Every time I stand before this painting, my eye goes somewhere different.

That is not an accident. This is a painting that looks different every time you meet it - because you are different every time you meet it.

Six mandalas gather inside one circle on a black ground. Each one speaks a different sacred language. La Chakana - the Andean cross, a map of the cosmos. The Flower of Life - the geometric pattern underlying all creation. Metatron’s Cube - containing within it all five Platonic solids, the complete architecture of form. A compass rose. A spiral. Rune symbols. Ancient Inca symbols. A lotus. Feathers. A dot mandala turning inward.

None of them dominates. None of them disappears.

They do not compete. They gather.

Under UV light something shifts. The individual worlds surrender to one deep violet field. The runes ignite. The Flower of Life burns at the center of the largest mandala like a sun that was always there, waiting for the right light to reveal it. Six distinct voices become one chorus.

In daylight, multiplicity. In darkness, unity.

Both are true.

I Have Never Had Only One Center

I get bored when I stay too long in one field.

I am an artist, a writer, a philosopher. I have been a nomad, a mother, a culinary alchemist. I have facilitated gastronomic ceremonies and breathwork. I have lived on multiple continents and built things from nothing more than presence and conviction. I have four entrance doors into my work - and they are all equally real, equally mine.

The challenge has never been having too many interests. The challenge has been not getting lost in them. Learning to switch focus consciously. Staying long enough in one field to go deep - then moving when it is time. That is not chaos. That is a different kind of mastery.

Cosmic Gathering is what that mastery looks like as a painting.

What is Embedded Here

The amethyst stones set into this work were once part of a necklace - a symbol of love and care. That energy was not discarded. It was given a new life here, held inside the field of this gathering.

Mirror pieces are embedded throughout, catching and reflecting light back to whoever stands before the painting. You do not just look at Cosmic Gathering. At certain angles, it looks back.

The Runes

Running through this painting is the Elder Futhark alphabet - all twenty-four runes encoded within the geometry.

Close your eyes. Let your finger find a rune. Receive what it offers. The painting becomes a working oracle - a different answer every time, depending on what you carry, what you need, where you are.

Cosmic Gathering is part of the Luminary Portals series by Annie Lulu - Starworld Alchemy.

If this painting called to you, you are welcome to enter through the door it opens.

• Instagram: Starworld Alchemy

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I was thinking of green. Of gardens. Of something harmonious and natural.

This is what came.

Every painting I create starts with an idea. But from the first brushstroke it is the painting that leads. I witness the process. And sometimes what arrives through the brush is not what I was reaching for - it is something that already knew what it wanted to be.

I called it Alien Flower. Not from any garden on this earth.

The Runes

Running around the entire circumference of this painting is the Elder Futhark alphabet - all twenty-four runes, encoded in the outer ring like a seal.

They are not decoration.

Close your eyes. Let your finger find a rune. Receive what it offers. The painting becomes a working oracle - a different answer every time, depending on what you carry, what you need, where you are.

This is true of every painting in the Luminary Portals series that carries the runes. The alphabet is always complete. The oracle is always available.

What It Does

In daylight the outer ring holds its ground. Bold. Ceremonial. The rune seal running all the way around. Star points sharp and alive. Mirror pieces catching and returning light to whoever stands before the work.

Then inward - quieter, layer by layer - until the center. A dot mandala. A lotus. A single star. Still.

The outside is loud. The center is still.

Under UV light the direction reverses. The star points ignite. The rune ring blazes. The mirror pieces glow at the perimeter. And the center - quiet in daylight - opens into a deep purple-black void. Not empty. Waiting.

In daylight it holds its ground. Under UV it opens.

What Do You See?

I called it Alien Flower because that was the only accurate name.

But what do you see when you stand before it?

Others have called it a forest. A cosmos. A seal. Something that doesn’t have a name yet.

Under UV light the unearthly quality becomes undeniable. What looked like a garden in the making reveals itself as something else entirely. Something that arrived - not from memory, not from intention - simply from the process itself.

What does it call up in you?

Alien Flower is part of the Luminary Portals series by Annie Lulu - Starworld Alchemy.

If this painting called to you, you are welcome to enter through the door it opens.

- Instagram: Starworld Alchemy

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My daughter was three years old the first time we walked the Camino de Santiago together.

We stopped for every dandelion along the way. We blew the seeds into the wind and made wishes together. We walked it again when she was five.

She is fourteen now. We still stop for every dandelion we find. Each seed carries our wishes out into the world - visible for a moment, then gone.

This painting is for her. And for that ritual. And for everything the two of us have carried together across eighteen years of nomadic life.

The Mushrooms

Psilocybin mushrooms are known as teachers.

I studied plant medicine for a while - ceremonially, not recreationally. The reverence around it, the intentionality, the understanding that what you consume can open doors of perception and memory - that philosophy became the foundation of the Gastronomic Ceremonies I later created as The Culinary Alchemists. Every meal at our fire tables in Cuenca was, in its own way, a sacred plant ceremony. Fifteen courses. Four hours. Transformation through what you receive.

The mushrooms in Wishkeeper carry that lineage.

In the outer ring, under the flower petal arches, are tiny microscenes - a girl on a swing, a dandelion, a sail ship, palm trees, snow-covered Christmas trees, yellow wildflowers. An ocean visible underneath, sky above in light blue and purple. Each scene sheltered under its own mushroom umbrella like a fairytale.

The girl on the swing is the inner child - the one who never stopped playing, never stopped wishing, never stopped swinging toward the sky.

The snow-covered Christmas trees stand for our time in the northern hemisphere. The palm trees for our time in the southern hemisphere. The sail ship stands for the journey of life itself.

Two scenes are deliberately left empty. Not unfinished. Open. Because not everything is written yet.

In the inner flower petals, the Fliegenpilze appear - the classic red and white spotted mushroom, painted under sky and night simultaneously, showing the mycelium network running between them.

The Network

Underneath every forest floor runs a mycelium network - fungal threads connecting root to root, passing what is needed through the dark. It is invisible. It holds the whole system together.

The dandelion seeds we blew on the Camino. The wishes made at roadside flowers across many countries. The meals shared, the mornings we packed and moved, the things we built and left behind. There is an invisible thread running through all of it - mother and daughter, always moving, always together, always stopping for dandelions.

The mycelium network in this painting is that thread.

The Center

At the center of Wishkeeper is a round mirror piece - the Seed of Life surrounding it, yellow wildflowers and stars scattered around.

Look into the center and you see yourself.

The wishes, the network, the microscenes, the open scenes waiting to be filled - all of it circles back to the one looking.

Under UV light, the green spirals and tendrils glow electric. The jellyfish drift through deep purple space. The center ignites and the whole painting becomes what it always was underneath - a living, interconnected field of memory and possibility.

The mushrooms remember what we have forgotten.

The dandelion seeds are still traveling.

Wishkeeper is part of the Luminary Portals series by Annie Lulu - Starworld Alchemy.

If this painting called to you, you are welcome to enter through the door it opens.

- Instagram: Starworld Alchemy

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There is a painting in my home that has to be experienced in person.

In daylight, it radiates. Bright. Solar. A mandala of sacred geometry with teal star-points standing like guardians at the perimeter, pearls and stones threaded through its layers, a dark cosmic field opening at the center where something ancient lives quietly.

Under UV light, it becomes something else entirely. The solar disappears. Electric green fire ignites at the edges. Deep violet and indigo rise from the surface. Stars multiply. The center opens like a portal you could step through.

I named it Stellacode. From the stars. A living code.

But what most people don’t know is what is embedded in this painting - literally, physically embedded - and what those objects carry.

The Arrowheads

Just days before the pandemic was declared, I had packed up our life in Ecuador and had our backpacks ready to travel to Colombia on Tuesday. The Friday prior a friend suggested to wait it out in our little Andean village where we had friends. I wasn’t worried. Even if they would close the borders temporarily, it probably would only be for two weeks max, I thought. And that I could sit out anywhere. Everything got more tense and on Monday I made the call to wait. On Tuesday they closed the borders. We were confined to our little village. Strict curfew from 2pm. Leaving the house only for groceries - and not even allowed to take my daughter with me. It took four months before the roads opened again and we could move within the country. That is when I followed the invitation of a friend who had moved his vegan, gluten-free restaurant to Cuenca and was ready to open, except the world had stopped.

He had seen my mandalas. He asked me to bring the frequency of my art into his kitchen, into his food, into the experience he was creating. I came to help with plating ideas and stayed, helping him get everything ready while they waited for the sous chef to return - who came back for two weeks, then took his pay and left days before opening.

I stepped in.

What followed was three years of building something extraordinary together. The concept of Gastronomic Ceremony was born - fifteen courses, a four-hour culinary journey around fire tables, moving through breath, awareness, and transformation, with cacao ceremony woven through. We called ourselves The Culinary Alchemists.

In the center of each fire table was a bed of agate arrowheads.

Those arrowheads were present at every ceremony we held. They absorbed the energy of every evening, every guest, every moment of transformation that passed through that space. In a meat-loving country, we became the number one restaurant in the third biggest city.

I never fully claimed my part in that. For years I stood behind it - behind someone else’s dream - and gave everything I had without naming what I had actually built.

When it ended, I left with hardly anything but my experience. And those arrowheads.

Lake Arenal

Fast forward to 2024.

It was overwhelming to pack up our life again. What I had invested all my energy in had suddenly ended. Business, family, relationship - everything that was built, was no more. Trying to sell everything that didn’t fit in suitcases. Instead of dealing with it completely we signed up to become breathwork facilitators. Trying to stay centered.

A neighbor needed housesitting a few months later and offered to store what we couldn’t sell or take with us. I agreed to return. I made it easier for him in the moment of leaving - and came back alone to close what hadn’t been mine alone to carry.

The house we were staying in overlooked Lake Arenal, close to the volcano.

One weekend, there were over a hundred earthquakes - small ones, but constant. The earth was moving. I put the arrowheads outside. There were thunderstorms. Lightning. A new moon. The next day, a rainbow.

I left them in all of it.

I was not performing a ritual. I was recognizing that these objects had already lived through fire, ceremony, transformation, and loss - and that they deserved to be consecrated by the earth itself before finding their next home.

What the Painting Holds

When I began painting Stellacode in 2025, we had just made a decision - my daughter and I. After eighteen years of nomadic living, we were going to let our inner foundation settle in one place. To let our inner roots grow outward for a while.

Something had to break open for something new to be born. That is what you see in the mandala - the geometry cracked open at the center, a new reality emerging from within the old structure.

The arrowheads found their place along the outer ring.

Only later, when I began writing about archetypes, did I understand what this painting actually was. In daylight, it holds the energy of Sacred Motherhood - the conscious choice to root, to protect, to create a home from the inside out. Under UV light, it reveals something else: the Black Sheep energy. Not darkness. Power. The one who breaks the inherited pattern and sets something new into motion.

Two faces. One painting. Day and night. Both true.

The runes encoded along the outer border are the complete Elder Futhark alphabet - all twenty-four symbols. Close your eyes, let your finger find a rune, and receive what it offers. A different answer every time, depending on what you carry.

The agate arrowheads embedded in Stellacode were charged at Lake Arenal during earthquakes, thunderstorms, a new moon, and a rainbow. They passed through years of ceremony before they arrived here.

They are not decoration.

They are memory made visible.

This is what I mean when I say each piece holds a field. It is not a metaphor.

Stellacode is part of the Luminary Portals series - sacred geometry paintings that carry a hidden UV layer, revealing a second reality under black light.

If this painting called to you, you are welcome to enter through the door it opens.

→ Instagram: Starworld Alchemy by Annie Lulu

→ Substack: Start here: 4 Doors into my Field

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This is the entrance to Door 3: Starworld Alchemy, where frequency becomes visible.

Starworld Alchemy is my painting field. It is where lived contrasts, sacred pattern, movement, memory, and different worlds come into visual form as a field of coherence. My work moves through polarity: light and shadow, beauty and pain, inner and outer worlds, stillness and force. Painting is where these currents meet, organize, and become visible.

I do not begin with a fixed concept. I start with an idea and enter a flow, a current of a specific frequency, and from there the painting leads. The work itself shows me how it wants to come into form. This is why each piece has its own movement, its own order, its own presence. What appears on the surface may be color, geometry, symbol, dot, or light. Underneath it, something else is happening: frequency becoming form, and form holding coherence.

Over the last twenty years, I have lived across different cultures, landscapes, and extremes. Those lived passages are part of this field. They appear as translation. What has moved through me becomes image, pattern, rhythm, symbol, contrast, and space. Sacred Geometry, La Chakana, Runes, Tai Chi, Tongan pattern, Dot Mandala, and UV light come together here as one visual language, each carrying its own origin while moving within the same field of coherence.

My paintings are not only meant to be looked at. They are made to be experienced.

That matters especially now, because my current focus is a UV blacklight series: immersive visual spaces in which the paintings shift, open, and reveal another layer of themselves through light. This blacklight work is one current expression of Starworld Alchemy. It is not the whole field, but it is the series I am building most actively at this time.

What remains constant throughout the work is the flow toward coherence. Not perfection. Not sameness. Coherence. The moment when contrast does not cancel itself out, but begins to hold. The moment when the visible image carries something that can be felt, even if not everyone will feel it in the same way.

Below is a short guide to some of the recurring visual languages inside this field.

Visual language notes

Sacred Geometry

Sacred Geometry is the foundational pattern language of creation. It shows how life is built through shape, proportion, rhythm, and relation, across nature, cosmos, and sacred form. The same intelligence appears in plants, shells, galaxies, architecture, and spiritual symbols. In my work, Sacred Geometry is a structural principle through which coherence becomes visible.

La Chakana

La Chakana, also known as the Andean or Inca cross, is a sacred symbol whose stepped geometry is associated with the Southern Cross constellation in the night sky. It expresses the connection between the upper world, the earthly world, and the inner or underworld, holding balance, order, and sacred relationship between dimensions. At its center is an opening, understood as a portal: the point through which one may enter another dimension of reality.

Dive deeper: La Chakana - coming soon

Runes

In Norse mythology, the runes are sacred signs revealed to Odin through sacrifice and inner vision. Seeking wisdom, he gave one outer eye for deeper sight and later hung from the world tree Yggdrasil until the runes were revealed to him. They are more than an alphabet, carrying sound, force, hidden meaning, and ancient power.

Tai Chi / Yin-Yang

In Taoist philosophy, the Yin Yang or Tai Chi symbol expresses the living movement of polarity. Light and dark, active and receptive, inner and outer are not opposites in conflict, but complementary forces that belong to one another, each carrying the seed of the other. It is one of the clearest visual expressions of coherence through contrast.

Polynesian / Tongan pattern influence

Tongan patterns, known as kupesi, are traditional geometric designs found on ngatu (tapa cloth) and in tattooing. They carry Tongan history, nature, and social values through structured motifs and repeated forms. In my work, they hold a deeply personal place, rooted in the polarity between my German background and Tongan culture through my daughter, who embodies both worlds — a personal yin yang between two cultures that could hardly be more distant, geographically and in many of their values.

UV blacklight

UV light reveals a hidden layer within the work, changing how color, symbol, and pattern appear. Under blacklight, the painting opens into a different visual experience and becomes more immersive. In my current series, this is one of the ways Starworld Alchemy moves from image into space.

Dot mandala

Each dot is part of a larger whole. Even the smallest point belongs to the field. Dot work expresses connection, precision, rhythm, and the truth that coherence is built through relationship.

This is Door 3: Starworld Alchemy.

If you want to follow the visual work more directly, you can find it on Instagram at @starworldalchemy.

If you want to understand how this door lives inside my wider field, begin with

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Since sharing my last letter, I’ve continued with the painting I started after receiving the Tao. I’m still in the process, watching what wants to come into form and staying with it without trying to decide ahead of time where it should go. I said I would share the progress, so I want to continue from there.

A few days later, I was invited to join a Tao study group held in English by the woman I met at the trampoline. I expected a small group, just her, my friend, and me. When I joined, I was surprised to see familiar faces already there: my friend’s niece, the host of the ceremony, the speaker, and the master. He spoke in Mandarin, and even before the translation, something else was present. I noticed the same joyful ease I had felt during our last meeting at my home, uplifting and beautiful to be in. I found myself smiling, simply witnessing how these moments were unfolding.

After that class, a second painting began to come through, even though the first one was still in process.

This isn’t unusual for me. I often work on several pieces at the same time and move toward the one that calls most clearly. This one carried the same theme as the first, but it wanted to take form in a different way, closer to my usual visual language.

I had a clear sense of how it would begin, including a specific color palette. I pre-colored parts of the painting to get a feel for it. Very quickly, the colors shifted in a direction I hadn’t planned. I tried to bring them back to what I had in mind, but it didn’t work. So I stopped and worked on another area instead, allowing the process to unfold without forcing it.

As I painted, I noticed how easily I slipped into that state. Painting has always been like that for me. Thoughts move through as I work, some staying for a moment, others passing without effort. I don’t try to hold on to them. I simply notice what’s there while my hands continue.

While I painted, my daughter was meditating in her own way, through music. She moved between the viola, guitar, and keyboard, playing without following written music. I love listening to her being in her own flow. Not reproducing something she has learned or following someone else’s structure. She was responding, letting the music take shape as she played.

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Last week, I took my daughter to the trampoline outside the coliseum. In our small Andean village in southern Ecuador, this is one of our highlights. A few times a year, fair operators bring huge bouncy castles with trampolines and slides. My fourteen-year-old daughter is usually one of the oldest and helps the younger children. That’s where we regularly meet another mother and her young daughter, who has loved mine ever since she helped her down the big slide last year. With them was a friend visiting from abroad. She had arrived only a few hours earlier and shared that they were awaiting a Chinese Tao master.

She shared that she had been vegetarian for many years, and when I told her we were as well, she invited us, along with others she met on her first day, to a dinner the next evening. A huge plate of steaming hot dumplings, along with many other dishes, awaited us, a mix of people from different countries: China, South Korea, Germany, Italy, Russia, Switzerland, and Peru. The evening was filled with laughter and great conversations. My Sacred Geometry Portals came up, and I invited them to visit the next morning to experience my art.

She invited us to come again the next day, to meet the master and receive the Tao. I had a full schedule I was planning to rearrange, but a strong migraine took me out. I couldn’t come and didn’t see her again before she left. It wasn’t meant to be, or so it seemed.

The following day, I was on the phone with a good friend. He asked if we had gone to receive the Tao and shared that he had gone with his entire family. He said the master was young, but when he looked into his eyes, it felt like looking into a five-thousand-year-old soul. I had thought the master had already left that morning, but it turned out he was there another night. And I was given another chance.

Our friend came with us and was invited to join the ceremony as the one who introduced us. The speaker and translator came around the corner and greeted us with a warm smile. His presence felt uplifting and familiar, like meeting an old friend again. When he read our last name, he paused and shared that the same name had been given to him by his mother and means morning dew.

The ceremony was held in Mandarin, and there were parts we repeated after the master. When he spoke, the frequency of his voice carried a vibration through the room that was deeply felt. Receiving the Tao is a direct alignment with the living current of reality itself, no longer trying to shape life through will, but allowing it to arise from deep inner harmony. This mirrors closely how I experience the creation process of my Sacred Geometry Portals. I enter a deep meditative state of flow. It’s as if the painting itself guides my brushstrokes. I may start with an idea, but the process itself remains guided. Colors and shapes ask to be combined and made visible in their own way. I witness the process of creation coming into form, my own hands moving within it.

After the ceremony, we were invited to share dinner. The speaker had heard and asked about my paintings. While I explained, I said I wished he could experience them himself. It was already late, and they had to leave for the airport very early the next morning, at 4 a.m. Where we live, taxis are the main form of transportation, and they stop running at 9 p.m., which usually sets the curfew if you don’t have your own car. To my surprise, the speaker asked the host if that would be possible. She offered to take everyone to our place to experience my paintings.

After eighteen years of nomadic living, having our own place to welcome friends feels very special. We have a nice little palace, an open kitchen, living space, and art studio combined, with my portals on every wall. When I enter creation, the limited space can easily feel crowded, as my whole focus is on the process itself and nothing else. In my mind, I quickly scanned our home, hoping I hadn’t left the dishes in the sink.

Shortly after, we entered our home together. Each received a black light torch and moved through the space, experiencing my portals on their own. I love walking from painting to painting, exploring and feeling the vibration and frequency that emerge. It felt like an honor to share our place and my creations with the master, the speaker, and the host. There was a beautiful, joyful energy as we walked around. There was lots of laughter as the blacklight danced over the portals.

And the call for the next portal to come into visibility made itself known. I have started the process. Those who wish can witness the becoming.

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I work through recognition, not imagination. Everything I do — art, writing, food, ritual, parenting — is a translation of frequency. Different materials. Same source.

I translate portals into form. They exist as frequency first. I bring them into physical reality so the body can feel them.

Stellar Code is the core of the Luminary Portals.

Watch in silence. Let your nervous system respond before your mind tries to understand.