Hi, I’m Vyana. I’m a Mermaid Ambassador.
Mer means “of the Sea.” Maid comes from the word maiden meaning sovereign to herself. Boys are called mermen. Maids also appear to be good at cleaning things up – and our oceans could really use some help in that department.
Like other sea mammals, we breathe air, but can hold our breath. Many of us are related to porpoises from the waste down, but some species have scales, wings, and are part of a shapeshifting dragon family.
The Ambassador program has 3 porpoises (pun intended) explained below:
- Self Discovery
- Water Advocacy
- Service to others
Self Discovery
Mermaids are Mythic. That means we’re much bigger than our daily personalities. We’re on a mission, and it’s our job to create mythic lives.
We not just putting a tail on to play dress up. We look inside, not outside to feel what is REAL and embody what is authentic for us. We try on new names, new colors, new adventures – keeping only the parts that feel REAL to us. Like our dolphin friends, we are using PLAY to remember parts of ourselves we may not have met before.
In that sense mermaids are more real than the part of me that plays lawyer at my law firm. My successful lawyer self looks REAL from the outside, has a diploma on the wall and over 20 years of experience to prove it, but is more of a professional role that requires I wear a suit, lower the pitch of my voice in court, act like a non-emotional gentleman and is limited in what it can offer the world in its traditional form.
While my role is important and helpful, it’s not my most authentic expression of my greatest gifts. In truth, I’m soft, spontaneous and wear flowy colorful clothes.
IT’S FUN to be a mermaid – since there seem to be few limitations. Just about anything is possible. We can sing songs or play music, write poetry, we’re free to explore the 90% of the earth’s living space – the waters, most of which has never been seen before. We get to play with all the creatures of the sea. We connect with each other for REAL, not just on shell phones.
Ocean Advocacy
We clean up the oceans and help raise money for organizations like All One Ocean. We held a mermaid festival fundraiser and helped them win a $5000 grant at the Green Festival. We inspire donors to be generous. Our approach isn’t to focus on what’s wrong with the oceans. Instead, we use beauty, fun and magnetism to help people fall in love with the oceans and feel connected so they naturally want to keep them clean. There’s a huge mermaid movement happening around the world right now – and it’s a wave we can all ride! We are not failing to clean up our oceans? We are just beginning to succeed.
Being of Service
Being of service to others is how our mermaid ambassador program began and gives meaning to our lives. We first started by heading up 3 beach clean-up stations in Alameda, California.
Another service project was inspired by something that happened to me at age 6. I was in a wheelchair for a week due to a kidney infection and I noticed that everyone thought something was “wrong” with me when I went out in public. People who didn’t know me seemed uncomfortable. Many didn’t know what to say, so they often just pretended I didn’t exist.
In contrast, at the age of 40, I went to an international mermaid convention where every mermaid was in a wheelchair because it’s impossible to walk in a tail. Instead of assuming something was wrong with us, we were seen as superheroes. People wanted to take their picture with us, be our friend, and spend time with us. It was the same wheelchair, but a very different experience. I decided I wanted to do mermaid makeovers for children in wheelchairs so they could shift in the eyes of the world from a story that “something is wrong with me” to “I’m a magical mermaid”. We don’t think of mermaids as lacking mobility. We think of them as gifted and free. Just add water, gravity disappears and there’s lots of mobility! We’re looking for children who lack mobility and would like a mythic mermaid makeover. For those who can’t afford a tail, we often make scholarships available.
For example, a few years ago, here in Hawaii, I was asked to host a second-grade school assembly to offer a magical moment to an unexpected recipient, an 8-year-old girl with cerebral palsy. Her classmates didn’t know how to relate to the little girl since they had never known a child in a wheelchair before, and she did not speak English yet, having been relocated from the Marshall Islands. The tail was sewn by a group of caring women in the community in the girl’s favorite color and tied around her waist in front of the entire second-grade class, at which point, they all circled round declaring they all wanted to be mermaids too (even the boys).
I informed the class that I had found my long-lost mersister and that all mermaids have special gifts and talents like music, math, poetry, and the like, and that it was their job to find out what her magical gifts were. Suddenly, this little mermaid became one of the more popular children in school as she sat up in her wheelchair with a smile that could light up a room. She may not have understood a word that was spoken, but being surrounded by her classmates in her sparkly tail was most certainly a highlight of her second-grade experience. She made the front page of the newspaper and lead Kona’s 4th of July parade in her sparkle-tailed wheelchair.
If you would like to be honored as a mermaid ambassador or would like to honor someone else as a mermaid ambassador, please contact me with the details.
