Cloudland is for dreamers

How to create well-being in a whole new different way

First off, Cloudland Road is in fact a real place. It’s a remote gravel road I traverse in rural Vermont. Part of one of my favorite training rides. There is a spot there which harmonizes well with my and always raises my energy. I leave calmer and feeling better overall. I always get off my bike and linger at that spot for a bit because of how intensely good it makes me feel when I sit or stand there for even a few minutes.

Sometime back, I opened the door to a meditation sanctuary I named Cloudland. It’s not a real place but it is a real place.

Here is the set up for this story. The stress and anxiety being produced and experienced today is off the bloody charts.

Traveling by car in morning rush hour in any city any where anymore just plain sucks. You can feel the negative energy covering everything, like a violent rainstorm that obscures your vision and echos through your car as you attempt to drive.

People are angry, distracted and generally aggressive on the road anymore. Traffic is going either 80 or 20 and is bumper to bumper. Cars riding up on you. Drivers on their phones drifting into you or the pickup doing 100 weaving in through the narrow spaces. Someone flips you off and you have no idea why. It’s a harbinger for our society overall I fear.

Any time I have to find myself driving in rush hour (thankfully 99% of the time I don’t have to), I end up feeling emotionally drained, anxious and sometimes afterwards, physically ill. It’s not the traffic as much as it is the energy. It’s caustic.

We live in a world today where there is no sanctuary for most, just different levels of stress and distraction.

Some believe emotions are stored in the body, however the limbic structures of the brain are where emotional processing takes place. The body can hold tension associated with emotions, and some areas may be linked to specific emotional experiences. This tension can be held in various places throughout the body—and perhaps even around us or beyond us physically.

Emotions, like thoughts, experiences and physical things are all made up of energy. Can that energy leave an imprint? If so, what happens to that? Does it get stored? Outside of just storing it, what exactly do we do with it?

Are we all on an energetic version of the show ‘Hoarders’?

Can we use what we store for good or is it just baggage? Can we curate it? Organize it, use it or instead, get rid of what doesn’t serve us?

If you want to curate it, do it with intention. For that, perhaps you need a place to do that. If you meditate, going to this same place allows for an even better experience than traditional meditation…or at least this is my experience.

I believe these places already exist for each of us. We just need to go hunting for them. Simply let your mind drift. Where feels comfortable? A city? One in particular? A loft off of West Queens West in Toronto? A small building on stilts at the end of a long pier off of a deserted island beach? It doesn’t matter. There are no rules.

These places are there, and you will recognize yours when you are close. Just follow your senses. Don’t rationalize. Let your heart lead you. Where you end up is exactly where you are supposed to be. That’s your place.

These places are useful. Try traveling there to meditate or just relax. Retreat there for a few moments of peace when you feel frustrated or anxious. Just close your eyes and go. Visualize. The more detail the better.

Visit when you need to find clarity on something. To be creative or solve a problem. Go there before drifting off to sleep and end up staying the night.

Some of you might be thinking, “this is mumbo-jumbo new age bullshit…I am out.”

That’s fine, no problem. Thank you for giving it a try. It may not for you and that is ok.

Now, for the rest of you remaining, want to go on a field trip?

Are memories real? Is a visualization real? How are they different? Both are just forms of energy manifesting within you.

To me, Cloudland is as real as any memory I have.

If something is a memory and you relive it, is it real? If you visualize something so intently that it comes to pass, is that visualization real? Yes. Both are energy being put to work.

So let’s take the residual energy you carry or store and curate it. Put it to use or discard it.

Hello. I am the artist in residence and the curator of the Cloudland gallery. Welcome to my sanctuary.

As individuals, we are supposed to be experiencing life both outside as well as inside. Within the world and within ourselves. As such, we are both artists and curators-or collectors.

We collect works from the outside and create them inside. We do this through our physical experiences. Some of what we collect in the form of memories, emotions and experiences is art. Some of it not.

What is not, can be heavy. Visualize this negative energy or experience as stones you keep in a backpack. Rocks you’ve collected over time. My guess is you have more than a few. Now that you have noticed them, you realize how damn heavy they are.

So when you get to your sanctuary, unzip your backpack, take out the rocks you are ready to let go of, and set them down outside. Leave them for nature to recover and repurpose.

Nature will take care of it, as per the First Law of Thermodynamics.

Inside our sanctuaries are representations of own unique life experiences. What appoints the place represents the energy from how we live our lives. What is here can even drive how we are are perceived by others.

It’s even possible to have visitors at our sanctuaries. Guests. This is done simply by being your best and truest self with others and how you ‘rub off’ on people. The residue of energy. This is how they can experience what you create and curate.

Welcome to Cloudland.

My sanctuary is on Cloudland Road. I just call it Cloudland and it sits on the energy spot I mentioned. Sort of. In this physical space, it isn’t really in that spot. I put it there because that is where it belongs. Perhaps in another nearby reality, it really is there. As I see it, it’s surrounded by ancient pines and can be approached by a winding gravel path leading up across a series of upwardly rolling meadows.

It is a collection of three ancient, multi-floored colonial-era buildings set out in a ‘U’ shape. The wooden siding painted white with dozens of coats of paint applied over a few centuries, with the appropriate black shutters framing the windows. Green shutters are reserved for residences.

The building facing the pines is a gallery. This is for what I have created and collected. The one opposite, overlooking the meadow is the studio, where I work and create. It is the place I am writing this from. There is a smaller, open-walled building in the middle, straddling the other two. That is where I mentally retreat when I need respite and re-energize. Where I go for meditation. Literally. I go there first and settle in. I see what is around me, I hear it, feel it and smell it. Once I am present here, I’ll begin to meditate.

Try your place out sometime. My guess it has been there waiting for you all these years to rediscover it and the power it can offer you.

My sanctuary’s gallery is either relatively large or relatively compact, depending on your perspective. The east side, facing the meadow is bathed in light. Outside it is quiet, the sounds of nature ever present as white noise. The deep stand of pines that line the mountainside which gradually slopes further up behind the gallery provide a subtle but sharp scent that seeps through the open windows and doors during warmer months.

My studio contains a host of media and collections. Books. Music. Trinkets and talismans. Artifacts. All of it some form of gear.

Muddy Waters or Dusty Springfield or even the power trio Rush can be playing as often as Noah Kahn, Above and Beyond or Fred…Again. Music I bring with me.

There are notebooks for sketching and ideas. Transcriptions from the pictures and writings found in the journal I always keep with me this s story was originally written in, using my go to Pilot Precise Varsity pen-a disposable fountain pen. All tools I also bring.

Also, fountain pens should always be used for important work.

There are also several pieces of broken porcelain awaiting Kintsugi transformation here, as well as canvases of all shapes and sizes. There is a pile of rusting scrap metal rescued from here and there lying in the corner next to a Miller welder and welding helmet. The floors are worn wide plank pine, pocked and dented from the ages. Splashes of color dot some of the boards from overzealous work.

Much of the compound has been completely rehabbed. Rooms reconfigured. Walls knocked out, anticipating their future use. Older works are housed in part of the gallery that didn’t allow for easy renovation. It’s an old property.

In this part of the gallery, the work isn’t as impressive. What here is a bit stilted and one dimensional. Copies in the style of others, largely. Work from my earlier years. Created by a hand without practice or intention and in a style foreign to the artist’s true self. The outcome are generally flat, monochromatic interpretations. This is mixed in with pieces from others, collected from time outside, often in the same style, but these pieces are a bit bolder. Brasher. Yet still presenting themselves without any catalyst of inspiration.

These earlier works try, but often fall short of delivering on their intent.

As we move into the renovated areas, there is a different energy. What’s here is largely contemporary-but not entirely. A balanced mix of earth toned interpretive landscapes, along with bright expressions of emotion and movement. These works sit alongside almost luminescent pottery, each lined across the surface with bright gold seams. Manuscripts and stories on parchment. Epic poems, short stories and haikus. Each work its own fascinating study, different from its counterparts but yet a balanced part of the whole.

These gallery rooms are not yet as full as the older rooms. However, they are being added to with care and intention.

The goal is not to fill these rooms, but instead fill these rooms well. To give them energy until they give it back. Those that belong belong. What doesn’t belong isn’t present. It’s that simple.

Moving on, there are a number of other rooms, equally bathed in light, which remain empty, but not silent. They are not sequestered from the newer gallery rooms. They are an extension of them still waiting all of them in harmony with the music that flows through the entire space in a gentle current.

These still empty rooms are not forgotten. They sit patiently waiting to be filled with well created or curated work at some future date. A still in process collection from times and places, all experienced well.

Vestiges of a life now being better lived. Simple works taken from coffee shops or time with family. Louder works conscripted from times of adventure. Carefully restored works previously overlooked or abused. Introspective works. All add to the value of my collection.

Here is the thing, Cloudland is as real as any memory. It is constructed in my mind but it sits alongside the memory of the birth of a child. Both are illuminated with detail. My daughter is now 18, no longer the newborn she was once. She is no longer what I registered in 2006, nor the baby that is part of this cherished memory.

That time and place of her birth…why is it any different than a sanctuary I’ve constructed with intention? They are both now inside me. Neither is any less real than the other.

Everything we experience can be carried and put to use, or discarded at your sanctuary, if you allow it. So find your place. Make it real. Visit often. You will be the better for it, I promise.

We all have these opportunities to rediscover what we’ve forgotten or find something that has always been there but we’ve missed due to the noice of a chaotic world —If we chose to.

I hope you will come back to mine. Feel free to bring friends.