When I opened Pandora's Box (Remember that post about Voudou?)...yea.

 

 

2006.  Previously, I was introduced to the idea of Pandora's Box via an experience I had with someone from high-school.  That time it was music.  I was a slight music aficionado due to my older sister's boyfriend. He had opened up our world to music from the east coast.  A total split from what we were raised listening to in a household ran by a devout Christian.  Imagine my siblings and I in Houston knocking our rides with the Wu-Tang clan and the likes in the 90's.  Oddballs. 

But this experience with music through that person, my old high-school friend, introduced me to the classics. Black classics.  The soundtrack of my life from 2001-2006 had been Minnie Riperton, Jeffrey Osbourne, The Commodores (Zoom is my favorite) and more. 

And also a soundtrack that led me to the actual box. 

To me music and history are undeniably intertwined and when I opened this box.  I was taken back to the foundation of it all through what I ultimately learned. 

Black consciousness.  This was the box.  Handed to me by the hands of a young, handsome, suave, and cunning voudou priest. A babalawo in training to be exact. Whom I introduced myself to out of sinful interest.  I really had no business doing that.  Sometimes things are just meant to be though. 

The box he handed me led me to dig deeper into the skin that flanked me. It's origin and it's meaning.  It whisked me out of the throngs of traditional religion and into a space where linear living and thinking was minute in comparison to all it held.  

My life has not been the same since. For some reason, intermixed in our dealings was this calling by the universe to get full doses of black knowledge and consciousness.  

It helped me develop a strong sense of appreciation of my blackness when Christianity made me forget. I consumed myself with the history of my people, ancestors, black magic, politics, from the rooter to the tooter, I spent my time learning it all.  As much as I could and it changed my outlook on everything.  Boiling every experience I had and would have down to self and divinity and the lesson and blessing between the two.

It also helped me understand the world I was living in and not the imaginary one I could look forward to, because honestly, which is more important? 

Although the end between He and I was interesting and as it turned out, nothing.  I will forever be appreciative of his moment in my life and the discovery he had for me.

To my old Aquarius friend,

Thank you for handing me that box and thank you for allowing me to indulge you despite the circumstances.  You were as sweet as icing sometimes yet as tart as a strawberry, most. 

Signed,

An Aquarius. 

PS: How did you really expect me not to love you after four years? idiot.