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a bit about Marco...
Marco Stanley Donner (a.k.a. Mark Donner, Trail, the Poke, Markitus, hey you!…) … born 19 December, 1957, Palo Alto, California, into the happy mayhem of lovely-wacky parents and three sisters (with a fourth sister following) in an area that was once magnificently empty for roaming with fields, hills, creeks, and animals (Silicon Valley made quick work of that, I'm definitely not certain for the better… , however, this website does exist, I think?…). My idyllic rural childhood shifted twice to Europe through my Stanford University professor father's sabbaticals. The first one whey I was five to live in Paris, where in school I lived for Thursday when we had no school! Singing was definitely the high point of my French kindergarten. Plus I loved our morning cold ritual of strolling to our village center with my father to the boulangerie for baguettes (one of which surreptiously sacrificed), the papeterie for his newspaper (sometimes a Babar comic for me), and possibly the tobac for his pipe tobacco. I also truly loved wandering through the huge Paris market, Les Halles, with my mum holding tightly to her skirts or coat. I spent blissful hours as well in our overfrown back garden amidst towering rhubarb palsnts and massive lilacs looking for my tortoise, "tortu," whom eventually (sometimes weeks later) I'd find.
A second time we all went to London, I was twelve and went in uniform to a proper British preparatory school. I was crazy about my teacher, Michael Turner. We studied Latin, Greek, geometry, history, and wrote prose and poetry, which we read aloud first thing every morning (alright, Donner, what have you got for us this morning?…). I adored roaming on Wimbledon Common, where we would search for the odd Roman encampment hoping always to find coins, swords, anything…. we also had our school soccer matches on the common, which I remember as hilarious great muddy affairs (I'm not sure that we were often victorious, yet that never seemed to matter…) Almst every chilling, foggy evening, my father and I would set out on long wanders kicking a stone through the deserted Wimbledon streets. The Beatles were on the telly, their moments moments were beginning… my life was changing.
At age thirteen, my father took a chairmanship job in Austin, Texas, at the University of Texas. I was never quite a Texan, yet I made so many incredible friends during this period that I may as well have been. I graduated from Austin High School in 1970 with the help of a great friend, Tara Sayers, who lent me her wig which was slightly shorter than my own hair which was considered by our principal to be too long to graduate. The principal and my basketball and baseball coaches were almost effusive in their delighted compliments over my new "haircut," not to mention the new curls and darker color…., nonetheless, I graduated.
Early that following summer I quit very suddenly a great job I had of running jet boats on Lake Austin in order to join three dear friends (Michael Wessels, Mark Currie, and Robert Dennison) who were to be traveling in Europe. We all eventuall met up in London where we bought two very inexpensive (and slightly decrepit) motorcycles. We joyously toured the countryside of England, France, and Spain, stopping in both Paris and Madrid. My moments in the Jeu de Paume (the French Impressionist museum) still sing so vividly to me, as do moments in the Prado in Madrid.
That fall I was studying at Colorado College, Colorado Springs, Colorado, which I mostly loved, yet brought up more questions than answers for me…. I did however plead my way into an advanced religion course on 13th century mysticism. Our teacher was the Abbot and Gregorian choir master from the Trappist monastery near Aspen, Colorado. With the Abbot's guidance we set up a ranch in Wyoming in the style of a 13th century monastery with Bible readings, Gregorian chanting, then silence through the hours beginning at 4 a.m. This precious gift I still practice and am so grateful for. My career with Colorado College continues into my thirty-fourth year of my leave of absence.
The following year, I lived with my would-be brother, Bob Miller, in an old miner's cabin that we excavated from a huge snow drift and resurrected near Breckenridge, Colorado. We spent the winter working as roofers, reading, writing, playing music, surviving, and blissfully tasting the silence of living on our own in a total wilderness. Eventually the moment came when we wistfully abandoned the Colorado wilds.
In Texas, I worked until I had saved enough money to return to Paris, where I intended to study the flute. Once I had arrived, I quickly exhausted an invisible portion of the city's flute teachers, and spent my time drawing, reading, and seeking out the quiet spots along the Seine. At some point I tired of the cold busy-ness of Paris, and sometime after Christmas I quite simply walked out of the city with my backpack headed for the Pyrenees Mountains. It was on this particular adventure that I was given one of the most wonderful lifts of my life. It was on a deserted snow-blwon Sunday morning sidewalk on the outskirts of Orléans. I was just wondering, having spent the last couple of nights in thin snow along the roadway, if I ought to treat myself to a hot chocolate, when from of the total grey-blue the only car for miles jumped the curb and swooshed me away. I was suddenly speeding towards Barcelona with magical souls, Cesar Viguerz and Margarita Andreu. From the moment that they picked me up, I loved them both! We had such a grand time! I stayed some months in their apartment in Barcelona. I wandered the city, taking in everything… plus Gaudi, Picasso, Miró, Tapies… with our weekends devoted to 'Les Voyages Surprises' into the countrysides of Cataluña…
I finally had to leave Barcelona… I was headed in a vague way to India via Italy and Greece. In the north of Italy, I made a friend, a student from Notre Dame. She was determined to take me to three places. We first went to Florence. I was ecstatically and deliriously undone… from Celini's Perseus to Fra Angelico's frescos to Donatello's David…. the Michelangelos, Fillippo Lippis, Della Robbias… too, too much… how can I live here?!! Next to Assisi, where we stayed in a convent and I played my flute for the sister's evensong. Upon seeing St. Francis' bed of stone in the Hermitage, I found my soul's nest… I was in tears, it all seemed so unnervingly familiar… insude my whole being was insanely happy. It was impossible to squeeze any sense from these ridiculously rich ethers. We made our way then straight to Rome where I vowed triumphantly to return without ever tossing any over-the-shoulder coins into the Trevi fountain. In Greece, I sought out solitude on the small island of Ios, the only island at the time which had no roads. I bought simple foods and lived by myself in a deserted rocky area on the sea with the timeless songs of slow passing sheeps bells mingling with the soft breathing of the Mediterranean. Days sauntered into days as I passed my time meditating, drawing, and swimming… I was visited by an angel telling me that India would wait and that it was time to return to the U.S.A.
Once again I was back home in Texas working as a carpenter and printing in watercolors… One day after reading a Harper's magazine article about William thompson's new Lindisfarne community on Long Island, New York, I was suddenly there. This amazing group of souls led me on to meditating with the Sufi leader, Pir Vilayat, and later a Tibetan, Lama Chimé, in the high Alps above Chamonix, France.
Now sometime during this sumptuous spin dry cycle of seventies, I lost most hope of not only becoming a medical doctor, but also some other dreams of being a monk, a clown, a musician… as I hollered quite loudly in the total silence to myself, "From now on I shall only paint!!" The subsequent years I spent mostly in Europe studying briefly in two art schools, yet primarily devouring museums and painting/drawing wherever and whenever I possibly could.
In the early 1980s on a perfectly unsuspecting Sunday morning winter's cycling to clean up where I'd been remodeling a friend's living room in a small English village…. I cycled by a most lovely young lady singing to a field. We became breat pals, Abigail Summers and I. In the ensuing years, I moved back to Rome to paint. Abi studied cello at the Royal College of Music in London. Along the distancy way of our long friendship, we eventually married and now have three delightful children, Zasho (17), Lhasa (12), and Tayja (3). Our house we have been building for the last fourteen years. it is perched on an oucropping of rock on a mountainside that gazes out over twenty miles of wilderness to the Pacific Ocean in northern California.
From a very early age, I have been obsessed with the spiritual essence of our earthly lives. Since the age of nineteen, I have been mingling meditation and prayer with all that I do. Angels have appeared to me as have some of my previous lifetimes… these images invariably spill into my paintings. For the last seventeen years I have been practicing Vipassana meditation and going on ten day silent meditation retreats (which I so earnestly recommend to everyone!!). Due to the happy constraints of family and house building, I tend to have irregular exhibits of my paintings and our house has become our art gallery (until further notice!). Truly, I am so grateful to all the beautiful lovely souls who have in any way touched my tiny life… I love you and I immensely thank you!!! My main hope for my humble life and work is to be as a smiling light for peace, kindness, and compassion everywhere and for all………!!!
Marco, Taizie, Lhasa, Abi and Sasha at Oco time