pink.marigold: Whistling the Toreador Song to Bizet's Carmen

The meaning behind pink.marigold:

When I was about ten-years-old I grew flowers on our apartment balcony, the bright yellow and orange marigolds being my most cherished among them. One day a single pink marigold appeared in one of my pots. Pink being my favorite color at the time, naturally I was beside myself with joy to see this rarity and paid homage to it daily. But to my dismay, I awoke to find my miracle flower gone, left remaining only its sad stem. The culprit, my baby sister, she picked it when I was not looking. Able to do no more than talk about it again-and-again, the story became a mantra and the mantra the metaphor…Brown Americans (otherwise known as black or African Americans) barely consist of 1% of the world population. Taking into account education*, as one of them, life has been a fantastic journey much spent with some level of conscious awareness that I have the collective perspective of a paltry .1% of the world. All this isolation has made it imperative that I learn to think four dimensionally, using every new experience to build rainbow connections often with those I would have otherwise viewed as an other, while at the same time paradoxically weakening my connection to this .1% from which I sprang. Some might call it assimilation. I call it being a pink.marigold, the symbol for being planted in a far-off pot, isolated from the normal flowers, and miraculously growing only to be "picked" for being so irresistibly unique and beautiful.