What's in a Name

Flotilla, Drozda 2001

18x24 inches

mixed on recycled wood

Several days ago Alyson asking me to address my blog name Merci 33.
Here's what has come to share.

Once upon a time 3 miscreants set me up in an entrapment situation, traumatized me severely and left me for dead. You can connect with the storyline where I created a graphic memoir last summer and posted it here on the blog from June through August. A post can be found here. You can imagine how physically, emotionally and psychically bereft the experience left me. One aspect of my recovery involved working diligently for 16 years to move beyond debilitating Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. I lived in relative solitude for much of that time and devoted every day to inner repair working in studio and garden. It took time to learn to trust that life wouldn't brutally harm me again. I learned, and continue to enlist, unbroken focus; taking active measures to reclaim and rebirth myself, to walk in balance.

Alyson was curious and interested to know where the name Merci33 comes from and if I had ever explained that to my readers. In a follow-up email she went further and suggested that I tell the story of Donna Iona Drozda.

I'll be brief.

I love how the words we use and the way we communicate sends energy out into the world. Pain/pleasure, gain/loss, praise/blame, fame/disgrace. The list goes on and on. Some words help us feel hopeful and uplifted other words suck our lifeforce away and break our spirit.

Since 1991 the Lifecycle department of my studio outreach has been devoted to assisting us in walking in creative balance. The mantra for Lifecycle is paraphrased from Thoreau and states 'To affect the quality of the day is the highest of arts.' For Lifecycle I enlist a variety of well developed tools. I have a love affair with the work of walking through the world in a state of balance.

Merci 33: of course Merci means thank you. Thank you for every blessed moment. And 33 is an auspicious number that relates to 'All is Well'.
Therefore Merci 33 is a code for my life that reminds me 'Thank you. All is well.'

my plates remind me daily

My given name is Donna Jean Drozda. When I was violently attacked I could have been lost to myself for all time. However very quickly an artist/mentor came into my life and her lifestyle served as an example and helped me to immerse in the study of first Raja yoga and when my mind was able to calm a bit Hatha yoga. I was simultaneoulsy introduced to the Tao Te Ching. I have studied these daily for decades.

As part of the ongoing healing process I opened my studio to monthly 'Creativity Salons'. The monthly Salons were like protected circles, a gathering of artists who also shared like-minded souls. A core group of twelve of us engaged in a kind of 'collective creating' using the phases of the moon to circumnavigate the year. For more than five years we invested in the Salon environment where we were free to creatively invent ourselves anew.

We were a very playful group and one of the first things we did was give ourselves permission to choose a 'name for the day'. Instinctively I knew I needed my true  'Artist Name'...my own soul name. A name that belonged to me. What came is Iona. As in I own a Drozda...I own myself. Iona. No one anywhere, under any circumstance, has the power to take me from me. Not ever. It's been tested. It's been proven.

The Fields of Dewachen, Drozda 2001

30x30 inches

Acrylic on canvas

I feel very fortunate that circumstances came together to form a scar tissue that has made me stronger and more flexible as a result of what I have endured. I am a bona fide member of the 'Scar Clan' as outlined in the magnificent book Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes.

I am well aware that we are each stronger than we can ever possibly imagine. Often it is not until, or unless, we find ourselves faced with a true test of our inner strengths and resources that we discover just how Merci 33 life truly is.

So there you have it Alyson, in short form.

 Thank you so much for stopping by... may you always in all ways:

~Sing the day

Angels Surround

The evenings in the late summer garden are intoxicating with the scent of the Angel's Trumpet swirling in through the window's on the night breeze.

I am saying thank you to All That Is for the ability to look back using the art form of the memoir. It allows a space for the gaze into what was without being pulled away from the preciousness of the moment. I love reading, writing and taking classes in memoir.

Here then is a short Afterward to the Memoir in Two Chapters that ran between June 8 and September 11.


AFTERWORD


I was raised to believe in Guardian Angels. And believe in them I did. I had a trust in life, a naivete' that caused one person important in my life to refer to me as "unassuming".

Mother always said, "Give them the benefit of the doubt." and this particularly odd one "You'll catch more flies with honey than you will with vinegar."


I was house sitting in 1982 and I read an essay in my host's college journal that was titled 'Rape as a Spiritual Experience'. I was enraged and outraged. I became 'beside myself' the same way I did when I took rape crisis training and learned of the documented post traumatic stress (PTS) syndrome that is no different than that visited upon veterans of war.


It took me years to realize that the Hells Angels were, for me, 'The Angel's from Hell'. These Angels took be into the Underworld and showed me a cavernous dark.

Like any demons worth their salt will do they tried to make me small and of no use.

Like any monsters, dragons or strange beliefs that we invite in either consciously or unconsciously they tried to strip me of all dignity and worth.

Like any demon they brutally lay in ambush.

They preyed upon my Innocent state of being. And from them I learned that when brought face to face with what we believe we cannot endure we do indeed. We do indeed. We endure. And more than that, much more than that, we rise above...individually and collectively...our true spirit, beyond the Beyond, lifts us away from danger. We float with effortless ease above the battlefield. The body may be battered upon return, or we may not return at all (transcending the body), yet our sweet strong empowered creative spirit lives on.


This is a Big ol' School called Earth. I learned that at 19. I wouldn't have been able to comprehend that or assimilate that without a model. Immediately Life sent me that model, my mentor, my guide...my guardian Angel in Alice. She offered me an example of what Life could be. She demonstrated a life of lightness of being employing yoga, art making, gardens, gentleness, laughter and balance in all ways...even in the midst of her own severe loss and heart break.


I could address these issues at length and ad infinitum but I prefer to recognize that the 'Angel's from Hell' made me a life member of what Clarissa Pinkola Estes brilliantly refers to as 'the scar clan'.


Like my friend Indigo Girl decided, I hope that you will pull Estes' work off the shelf and read again this concept. You'll find the treasure of her wisdom on page 374 of Women Who Run With the Wolves.

You too may discover that we are each indeed much stronger, far wiser and certainly more capable than much of the mass consciousness cultural out picture would have any of us believe or subscribe to currently.

Notice the manner in which you have faced your demons and faced them down. Celebrate your ability and your capacity to thrive rather than survive.


This Life is all so temporary and precious.


Rumi says it so well: Let the beauty you love be the work that you do there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

Thank You Alice

I immediately write a letter to thank Alice for all that I have gained as her guest.

A week later the mailman delivers a large manilla envelope to my parent's home. There I find five pages of her poems, four sheets of her small abstract watercolor paintings, and the most enraptured letter that I will ever receive in my entire life. It marks the first of twenty-six years of delightful ongoing correspondence and visits.

This first hand written letter reads so beautifully and is so deeply inspirational that it feeds my soul for all of my days. In part Alice states "...you will never leave the farm...and wherever you walk, I'll be with you...my strength is vast and comes from Beyond...so take from me what you will...I know that you will use it wisely...please let me know where your special star leads."
That letter is dated August 21, 1968.

Years later Alice and Larry sell their Ohio farm and settle on the banks of the Rio Chama in Abiqui, New Mexico, just minutes away from the home and studio of Georgia O'Keeffe.

Larry builds Alice a simple artist home that hugs the earth. He continues his woodworking and Alice her painting. On my last visit I camp on the bank of the river. Alice comes to sit at my campfire. The flames leap turbulently into the brilliant star lit sky on this crisp October night. We sit quietly staring into the thick bed of hot coals. After a time she shares her deepest story. Twenty three years earlier, in March of 1968, her eighteen year old daughter died in a car crash. Six months later I arrive frail from my own trauma. We instantly bond as surrogates unaware of the other's recent injury. It is enough to hold her story. I don't ever tell her mine.

"What is La Loba? ...she is the female soul. Yet she is more: she is the source of the feminine. She is all that is of instinct. Of the worlds both seen and hidden she is the basis. We each receive from her a glowing cell which contains all the instincts and knowings needed in our lives." Clarissa Pinkola Estes

On January 30, 1994 a large manilla envelope arrives. It echoes the first from the summer of 1968...a handwritten letter, four watercolor paintings. In part she states "Feels like much is happening planet wise. No doubt it is. Would like to block it, sometimes I can, sometimes no. We have no TV, no radio, no newspapers, no magazines. Quiet here. Serene. It's good. we send much love.
The letter is dated January 27, 1994.

As I finish reading her words the phone rings. A friend is calling from New Mexico to tell me that on the evening of January 28, on an unlit back road, Alice was killed instantly when Larry's truck hits a rock and overturns.

Later that day I write into my journal...Thank you Alice for your natural beauty of spirit and your love of the artist life. You gently and joyfully passed these gifts to my heart when I was a very young woman. I have nurtured, nourished and shared the legacy you passed to me. I pledge to continue to do so all the rest of my days.


This artist memoir is dedicated to Alice Boucher Twitchell November 4, 1917 - January 28, 1994

'She who we love and lose is no longer where she was before. She is now wherever we are.'

This closes two chapters of an artist's memoir. A brief look back in the 60th year.