Jesus was crucified because he was imparting elite information to the dregs of society and empowering them. At Ziggurat, the Brahmins hired an assassin to kill him because he started teaching the holy texts to untouchables. A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. Knowledge without compassion, without spiritual evolution, is dangerous. However we can’t lift people up enough to see how they’ve been oppressed and not expect them to be angry. Too often they bite the hand that feeds them instead of looking at systematic oppression rationally.

Lashing out that way is an unfortunate consequence of knowledge without understanding. It’s part of a catharsis of healing ignorance. To see people forgiven for lashing out at me for the knowledge I taught them and deployed in their favor as a coffee broker made me realize that it’s an exchange of information. The anger and bitterness and violence – either social or physical – are the words we don’t know how to say calmly. The thoughts we haven’t spent enough time on. It also made me realize that I had my own information to return to the violent, genocidal, femicidal, ecocidal system and if I didn’t speak those things, I would actually die or kill myself from the pain of trying to fit into the system in any meaningful way.

But, if it was just my life at stake, I wouldn’t have said anything. What I saw from a young age was that everyone I loved was slowly being tortured to death by subservience to this system, and I had to do something, even if that something was to offend, to be a lightning rod, to say “Yo” to the Devil in his own realm.

Once, when I was a freshman in college, I played hearts with three senior boys. They were all card shark poker players. I got dealt all the hearts starting from the two and the queen of spades. I ate all those cards and every time I took a trick, the boys laughed and groaned and said “what are you doing?”. Until I threw the queen of spades and they knew I had shot the moon. I guess you can ask them why they assumed that I was losing the game the whole time, mocking me. I wouldn’t presume to say I know the answer for sure.

What I do know is, that you don’t have to snub people if you can talk to them rationally about what you disagree on. That’s sometimes a big “if” when you’re dealing with big egos. You might end up chop suey. But if you see that you have the connections and the skills to have a big conversation that could save the planet, and you jump off and take that risk – lucky not to die straight away – then you deserve the rewards. That’s just how I see my job as a writer, researcher, thinker, and spiritual practitioner.

How dare you

Love me?

How dare you

Live up to my expectations

Fulfill my fantasies

Get through my defenses?

If it keeps on going this way

You’ll end up in my fortress

When

You’re ready to set up fortresskeeping with me

That we’ll mate, my Hero.

You have lots of things to do in the meantime.

When you get to C6 or C7

We’ll both be as vulnerable as the day we were born.

Excuse me if I need to breathe – I would give you my breath if I had right now –

But what if, we just breathed together for an hour

Before we held hands?

What if we looked into each others’ eyes

Before we speak?

Today, I awoke holding my body.

Belly,

Face.

A caress in each hand.

I exist.

I am embodied.

I stay here,

In this

Flesh.

Feel this,

Under my flank;

The angle of femur

Resting in hip socket.

And this muscle, this meat and

Skin over it.

We all desire to perpetuate.

We want this body to continue to exist.

We want it to regenerate and heal.

Daily,

We bathe it

Feed it

Sensing how it needs to move,

It moves without us naming.

Before we say in language how

We need it to move, it knows;

It already does;

Activated by instinct;

A voice

From a deeper place

Inside.

The instinct

Moves our vocal chords

It gives birth

It makes war

It gets a divorce –

It remarries.

This body

Loves

Hates

Mourns

Laughs

Does a silly dance

Rescues someone.

To stay. In. The body.

This is the boon we ask of God.

We ask of the All, the Everyone;

The Universe.

We observe something is true

With our own eyes

Before language,

Before language.

My soft

My soft

The curve of my belly

Is good.

Once, my high school boyfriend‘s mom told me the story of when she and her scientist husband were driving along at night in Mendocino. Suddenly a man ran out of the bushes and waved them down. He said that he had gone to the Moonie ranch because they offered him free food, and then he noticed that each of them were assigned someone to mirror their every action. If he laughed, his Moonie laughed. If he went to the bathroom, the Moonie went to the bathroom. If he ate something, the Moonie ate the same thing in the same portions. At night when he lay down to sleep on the floor, his Moonie lay down next to him. And he stared into the dark of the night knowing that if he went to sleep, all that programming would take over and he would be a Moonie when he woke up and just go along with the group. So he escaped through the window and ran to the highway, where he saw their car. They dropped him off at a gas station on their way into town and they never saw him again.

I was in the backseat of my friends’ Subaru, holding a parsnip.

My friends are both timberframe building instructors and have a beautiful home that they built together with a huge permaculture garden that provides most of their food. While her husband drove, my friend turned around and made a lewd remark about the parsnip which I won’t repeat here because I literally froze in my tracks.

I had arrived on Thursday for a Sunday wedding because instead of receiving a printed invitation, the groom had invited me verbally after camping out in the back yard of the tiny washing house where I lived in Hawaii at the time. He was working at the Four Seasons Resort, restoring what is called a “Living Machine”, an ecosystem of water plants designed to clean wastewater from the hotel so that it could be used for a fish pond. Then he visited me and very politely ate a modest meal and slept in the backyard, like a real gentleman.

Flip back to me riding in the Subaru with my two hosts (thankfully, I had a great place to stay!) and she asked me why I had arrived so early for the party. When I explained it to her, she said, “XY. XY. It’s his chromosomes. Guy doesn’t even remember his own wedding day”.

Fortunately, the bride’s family being Italian, she and her parents were delighted to see me and have some fabulous wine and antipasti together at one of those places where they use wine casks as tables. It was a reunion filled with delight and heartfelt celebration. We had all been aghast when, a year earlier, the couple had almost split up at a point where the bride was facing a life threatening health crisis. Her life had turned around after a visit to the Amazon where she took ayahuasca with an Ecuadorian curandero. Our greetings were heightened with a sense of relief and happiness that she was not only alive, but the relationship had turned around and they were deeply in love like never before.

On the day of the wedding, me and my permaculturists piled into the Subie in our fancy clothes and drove to the venue. It was a beautiful house with a magnificent view of gentle meadows outside, where the ceremony was set. Of course there was an arbor with flowers on it! What else?

The vows were beautiful and they invoked several cultures during their ceremony. The bride read a poem. The musician played Neil Young on the piano.

Beautiful Italian food was arranged gracefully under the branches of a white oak tree. Everybody got that kind of perfectly tipsy where we stayed on this side of wasted. Her local friends played music under the big white tent and we danced. I did get tears in my eyes knowing how close she came to disappearing from this life, only to experience something as beautiful as this.

Chinese New Year in Penang

When I was six years old, we spent Chinese New Year in Penang with my Chor Chor, Amah (grandmother) and Chor Chor’s best friend, Ah Cheng Chee. Cheng Chee’s husband owned a restaurant and she was such a good cook. She used to cut the carrots and pineapples with little designs, so that when you sliced it it would look like little flames.

Chor Chor and Cheng Chee spent all day preparing nice things to eat; stir fried beansprouts with garlic, laksa curry with thick noodles, glass noodles with sambal, spicy peteh, their special fried chicken, and of course pineapple cakes, cookies and jelly sweets.

At midday, Cheng Chee’s husband Ah Pek piled us all into his red Cadillac car and we went to his restaurant to watch the Lion Dance. Wow! There were drummers, and dancers and the Lion playfully chasing its ball.

We went home for a nap before dinner and when I woke up, everyone was outside! I got out of bed and quickly ran outside where my sister and cousins were posing for photographs and I began to pose too, until I realized I had forgotten to put on any pants! As soon as everybody noticed they all laughed, I think I remember that I didn’t care how embarrassing it was. Malaysia is warm, because it’s at the equator, it’s very warm outside and you hardly notice a thing like that.

Yah, so, after everyone laughed at me I got my pants on and we sat down at the big dining table and ate that good food. I remember I had to take cough syrup because I had gotten pneumonia, in those days I did get pneumonia a lot. I was so happy the medicine tasted good to me that day.

In those days, we would wake up and hear the chickens from the neighbor’s chicken coop laying their morning egg, and they would give some to Chor Chor to cook for our breakfast. People were very careful and did nice things to preserve those happy feelings.

I was just a little girl, about eight years old when one of my second cousins offered to make me a crocheted Kleenex box cover. “What are your favorite colors?”, she asked me, laughing in her eyes as she looked at me. “Pink and yellow”, I said and a few days later a Kleenex box cover appeared, with scalloped ruffles all around. We were living in my great-grandmother’s house for a month on Emerald Hill Road in Singapore. Great-grandmother, or Chor Chor, we called her, was crocheting round tablecloths with intricate patterns and her two grandchildren from Medan were living in the house while going to school.

Pink and yellow reminds me that not everything primal is tough, brutal, or violent. Sometimes it comes out as a frothy and gaudy decoration for disposable tissue paper!

Family, nurture, gentleness, love, kindness, respect were normal in that house. I won’t say that there were no mistakes, but every mistake became the basis for learning and growing, what I call “compost” that makes our soul richer and more fruitful.

Chor Chor and her delicate, intricate movements as she wove this beautiful symmetrical object out of cotton string, is a reminder of the primal need for detail, for making tiny improvements over and over that evolve into something beautiful.

A wild little thing doesn’t need violence because she notices everything and creates a tiny change that becomes self-defense, protection, income, food and shelter, and so on. A wild little thing creates safety with alertness and agility. And somehow she not only survives, but she can thrive.

Like Mowgli in The Jungle Book, a wild little thing is friends with all the creatures of the jungle. A human being is unique in that it has the ability to befriend any creature, any plant, even the cosmos.

An elephant has a trunk to pick things up with, a dolphin has sonar and a sensitive skin, and a human’s evolutionary feature is our consciousness. Playing with material things is a way to play with our consciousness, and the finer and more detailed our consciousness becomes, the less we require violence to get what we want or need.

There was light falling through the leaves of the trees.

Chairs around a card table outside, but no cards. We drank wine and beer.

Women cooked AND men cooked. It was a pot luck.

I glowed with happiness about the way the people were proud of the different kinds of food they cooked and gave to each other. Especially the people who cooked healthy food made me smile because I feel happy when I eat healthy food.

A visit to my friends after a wild summer showed them that they missed me. And the women were looking after each others’ feelings.

My friend was going through a lot and we sat down to have a heart to heart talk just like old times. What consoled me is that her partner was supporting her emotionally in the most profound way possible every step of the way.

My favorite moment was when another friend of mine who had learned how to eat with chopsticks put his chopsticks down and he said “yeah, China” because he could see that someone needed clarification of why they felt I was different or weird. I just felt glad he stood up for me.

His girlfriend was someone who I befriended, too. She was very smart about family politics. I thought it was nice that she and I visited and just chatted a bit in the kitchen.

Tuesday, May 11, 2021

Once there was a middle aged Regent of a Kingdom.  A Regent, for those who might be wondering, is like Denethor in Lord Of The Rings.  Anyway, this Regent was troubling the line of succession, so the Monarch said to him, get me back my former colony, the best one, the one that got away, and I will see to it that you become King.  Now, the Regent never thought that his Monarch might be sending him on a wild goose chase.  However, she said that because she thought it would be impossible and then as it turns out, she really did want her colony back in her imagination.  

So the Regent identified the Kingmaker of the former colony and it was a woman, so he began to seduce the woman.  She was not so easily plied, however, and she did object to the seduction on the grounds that the Regent is married, to a brave feminist woman, no less.  So she played the same trick again and sent the Regent on a wild goose chase that was the antidote to all colonization for the rest of all time.  And she also never promised him anything because then, she would not have to break her word.

The Regent saw the justice of the Kingmaker and he did acknowledge that perhaps he did not want to spend the rest of his life overthrowing the line of succession of his Monarch’s Kingdom.  He also happened to be a scientist and he had discovered an infinitely interesting realm of scientific knowledge, some of it was history that had been suppressed while other of it was new knowledge that could be utilized as the foundation of an equitable, ecologically balanced human society that he did not even know was possible in his dreams until he had gone on his wild goose chase.

He decided, as a traditionalist in biological marriage, not to get divorced, but to live as an expatriate on an experimental permaculture farm, like Baudolino.  (Umberto Eco is such a wonderful author, isn’t he?)

As it turns out, by doing so he gained many wonderful and kind friends who added so much to his life that he became very, very happy.  And as for his wife, she is a feminist, and she has to make up her own mind about what she wants.  And they all lived happily ever after until the end of their days.  

Mastering by Audible Oddities https://www.audibleoddities.com/

Music, arrangement and production by Liquid Love Drops https://soundcloud.com/liquidlovedrops

Liquid Love Drops – an exploration of hypnotic and enchanting sounds and entrancing patterns.

Liquid Love Drops has been entrancing booties across the bay and beyond, her vibrant personality, skills as a sound track selectress combined with a few of her ear worm bass heavy mixes and her high energy show that captures your attention and traps you on the dance floor.

As a professional sound selectress and dj, she has been recognized for her skills and chosen by other promoters to share the stage as an opening or closing act for acts such as Bassnectar, Glitch Mob, Beats Antique, Little Dragon, Thievery Corporation, Ooah, Edit, An-ten-nae, Marty Party, Joker, Kalya Scintilla, and Random Rab.

About Malian
I am a singer who writes her lyrics and melodies to the beat of her own heart’s drummer.  I am a second generation Peranakan Indonesian, and my ethnic group was the target of a genocide in Indonesia in 1965, the same year African Americans won the right to vote.  The powers that were had planned a genocide of my ethnic group in order to exploit our labor as a replacement for African American labor.
My grandfather was a witness to US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger visiting Suharto to plan the genocide, and the rumors that were spread about Peranakan taking advantage of the forest dwelling Indonesians.  In fact the Peranakan were targeted because many of them were Communist and wanted to share wealth with the indigenous. 
My mom emigrated to the USA, where she met my dad, an Irish and Scottish American drummer.  I was born in Kansas City, where the vibrant live music scene made it possible to meet incredible musicians like Taj Mahal or Iris DeMent as a teenager.  I saw James Brown get down and saw BB King playing Lucille at festivals in the park.  As a young person, I realized how powerful it was for African Americans to tell their story through music in the long road to  civil rights.  As a Peranakan, it gave me hope.  If slavery is wrong for African Americans, it is wrong for everyone!
The corporate imperialism that benefits from exploitation of labor in Indonesia is based on a materialist value system that says spirit doesn’t exist, feelings don’t matter, and money is the only god.  In defiance to that system, I use my music to encode the values of the New Paradigm where science shows us that spirituality is real, love is real, and both are needed for surviving and thriving.  How we treat people, matters.
Using music to tell the story of my journey is a personal way to stand for the rights of Indonesians to be seen and heard, and to heal as a nation.  I stand with all people all over the world who are struggling for human rights and civil rights.