There are times in our lives, be it an hour, a day, a week, a year, when we need to retreat and find Sanctuary. It's like surrendering to the flu, the only way out is through. The time comes to step up and step back, catch our breath, and admit that it's time to heal or find safety. A storm is coming. 

Pagoda is a painting I created as I had to retreat from a high profile studio. I just couldn't afford it anymore, so I fell back into a Blue Tower to figure out the best steps forward. The canvas was starting to open up for me, and I was learning how to communicate through my art. In every retreat, every fall or misstep, comes a gift. When we find it, it becomes the vessel that carries us through. 

This painting came directly through a dream that woke me one night in that warehouse I wasn't supposed to be living in. It was a lucid dreams, those that feel like moving through crystal where all the colors feel alive and sing. I found myself walking along a creek that led to a bridge made of glass, across was a path of many steps leading up to Pagoda alit by the full moon pulsing behind it. Reaching the courtyard at the entrance, the doors opened by their own will and I proceeded inward. 

The inner sanctum was a classroom filled with wooden desks I recall from my childhood, the one's attached to the seat and cold in Winter. An Avatar was standing appearing like every wizard I've ever met in every fantasy book adventured in youth. He invited me to have a seat, so I sat. On the desk was a sketchbook and he told me to start writing, it didn't matter what, just whatever was in my head in that very moment.
I honestly don't remember what I wrote, all I remember is that each letter I wrote grew legs and ran off the page. Every word I tried to form dissolved, almost laughing at me. In my confusion I looked up and the teacher smiled, "You are writing in the language of your birth, that not going to work here in the dream realm. You're words and letters are just a material abstraction of the world you were born into. Those thoughts need to be anchored in images and patterns." 

Closing my eyes, I tried to visualize my thoughts into a scene, a landscape, a theme, and began putting it to paper. Envisioning an alphabet as images, I tapped into the primal patterns the Universe follows, and convey that as language, almost hieroglyphic. It worked, the writing stayed on the page and glowed completeness. 

The Avatar clapped, "Congratulations, you just learned to read and write in the dream world. It will also help you in the Bardo, that time and space between death and rebirth. It's the only way us beings can carry our memories into our future selves. Remember," and then he faded and I was awake. 

Taking from the experience, its only our memories that we take with us when we pass through the veil, and when attached to acts of creation, like paintings and music, we engrain those patterns into our soul and carry them forward. Like child at four busting out Bach's Toccata in Fugue without ever having a lesson. 

Memories are sanctuaries for our experiences and thoughts. We store them there and keep them safe, those little soundbites of our time spent in the current world. They define who we are, where we've been, and help us figure out where we're going.

“Life is but a dream!”