standing before us in the marble of our fellow human beings, and even occasionally to glimpse them in the mirror. For some reason, God has decided that our true selves are worth setting free, and however hard it is to let him keep on working upon us until that image arises out of the raw material, it will be worth it in the end.

Maybe we might even consider the work of kenosis or self-emptying as giving God free rein with the chisel, and accept that a great deal needs to be let go. Once our outer defences and ego are chipped away, maybe an angel might step out into the light. For God, that beautiful person was there all along, and the layers that trapped him or her, were no barrier to his sight.

For the first forty years of my life, I doubted there was a writer hidden away in me. For the first forty-four, I had no idea I was an artist. Do you think one day God might uncover the sculptress too? What wonders are hiding in you, that might be set free by heavenly hands chiselling away at your earthly rock?

 

Text © Keren Dibbens-Wyatt Photo from Pixabay

Creating Encounter: Story

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Two writer friends, Amy and Fiona, asked an interesting question on social media this week. Will there be books in heaven? My first response was to think, of course, but no Jeffery Archer. Which just goes to show how quickly our instincts fly to exclude those we don’t deem worthy. But I think that probably it is God who chooses the stock for the libraries of heaven, just as he decides who gets to sit where at the feast.

As a writer myself, and someone who was an avid reader when I was well, I can’t imagine an existence without books. When I was tiny, nothing was so magical as sitting cross-legged on the library floor, transported to another world. We are wired for story, and it has a deep and presiding influence in our lives and learning. We learn about good and evil from fairy stories, whilst myth and legend help us to understand life by stretching overarching narratives across it, like skin on a drum frame.  Archetypes, heroes and villains are all helpful tools for navigating reality, and story can be both fiction and non-fiction. We talk, don’t we, about Bible “stories” and we read about the lives of famous people and saints formulated as story in biographies and autobiographies.

How we narrate our own lives, how we tell our story to ourselves and others, is a hugely important thing. We might see ourselves as victim or hero, and more often than not, write a triumphal narrative into the facts, whether it exists or not, because we need to have hope that it all works out in the end. Meaning is the mainstay of a human life, and story gives it to us.

What heaven is like, is something we can have great fun imagining. I feel sure that whilst we are coming home to God when we die, and finding union with his loving being, that we are also going, on some level, to keep becoming more truly ourselves, and that implies that there will continue to be an element of growth. Story, learning and creativity will always play a part in that.

When God has been gracious enough to give me glimpses of my heavenly future, I have always been doing something creative. Embroidering altar cloths as I minister to the broken, or kneeling on the back of a lapis lazuli sky, etching intricate patterns and words into its surface.  We serve a creative God and I think this reflection of who he is in our beings will be part of what is next. Added to which, I truly believe that the stories I have written have been given to me during the stillness of deep prayer. They sadly have the mark of my human expression that cannot capture God’s heart well, but they feel like a holy endeavour.

If we ever, like Richard Dawkins, begin to think that story is superfluous, and that fiction is about lies, rather than heavenly magic, we might do well to remember that Jesus chose to teach us, not by dissecting the universe into facts, nor by preaching clever theology, but by telling stories.

Text © Keren Dibbens-Wyatt Photo from Pixabay

Creating Encounter: Birdwatching

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Having a sedentary life enforced upon me, and being very rarely able to leave the house, even to venture into our small garden, the birds that visit our feeder outside our kitchen window are a spiritual lifeline and blessing of huge proportions.  I don’t think that that Jesus told us to consider the birds only as a lesson in God’s provision and deep care, but also because they are joy-bringers. Our hearts lift and soar as we watch them flying, and to see one of the Father’s bright and beautiful creatures up close is an encounter that opens our heavenly eyes.

When we can look at a bird, however small, and however dull its plumage, and see God’s handiwork, we enable an encounter with the maker of heaven and earth that is transformative. The subtlety of a sparrow’s myriad of brown hues, or the breath-taking iridescence of a starling or pigeon’s neck feathers, or the stunning colours on a goldfinch, are gateways into wonder. This awe has only increased as I journey deeper into being an artist, for the ultimate artist has his masterpieces gliding all around us, and his skills are phenomenal.

Watching birds is also something that pretty much everyone can enjoy. If you have access to a view of any kind, even just one small window can be an entry point for the song and the sight of our feathered friends. Here is one of the pieces from my book “Garden of God’s Heart” to illustrate the point I am trying to make:

Blue Tit

 

“A bubbly sing-song bird, bright and true, sky blue and sunshine yellow, your only hope of camouflage is high against a summer cloud. But who would hide such a treasure, a darling bud, a chirping, lively flitter between trees, between worlds? Heaven painted you with a lapis hood and cloak, and clothed you in a buttery jerkin, to bring cheer and loveliness to any dreary heart, and hope in goodness to any unbeliever.”

text © by Keren Dibbens-Wyatt Photo from Morguefile