Keren Dibbens-Wyatt's Blog, page 33
September 5, 2016
Heavenly Haiku 3
September 1, 2016
Landscape of Love 97: Churchyard
Ancient of Days, yew circles the holy ground and stands sacred guard. Her hollowness disguises fullness, and even her dank rotten places are teeming with abundant life; jewelled scarabs and luminescent fungi adorn the lightning wounds and tend the darkness. Toothed fort of the dead, domino headstones re-etched by lichen look ready to fall after centuries of marking mounds of mourning. And life, undeterred, springs up in grasses and buttercups, golden grails full of dew, bluebells ringing out the hours, a carpet of prayer covering the crypt.
© Keren Dibbens-Wyatt 2016
Photo from Pixabay


August 29, 2016
Heavenly Haiku 2
This one is dedicated to all my fellow C.S. Lewis fans, and especially to my friend Bev Wilson, a sister Fledgling. Thanks Bev for your friendship and your beauty that shines God’s light all around.


August 26, 2016
August 23, 2016
Landscape of Love 96: Well
Here is our shortcut to the underswell, our drawing up of the sweet holy water, the bucket swaying seductively with its load of comely coolness. And the holy man wipes the sweat from his forehead and sits half shaded, so we cannot quite make out his face, as he asks for someone else to serve him. We sashay over, unabashed, until meeting those thirsty eyes makes an honest woman of us. And all of us fall at those feet, pour out our fragrance, weep on them, dry the sweet sinless flesh with our dusty hair, and run to fetch clean, pure water, that we both offer up and drink down, and which sets us free from all unholy desires. We no longer hold our chin up, but level, no longer sink into the sand in shame, but see our worth. We leave our brazen boldness behind and seek to be desired differently, stumbling in our haste to tell of this treasure, thirst slaked by meeting the Truth face to face.
© Keren Dibbens-Wyatt 2016
Photo from Pixabay


August 13, 2016
Landscape of Love 95: Catacombs
Cocooned in leaves, wrapped like fresh caught fish, woven into casings by the zig zag zipped silken spinnings of grace, here we curl up and die, and wait for new life. Here we lie and dream of spacious places where our feet will soon be set, whilst the world sees only a fresco of shallow caves, grave in their claustrophobic smallness. Inside, our wings form and we fly, my brothers, my sisters, we fly!
© Keren Dibbens-Wyatt 2016
Photo from Pixabay


August 9, 2016
Landscape of Love 94: Shoreline
Weary feet sinking into dark demerara sand, and the sweetness pushes up between my toes. Waves crashing and rolling unstoppably to kiss where my legs and ankles meet, soaking the joining places. Wind whispers stored in abundance in the emptiness of scattered hells, softly saying, “the sea, the sea,” remembering all the forgotten words of Iris and all the writers who have stood here before and listened. And you, dearest you, cross legged a little way back, cooking breakfast on the brazier, looking over to where I am. The smile that breaks into dawning across your face, lights up the sky, and catches the dull ache of my heart in your net, lifting it, like the seagull suddenly caught above us in a thermal of grace.
© Keren Dibbens-Wyatt 2016
Photo from Pixabay


August 6, 2016
Some News, and a Spider in a Bucket.
Dear friends, my health is not good, my energy very limited. Blogging every day is too much for me, especially when I feel called to write so many books! So I am going to change the habit of a lifetime and be sensible. I shall still write here, but not so often, and with much more spontaneity than discipline. There will still be some Veil of Tears or Landscape of Love pieces, but also other types of sharing. I hope you will find the variety refreshing and stick with me as I work on all the outpourings the Lord is so gracious as to give me.
My readers will be the first to hear about everything! A reminder then, that my sumptuous book of meditations with full colour photographs, The Garden of God’s Heart is available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk , and that this is only the beginning……
Blessings, Keren
Read on to encounter a spider in a bucket….
In my back garden there is a spider in a bucket. She has been in there some weeks now, and she does not move, save for a few steps back and forth now and again to avoid rain, or to move round to a more sheltered side of her slippery home. I don’t know how she is staying stuck there living in the perpendicular, how she doesn’t fall down, or how she is still alive, since she does not appear to eat or drink.
She is staying still because she is wrapped tightly around a precious bundle. She holds under her thorax, a white parcel papoose, at least as big as her own body. It is an egg sac, where her young are swaddled, and are making ready to hatch and come forth into life, even as she, presumably, is waiting to die. I wonder if the young will eat her, as happens with some spidery beginnings. I could Google it, but I’d rather not know for sure. I wonder if she knows what will happen next. I wonder where her self-preservation went, and how a spider can lend itself so completely to the ways of its own nature that she doesn’t run from her responsibilities, but just sits.
And I wonder how like that spider I am, sitting here in bed, waiting for something, for anything good, to come forth from me. I am sat here with my belly full of wonder, of ideas and imaginings, of stories and theories and the love of God, and I ponder his word here and hold it all precious in my heart.
Will my words pour forth and turn on me and eat me up? Or will they thank me and run to spin their own webs, live their own lives, tell their own tales?
I do not know. But like my immobile arachnid friend, I will wait and see. Too tired now to run away, and in any case, how could I leave my bundle of beautiful word weavings unborn and never known? I must protect them, and they must be released. We sit and we wait.
©Keren Dibbens-Wyatt


August 5, 2016
Landscape of Love 93: Volcano
No matter how wet the firewood, how damp the kindling, one word from the glowing prophet and water itself will catch alight around your holy altar! The Lord’s lava flowing from the places where the ground opens up under your unsandalled feet, the cracks ‘neath crucifixion’s fulcrum filling to the brim stone with sulphurous spewing holy raging song that cascades up hills and down dales making a mockery of the highs and lows we spend so much time measuring.
All this time we had the power streaming beneath us, and we did not know. And as the bones of Ba’al’s believers rattle in a bleached latticed path before us, we can walk over molten earth and not be burned, the scorched and scarred lands are not our destination, for we head towards waters of love, even as we have, ourselves, become flame.
© Keren Dibbens-Wyatt 2016
Photo from Pixabay


August 3, 2016
Veil of Tears 109: Daunted
“Pardon me, my lord,” Gideon replied, “but how can I save Israel? My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my family.” Judges 6:15 NIV
When God first hints at something he wants us to do, and we hear the command, or the whisper, or the suggestion, however it may come to us, there is first a feeling of exhilaration that the Lord wants us to do something for him, and quick as a flash on the heels of that joy comes the blinking into the bright light daunted-ness of, hang on, you want ME to do WHAT? And then comes the clammy hand of fear on our backs and our feet, light as air a minute ago, now feel like someone poured concrete over them, and we are stuck fast in the mire of doubt.
But God speaks the same words over and over to his people when they feel daunted or uncertain of the way forward. “Take heart,” “Be courageous,” “am I not sending you?” for the cure for feeling daunted is obedience in faith. As long as we understand who is doing the sending, we can go. As long as we know that it is God’s work and he is the doer of it, we can move forward.
Gideon had no hope of victory with his tiny army. And yet when he expressed doubt, God reduced it still further. He sharpened the tools Gideon had, and paid no attention to quantity, only quality. And Gideon had the sense to see that he was being used of God. When that is happening, we can be confident the outcome is entirely in God’s hands. The Living God loves using the poor, the weak, the helpless for his causes. He does it to show us that he is in charge. It doesn’t mean that the work is necessarily easy, or that we won’t falter somewhere along the way, but it does mean that we can be assured that we are weapons being wielded by a higher power, with no need to rely on our own strength.
In the Bible we see this over and over again with Joseph, David, Joshua, Rahab, Elijah and Elisha to name just a few. Like Moses before the burning bush, we may stammer and be full of excuses, but if we are truly called, we will be unstoppable. Not because of our greatness, capabilities or strength, but because, like the five small stones in the pouch of a shepherd boy-king, we are going to be fired by his mighty hand.
©Keren Dibbens-Wyatt
Photo from Pixabay

