Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
throw yourself into life. And shortly thereafter you invited anyone
and everyone into your studio in which you were able to keep
going, because somebody else was paying the rent. And people
from all walks of life showed up. Now you say that you looked
upon each one of those people that showed up in your studio, and
many of them were homeless, and down on their luck, whatever,
you looked upon each one of them as if you were looking upon God
itself. I'm just wondering how that took place so suddenly upon
your disillusionment.
JERRY WENNSTROM: Well what I jumped into when I let
everything go was to simply be with what was. I didn't invite
anyone into my studio. I was simply present with what came, and
it seemed like people came out of the woodwork. I already had
something of a following as an artist, and then that I think word
got out and then… It's almost like if you put two beads of water
next to each other they become one. People were just attracted to
the space that I had entered, and I didn't know anything about it
myself. But I think part of what was coming into my life was the
tempering of my steel, the ability to hold that ground in the face of
a lot of most of our suffering in the world. We're always looking
for some reflection of how we can rise about that suffering. And I
think in some way I was learning that for myself, and in the
process I think it's only natural that those people come who are in
some way are in relation to that learning process. And that's how
we all learn we teach and we learn, and it's like jumping into the
ocean, and you don't know how to swim, you're going to have to
learn.
So a big part of it was I was learning to hold the ground by way of
an onslaught of, at a certain level, other people's projection of
what it looked like to be nothing to have no identity, to have no
money. Who are you? It's our ultimate fear it's like right there
next to death is non-identity, who are you if you're not a great
radio announcer, if you don't have any money, if you don't have a
nice red shiny car, who are you without anything at all? What
emerges in that questioning and presence is that you embody a
prayer where you become what the moment means, and that's a
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