Description
Friday Lecture: Creativity as an Initiatory Path
Through the sharing of their personal stories, Jerry and Marilyn will speak to the deepest inner requirement and essential components of a transformational journey we must all take, and how the creative process brought Jerry to the threshold of that journey. To paraphrase a line emphasized in, A Course in Miracles—“The journey to our personal awakening is unavoidable, the only variable is the time it takes to fully give ourselves to it.” On such a journey, through darkness and light, the only guides available to us are those who have gone before, creative imagination, myths, dreams and the “whispers along the way.” Jerry will speak to how these guides, seen and unseen, helped him traverse the territory. Marilyn will weave into the conversation her years of study and teaching on the re-emergence of the Divine Feminine and her in-depth exploration of the history and symbolism of the Black Madonna and Mary Magdalene, and their meaning for our world today.
Marilyn C. Strong has a B.A. in Religion and Adult Education through Antioch University West and an M.A. in Spirituality and Culture from Matthew Fox’s Institute for Culture and Creation Spirituality. Marilyn has worked in the areas of educational design and development and in group facilitation, ritual, music, and celebration. As a Jungian-oriented spiritual counselor, an ordained minister, a ceremonialist, a singer, and a trained Death Midwife, Marilyn leads workshops, facilitates weddings, memorial services, and home and family funerals. After years of exploration and teaching on the Divine Feminine, she currently offers on-line courses and leads small groups of women on pilgrimage to Black Madonna/Mary Magdalene sites in France.
Jerry Wennstrom was born in New York 1950 and lived-out the first half of his art career there. In 1979, realizing his limits as a studio painter, he destroyed his large body of art, gave away his possessions, and trusted the spirit of creation to carry his life. He threw himself out into the new life, penniless and homeless, for fifteen years. He “returned to the world” on Whidbey Island, met his now-wife, Marilyn Strong, and began doing art again. Jerry’s unusual life story, was made into the Parabola documentary film, In the Hands of Alchemy, 2000 and Sentient Publications books, The Inspired Heart: An Artist’s Journey of Transformation, 2002 and Wennstrom’s magnum opus, A Second Wind: Art Resurrected, 2024, The latter picks up the story and shows the work that emerged in the last twenty-five years. Celebratory in nature, this work integrates joyful embodiment and reveals the golden thread of a long and magical journey.
Jerry Wennstrom & Marilyn Strong
Website – www.handsofalchemy.com
