Merhia Wiese is a beautiful combination of strength and vulnerability. This woman has survived and at this point in her life, is learning about her true vulnerability and how she wants to claim herself in this more open, aware context. Navigating her career, family, herself through this relatively new emotional perspective, is a daily unfolding of joy and challenge. Merhia is committed to acknowledging the reality of her fear and moving forward in the truth of it.
Merhia has been quite open and articulate in her life experiences related to fear. Merhia was born into fear and abuse, she was shuttled through the horror of the foster care system in the 1970’s until her adoptive mother took her out of foster care at the age of five and brought her into her home. Merhia’s mother who I had the pleasure of also interviewing for this project, has been an advocate for desperate people as a profession and a crusade and in the case of Merhia and her fellow foster sisters and brothers, decided to adopted as many children as possible that had been the most abused, the most ravaged by life, and create a home for them. A wonderful idea but in actual practice, Merhia shared how that much concentrated damage in one household was a daily emotional and physical threat as the children played out their abused psyche on one another.
Merhia loves her adoptive parents very much but needed to escape the chaos of that household and ended up moving out as a teenager and entering into a relationship that resulted in her being a young single mother by the age of 18. As Merhia put it, you can’t be a starving punk rock artist when you have a child, so she shelved her own ambitions of being a photographer and worked every job she could get her hands on that would support her and her child. Merhia did not give up on being a part of the artistic community, she channeled her artistic passion into repping other artists that she knew and admired and did this for over twenty years. Juggling three jobs at once and two more children, all in the endeavor to take care of her family while maintaining her passion for the artistic community in Denver.
Please enjoy Merhia’s full length interview by following the link here: https://vimeo.com/286779980
So this is where Merhia began. The content of her life experience and character is so much more, but this is the bedrock. Women are amazing in their tenacity, their relentless push to survive. Often with children, often without a stable partner, women insist each day that they and their children will make it through somehow. Some women most definitely abandon those children, abandon themselves, but we most often survive. And the women who do hold onto the kids and also commit to pursuing their passions somehow – heavy weight champion fighters.
Merhia is now enjoying the benefits of all that amazing hard work. She is the manager of the office of operations for the upcoming opening of Meow Wolf Denver, a highly visible DYI corporate artist collective based in Sante Fe, NM that is opening immersive art instillations in cities across the country. Merhia’s long struggle to raise her family, have enough money to meet everyone’s needs, stay working and connected in Denver’s art community, has now born fruition. Being employed at Meow Wolf affords Merhia to utilize all her skills and talents in the Denver artistic community with artist outreach, fundraising, event organizing, She is overseeing the construction of Meow Wolf Denver from the offices on site, a beautiful space to work where I interviewed Merhia and under her recommendation and connection, I interviewed Zoë Williams as well who is also working for Meow Wolf.
Meow Wolf and what that means to Merhia as far as financial and professional sustainability for herself and her family, is everything as far as affording Merhia a sense of true stability for the first time in her life. Merhia can obviously survive and manage just about any situation, but to come to a place of abundance and learn how to breathe and relax into that, is profound. Merhia knows her privilege in this and is present to the responsibility of having more than enough and how to pay it forward to others whenever she can.
Merhia has been a connector in this interview process while i was in Denver. First with Zoë Williams, Merhia then also really opened herself up and suggested her mother, Reverend Jan, the next interviewee in this project. Reverend Jan is an ordained minister in the evangelical faith, a Trump supporter, and runs a shelter for recently incarcerated women and their children, Merhia is leftist liberal punk rock artist who manages Meow Wolf Denver and has deep roots in the Denver artistic community. The connection between Merhia and her mother and interviewing them both for The Nature Of Refuge feels pivotal to me as a storyteller pursuing emotional truth. The connection between mothers and daughters is primal and often strange. It is joy and laughter at all the fear that can pass between the two. It is a powerful connection that I will explore further in Merhia’s mothers interview story that will be published as a continuation of this one. Thats how daughters and mothers work, we melt into each other whether we want the boundaries there or not.
This project is one about exploring fear at its heart. I am interviewing predominately women who identify as female, but I am also meeting and interviewing non-binary individuals and transgender women to add their clear, strong voices to this chorus. I am invested in the stories of American women through the lens of this project because I have a deep powerful faith in the truth of fear and the response of compassion. I am asking these voices to share their experiences of vulnerability and how they connect with their inner sacred sense of safety. I am asking these voices to tell me how they survive, what tools have they cultivated in the endeavor of not drowning in their own and others suffering. I am doing this because i did drown at one point in my own suffering and I learned that magic and faith and love are the cornerstones of emotional survival that open up the door to actual thriving. Suffering being the catalyst. Fear being propulsion. Compassion being the connector and the stabilizer. My own drowning and resurrection gave birth in me a overwhelming sense of connection to other women’s experiences with fear and what they do with it. How we can take care of one another in states of extreme vulnerability. Because we are all the same stuff after all.
Merhia is many things: she is reaching for the light, vulnerable, tough, a survivor, an artist, a mother, a lover, a professional, detail-oriented, a manager, wounded, soft, fierce, scared, courageous, loving, open-minded, caretaker, aware, intelligent, focused, strong, a connector, resourceful.
This is the nature of refuge.
