Stephanie Ross
Chrysanthemums in a sumi-e style
Inspiration piece
Portal Pink
By Darice Jones
Response
In earth year, 60,000 BC, chocolate colored earthlings (our ancestors – and yours ) were busy migrating to places all over the globe. Their time in East Asia, where the beginnings of the Sumi-e art form would develop, along with a series of mystical years, and one truly magical painting were the start. These unlikely events allowed the adventurous among those Kenyan travelers to enter celestial portals that lead us to the faraway star system where we beautiful Brown Beings live now.
There was one painting in particular that became the quantum foundation for the life I am living today. It featured the Yao Shu Kui, or pink Marshmallow flower and root. Because the artist knew she was descended from the bold Black people of Nakuru, Kenya, she chose heavy dark strokes from the stems to the roots. This represented the African source of humankind.
During this time in human history, the color painting palette (along with a million other things) had not been gender-ized. Because of this, people were free to marvel in whatever moved them without shame. That’s how you got two men following their lead artist, a woman, in painting the Yao Shu Kui with equal appreciation for the pinks, the blues, and the black. Needless to say, folks back then were a tad more interesting that the ones you experience on today’s earth. They were freer. I’d like to think we’ve built on that freedom well here in the outer reaches of space.
I’m Lavizi, by the way. I am writing to you from my beautiful life in Pink along the Star System Goma, just 88 galaxies from earth. And although I am living in the same time as you, my experience of life is very different from yours.
I’m telling you all this because I am the direct descendant of one of the creators of the pink portals – which allow travel between where I am and where you are. My getting this writing to you could land me in a “time out” for the rest of my current lifetime.
Still, I think you have a right to know that there is more to life than war, money, mating, and existential angst.
I will admit, it’s important to me that Sori Ko, my ancestor, finally receive the credit she deserves for initiating this form of travel – but I also think you deserve the opportunity to actually utilize the portals she created and to transform your consciousness in the process.
We’ve evolved some in our time away from the earth. We’re darker in complexion and more peaceful in temperament. The suns here are even hotter than your earth sun, and the vimson layer that protects us is more efficient than your ozone layer, so our melanin is berserk. We love that word here, berserk. You earthlings don’t use it enough anymore. Here on the planets Ciam, Riki, and Zulu, everyone is deep dark (what some of your ancestors in the Western hemisphere used to call blue black) and we all value spiritual expression. It’s the next evolution for collective beings after spiritual enlightenment, which you earthlings are still going back and forth about trying to achieve. Frankly, it’s hard to watch. I think you need your consciousness nudged by a new encounter with “the impossible.” And that’s why I have sent you this lifeline.
I will definitely get into big trouble if anyone finds out I’m telling you this, let alone sending you the means to travel here. But I know that once you’re here, people will embrace you. That’s just our way. So, I hope you souls that find my lifeline letter and portal travel kit have youthful hearts, so that you are courageous, that you have elder minds, so that you see the wisdom of traveling the road your ancestors traveled, and that you are the type who appreciate the mysteries of life, so that you are open to exploring the so-called impossible. Oh yeah, and I hope you like the color pink, because it’s everywhere here. It’s extremely popular because the Yao Shu Kui painting was the first activation of the portal, the color pink is foundational to our aesthetic with dark blue, black, and grey highlights right behind.
As the story goes, Sori Ko of Nakuru, Keyna made the trek along with 200 other adventurers from their previous home to what would later become China. The history books don’t record this where you are, but folks created several forms of travel back then for the migrations. Each new terrain they faced prompted new creative advances in the travel technology of the time. Rolling vehicles, floating vehicles of all sorts, and even some meager flying vessels where all present. That’s important for you to know, since you’d be thinking of 60,000 BC as a primitive time and depending on how much of the twisted histories you’ve been fed, you might even think the people of Africa (my ancestors and yours) to be primitive as well. My sympathies are with you. You’ll have lots to unpack if you choose to come here. Life, language, expression, and art were much different then, but primitive is not at all the right term. It implies that they were much more crude and rudimentary than they were.
Anyway, the trek to The East revealed a whole new terrain, new climate, and required new thinking. Sori Ko and the more meditative adventurers in her group used painting as a form of meditation before problem solving. Back then everything was handmade, so everything was precious. Paint was made from crushed callicarpa berries or whatever berries happened to be growing wild. Paint brushes were made from the hair of animals and whittled twigs. Every step in the process, including finding smooth flat white stones to paint on at the edges of the water, was part of the meditation. Back then you could pull thin sheets of white stone out of the rivers just as commonly as you might find seaweed.
It was a beautiful time of discovery and people were meticulous about preserving each other, the earth that sustained them, and their inner peace. It is from this energy that Sori Ko of Nakuru, Kenya painted a portal that sparked a whole new existence 88 galaxies from the earth. It is said that on the day of the first portal opening, she was up before sunrise because she wanted to pull her thin white sheets of stone out as soon as the sun hit the water. She found three beautiful sheets and dragged them out to dry, while she made herself a breakfast using half of the berries she’d gathered the day before. The other half would be used for painting.
(The image of the dried sheets of stone standing up against the big trees with the mist over the river just behind them and Sori Ko standing in front with handmade paint brushes and crushed berries, is represented often in the art here in the Gomen star system.)
After hours of staring at the first sheet, Sori Ko stepped forward and began painting her interpretation of the pink marshmallow flowers growing nearby. The white sheets were much taller than Sori Ko, so she started at the low part of the thin stone. She had a kind of patience that was particular to that era and that hasn’t been seen again yet on earth. All her her strokes were big, slow, and complete. If she were painting a petal, she’d swoop her brush all the way around to complete it, let the paint dry, then swoop again. She did this with all the blueberry and blackberry painted stems & roots of the flower. She did it with each pink petal. People from her cohort came as she was in the middle and left before she was done. Her two collaborators stacked stones when she got to the top of her reach. A muscular duo, they made sure the stones were steady as a step stool for Sori Ko.
When she finished it by the moonlight and climbed down the stones all alone, she wasn’t even tired. She felt energized, like electricity was flowing between her and the earth, the trees, the white stone painting, the pink flowers, and the dark stems. She stepped back slowly to take a look. She couldn’t wait for the moonbeam to hit the canvass. She knew her view would be so much more spectacular when that happened. So she stood back looking and waiting.
To Sori Ko’s shock and thrill, when the moonlight hit the painting, the dark center of the bottom flower, the one within arms length, started to vibrate, sparkle, swirl and glow. She walked up and reached out her hand, but didn’t touch it the first night. By the third night, half of her cohort was staying up to watch the crazy and beautiful magic that happened every time the moonbeam hit Sori Ko’s painting. But no one dared to touch it. Then one night at midnight, Sori Ko made a pact with herself that if the swirling continued when the moon passed over at its weakest beam during the crescent moon, she and her two male companions would be brave and touch the mystery.
It was ten nights later when the moon beam from the crescent moon touched her painting. The crowds had died down now that everyone who’d traveled to this strange land had seen the center of the flower spin and sparkle as if hosting another dimension inside that circle. She told only her two companions because they were fellow artists and because they understood. The two agreed that they would follow her courage and touch the painting too.
And so, all three put their hands into the shimmering, swirling, sparkling black center of the pink flower at once. Their three mahogany brown hands clasped like kids making a pact on the playground. As soon at their hands touched that energy, their bodies seemed to disappear. The next morning, the other travelers who remained made up all kinds of stories to explain their absence.
All agreed that the painting had something to do with the disappearance of Sori Ko and her two companions. None of them could have imagined the truth, that Sori Ko and crew were 88 galaxies away seeing a part of the multiverse they never could have imagined and destined to build beautiful communities where art, love, and nature were the center of daily life.
Almost all who were left behind by Sori Ko that night agreed that it was time to take the painting home. So, a group of 20 covered the tall painting and made the trek back to Nakuru so that Queen Afua could judge what to do. The queen was aghast when the travelers stood the painting before her and the moonbeam made it come alive. She decided that since this was the work of artists, only artists in the community should be allowed to connect with it. Thus began 100 years of cosmic travel between the Gomen star system and Nakuru Kenya. It was a beautiful time where artists got to engage in their favorite activity – world building.
After 100 years, unfortunately, war became a regular part of earth’s activities and that prompted the closing of the portals (retaining the ability to watch earth, almost like a TV show in thousands of languages and groupings of people who have swallowed whole the idea that they are different from each other.) It’s a sad show to watch from here. Because we don’t live like that.
Our place isn’t some false utopia, it’s real people who found out what was possible and developed a view on the multiverse that keeps us unified. We have our struggles. Space, as you would call it, is volatile and can be terrifying. But our terror of the unknown and the way we band together to respond to it, never involves turning on each other. Time and environment has shifted our DNA from generations of practiced unity. We have our stresses and our woes and our losses, but it is nothing like that soul killing stew you are in – where you feel loathing at worst and ambivalent at best about what you see in the mirror, and you’ve lost your ability to be truly bonded like the big interactome you all are. It’s all connected is the understatement of the millennia.
Similar to the vibe of people who live on the earth’s least disturbed islands or the people who live in coastal towns, here on Goma people love to play, relax, and enjoy the experience of this current life. Something about the color pink has the uncanny ability to both calm and excite. From this steady passion, we’ve been able to build the kind of worlds that our ancestors were envisioning when they set out from the African continent to populate the rest of the world.
Should you choose to plant, water, and grow the enclosed pink paint seeds. Then paint pink flowers reminiscent of the reproduction I’ve enclosed of the original pink portal painting, you’ll be transported here to Goma. When your painting is dry, and you find a private place outdoors to allow the moonbeams to hit your piece, you’ll see the dark center of the pink flowers come alive. It will swirl and twinkle like stars in the night sky. If you have the courage to touch the celestial center of any pink flower on your painting, you and I may get the chance to speak face-to-face. I’m told I have a very pleasing face, but I wonder how someone from your world would experience it. I wonder so many things. And having a talk with you, or many of you, would be the highlight of my existence. Showing you around and incorporating you into our celestial communities would make my life complete.
If you come here, you will live under the five principles of the triad planets in the Goma star system.
First Code: All life is linked through a vibrational truth that sparks the entire multiverse. What you do is not only in relation to your perceived self, your perceived family, your perceived tribe. You are everything and everything is you. Act accordingly.
Second Code: Everything alive has a sense of humor. To laugh is to live.
Third Code: The full expression of life is coded in the seed, even before its planted. Every stage of development has value from the new, to the developing, to the ripened. Handle every stage of your life with love.
Fourth: Vulnerability is the practice of connection. Allow your heart to be seen as often as you can, and your soul will be rewarded with endless joy.
Fifth: Life is a sensual affair. Get out of your head and into your senses to align with the magic of being.
In committing to these principles and practicing them as part of our every day lives, we don’t have to speak to war, poverty, exploitation, or the destruction of the natural world. Those things have just ceased to be a part of our experience, through the practice of unity over many generations. The wonders here kept us intrigued and growing as beings, so peace is a mundane truth – not an unattainable goal. I know you can’t imagine that, because I’ve seen the way your leaders try to initiate every earthling into the cult of intractable human problems. You’ve been trained to go beyond believing the wise adage, “To err is human, to forgive divine,” to believing that “Everyone has the potential to become a monster.” I pose this to you from experience, just because humanity is fallible, that doesn’t mean its doomed to repeat destructive patterns.
Sometimes we call the earth the drunken planet, because it operates on an addiction to a weird (from our perspective) low-spiritual-esteem. The earth collective refuses to lean into its incredible resilience and into the fact that interconnected people in different climates end up looking differently over time, creating differently, singing and dancing differently, but BEING direct siblings non-the-less.
I laughed so hard when I recently started seeing your unkillable Black Americans saying things like, “I hate it here,” and “Earth is so ghetto.” In fact, this trend is part of what pushed me to write this long letter and send this portal activation kit. I am testing the theory that these statements are a recognition on the part of some earthlings that there is more to life and the universe than what you’ve experienced so far. There’s joy waiting for you, and new life, and passion, and the lots of healing pink energy, and your cousins who got away and chose to evolve our best parts and become really good at sticking together.
I am writing this letter because I want to meet you cousin. Did I say my name is Levizi and I’m a dark chocolate being all dressed in pink, risking a lot, and waiting on you? That’s me. Levizi. Who are you?
xoxoxo
Written by Darice M. Jones in the Year of Paul Robeson 2021
©2021
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