In today’s episode of “Healing from Within”, Sheryl Glick, welcomes artist and spiritual teacher Jerry Wennstrom, author of The Inspired Heart and also the subject of documentary videos which share his unusual journey of reaching out to many people in the community so he could share not only the vision of beauty in the art work that he created, but in the deepening recesses of his soul essence as he refined his own view of life and the process of creation. Jerry created a tapestry of wisdom in dealing with people, experiences and life.
Jerry Wennstrom lectures and writes for Inferential Focus in New York and many of his articles are featured in the Mythic Journey’s Magazine . Jerry’s art is featured in the film also entitled Mythic Journeys. Jerry does yearly slide presentations at Pacifica Graduate Institute, at the Birmingham Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum and the California Institute of the Arts. Jerry travels with his wife Marilyn Strong showing the films and presenting their works. Together they created Thresholds: Exploring Passageways to the Soul through Dreamwork, Ritual and the Creative Process.
In 1979 Jerry, as a young man, was a rising star in the New York art world when he let go of his identity as an artist by intentionally destroying his large body of art and giving away his possessions. With this leap of faith, Jerry embarked on a journey which lasted over a decade of wandering, listening, seeking and relying on intuition and unconditional trust to guide and provide for him. He has since created an entire new body of art leaving behind paintings to opt for large sculptures. “His large current interactive sculptures are both humorous and deeply meaningful.”—This statement is from Parabola Magazine.
In The Inspired Heart, one of the many amazing stories Jerry shares speaks about his friends in those younger years, Gilbert and Lewis who were elderly men and Jerry was only in his 20’s. He describes their unusual life style and different natures-Gilbert a participant in life and Lewis more an observer or introvert, yet their differences seemed to embody two halves of a perfect circle. It was as though Jerry was studying the people, himself, and the world around him in varying degrees in conscious behavior rather than focusing all his attention on his artwork. Jerry was becoming more of the soul being from within his own view of what instinctively made him joyful and of service to other people who needed him. Jerry was friends with Gilbert and they worked together at times. As time passed, Gilbert’s blindness progressed and Jerry wrote that he tried to help him accept gracefully the changes that were happening…What Jerry said to Gilbert next is what Sheryl believes was the motivation and impetus for Jerry to actually give up a part of his physical life so he could find the true value and purpose for everyone’s existence. Jerry wrote, “ Gilbert, your life is in God’s hands. If you can no longer paint or do your art, why don’t you just let go of it? Trust what is happening to you. You will be given other ways to be creative. Even if you die, that will be creative….I began to feel that the universe was whispering its truth…I felt and talked about a new kind of freedom. I explored intuitions, but I knew I was not living them out completely. Art began to feel like a trap to me, yet I was afraid to let go of it. After much praying for guidance, I finally was able to destroy what I had created.” Sheryl believes that was Jerry’s moment of authenticity in his search for an Inner Reality. It is in essence the authentic journey of the soul to remember who we are beyond our physical identification process.
As we observe transformation, we become aware that the process leads one to discover the nature of their energetic or soul life in regard to the choices they make in their physical life, and these choices offer the pathway to higher consciousness and to self healing and to the continuing creation of becoming more highly conscious and loving human beings.
Sheryl has noticed in her work with young children and in observing her young granddaughters work with art projects to create beautiful paintings, collages, designs, etc... that where one sense, the sense of words or communicating verbally, is limited for any reason, another sense takes over and for some young children, art is their best way to express the love in their hearts and their joy for being alive. It gives them a voice before they are actually able to express themselves verbally. It gives them a sense of purpose and an expression of their own deeper inner needs to create and share beauty. It is very natural for many children to develop this type of creativity. As sensory beings, we explore the world and our experiences via sight, sound, hearing, touching and smelling, and each sense, when fully developed, gives us our greatest means for developing our intuition.
Jerry lives in Whidbey Island, Washington, and it is here he began a new series of interactive sculptures much of which is deeply imbued with symbolic and mythic themes. Wennstrom’s whimsical Interactive Box Series is composed of sarcophagus-like sculptures standing 6-8 feet tall. The boxes are carved from the weathered cedar Wennstrom finds in the forests and on the beaches of his home base-Whidbey Island. Metal components many of which move, are fashioned from found objects discarded by others. In the piece “War,” pulling the trigger on the protruding gun shoots a pistol inside, making a bang and popping out a smoking human skull with flapping jaw. In “The Key to Heaven,” viewers activate the piece by inserting a dime and turning a brass crank. In others, hair is made from old rope.
Jerry goes on to describe the culminating creative act of destroying his large body of art earlier in his life as very much a death experience. Sheryl notes that many guests on “Healing from Within” have actually experienced near-death experiences that have opened up the possibilities for creating a more expansive and evolved life as a result of the artistic visions that they experienced during the time their soul energy was not in their physical body. Jerry tells about a friend Steven who sang an amazing song to him the night the film was shown of his life, called “It Must Have Been a Miracle”. Jerry goes on to write “Steven has a beautiful presence and the look of a biblical Jew..being tall, dark, poetic and fierce and he sang that night of Moses going up to the mountaintop and bringing down the truth and about Mary having a baby boy. “ And it must have been a miracle….Moses broke the tablets and that baby boy walked into his own death. Nothing seemed to survive. Jerry goes on to say it “felt like he could cry forever for everything the world could not hold in place.”
Sheryl goes on to share with Jerry the synchronicity in his book to certain themes and emotions that she felt they might both share. For example, when Sheryl was a little girl she had a small plastic boy doll that she called Jerry and she talked to him of all the feelings and observations she made about how people behaved. Being a sensitive child Sheryl felt the emotions of others and often could not understand why people weren’t kinder to each other. All spiritual teachers and their awakened counterparts begin to know that each soul is connected beyond time and space to the same Universal Source. While we each have a unique life plan or destiny, we are guided to rediscover the deep divine essence of Spirit within. It is not unusual for sensitives, healers, innovators, and creators or artists to be interested in knowing the divine messengers of the past who have greatly influenced their own spiritual pursuits.
Jerry made a detour and change in his thinking, lifestyle, and work. At times he was not sure whether it was his hunger for his soul growth or food that drove him forward, trusting that God would provide for him and bring him the experiences, people, and sustenance for him to have a good life. This is something many might want to do but until they conquer the fear and illusions of the physical world they are limited to making changes and often remain stuck in mediocre or less than authentic and fulfilling ways to explore their inner needs and the world and people around them.
Jerry also states in his book,” For some people trust in any form is difficult. In terms of unconditional trust, which Jerry needed when he moved from the life he had established to surviving in a different relationship to the world and his physical life, some of the life lessons he learned during his ten year sojourn was to accept people from many different walks of life as equals, and to share good feelings and good will, even where the other person was unable to do so. Kindness, compassion, and selflessness became a natural state of interacting with others and the world. As a result, the world or universe provided him with enough to survive and continue to follow his inner intuition for developing not only his artistic talents, but his soul life force.
Jerry developed an interest in reading autobiographies and biographies. As he did so, he developed a deeper understanding of the feminine aspect- both in the collective consciousness and in himself. People who are aware of the laws of energy know that each individual possesses both male and female instincts in various degrees. The use of a balanced energy in an individual is ultimately the most healthy to function.
Jerry mentions that Yolanda said In “God’s eyes we are all feminine”. Men have such a difficult time because they cannot let go of control. They cannot allow themselves to receive from a source less defined and more knowing than ourselves. Receiving life force in its subtle aspects generally comes more easily to women or more particularly to men or women who have consciously opened up to their feminine aspect. Jerry wrote that an autobiography of Marilyn Monroe had importance for him because of her sense of purpose and the way she lived it out in her short and unusual life. Perhaps it was the way her innocence seemed to be carried by forces larger than her own. Sheryl believes that is why the story of Marilyn Monroe might have interested Jerry as we all try to understand what is sometimes beyond logic or fact and can only be found in intuition. The sense of instinctively knowing the truth beyond logic or reason is what we should work on developing as it is the greatest means for knowing ourselves and the world around us.
Jerry wrote “We draw on the family power for strength and we buckle under the weight of the heavy shadow that gets passed onto us. The person out in front who has contributed the most healing and love to evolving the blood line holds the torch of the lineage.” Jerry mentions how his father’s life mirrored his own. Each one born into the many generation of a family’s line builds on the light or on the shadow of that lineage. Each of us depletes or contributes to the power of the family container in an ongoing way. Jerry says that the men of his father and grandfather’s generations got lost in the shadow cast by the previous generations brighter light- both Jerry’s father and his brother tried to earn a living in the field of machinery where his great-grandfather had notable success, but were unable to be successful at the same career his great-grandfather had excelled in. Sheryl found it interesting to note in this review of family influences that some patterns persist and others may be surpassed by new and improved views of self and the world as it offers the means to create new environments.
Jerry Wennstrom would life you to remember and be inspired by your own courageous nature to deal with difficult people and situations coming from your inner heart or soul presence and overcoming the physical traumas of any dangerous or challenging experience. Jerry gives an example of a night when he was walking in a bad neighborhood and met up with a street gang. The leader asked him for a cigarette which he didn’t have but the leader then asked what he did have so Jerry gave them some small Superman boxes of raisins. The leader in an angry voice asked “What do you think you are doing giving me these raisins..” In a challenging encounter, Jerry went deeply inward and having grown up in a poor black neighborhood was able to find a deep sad love for these angry young black men and with a good deal of genuine emotion in his voice answered, “I was just trying to be kind”…..At that moment the girls in the group surrounded him with love and told the leader to let him go… It seems to Sheryl that when we act from the heart and not from fear or judgment people, even threatening people, respond in a more loving way.
Jerry has shown that he was able to continue to create from within his heart beautiful art and also develop his connection to universal wisdom and a compassionate view of life. Jerry has shown that he lost nothing when he changed from one form of creation, giving up one body of art work for another, investing in the development of his complete Inner Growth. Nothing was lost, but something invaluable was found when Jerry, as indeed each of us at times, allows our hungry heart to search for our true passion which is actually to become the most dynamic, truthful, and open minded self, reaching beyond time and space to the infinite possibilities of delight in the Seen and Unseen worlds of Energy and Life.
Jerry writes, “When the gift of the inspired heart is given there is no longer a separation between art and any other aspect of our lives. We come full circle when we are fully attentive to everything in our lives. There can be no identified fixed priority, only the requirements of each given moment. We can no longer say, “I am an artist or I am a theologian or I am an anything,” separate from the alluring Whole of the heart’s inspiration with all its possibilities intact….. When we fix our gaze abstractly on the Whole, all action and non-action have the potential to support what is holy and creative. High Art becomes the art of all things, of whispers from God in all directions….Art is as good a way as any to express the whisper, yet art is not defined as separate from any other expression of creation. What is important is not the particular form of creation but the completed circle as the premise for Right action in the world…..We become with those we are connected to the inspired heart of creation itself.”
|
