The Refuge for World Truths
Near Crestone, Colorado
Crestone sits at the edge of the San Luis Valley, a crossroads few would have predicted becoming one of the most unusual spiritual communities on Earth. The town has fewer than two hundred permanent residents. It has more than two dozen spiritual centers.
No other small town on Earth has this many sacred sites representing this many distinct traditions. Tibetan Buddhist stupas and retreat centers, a Zen monastery, a Carmelite Catholic hermitage, Hindu ashrams, a Japanese spiritual fellowship, Sufi lodges, and contemplative schools from four continents have all put down roots in this high desert valley at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The story begins with Maurice Strong, a Canadian financier and United Nations diplomat, and Hanne Marstrand, who would later become his wife.
In nineteen seventy-seven, Strong purchased a controlling interest in a company holding vast land across the American Southwest, including one hundred forty-six thousand acres in Colorado. Among those holdings was a large subdivision near Crestone, planned as a retirement community. After visiting, the Strongs changed course.
Hanne believed the land held unusual spiritual power. The mountains behind Crestone are among the most dramatic in North America. The valley below is one of the flattest and most expansive on the continent.
The contrast seems to speak to people oriented toward the sacred. Hanne founded the Manitou Foundation to steward the land. Beginning around nineteen eighty-eight, the Foundation granted parcels to spiritual organizations, each required to build a genuine center open for retreat and practice.
There were nine formal land grants: to the Karma Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, to a Carmelite monastery, to Shumei International, a Japanese spiritual fellowship with only one center outside Japan, and to several other traditions. The Tibetan connection runs especially deep. In nineteen eighty, the sixteenth Gyalwa Karmapa, head of the Karma Kagyu order, rode through the surrounding mountains on horseback with Hanne Strong and declared a prophecy: that Crestone would become a place of sincere practice where many would attain realization.
The stupa he blessed, the Karma Thegsum Tashi Gomang, was consecrated in nineteen ninety-six on land he had chosen. Today thousands of retreatants visit each year. The town calls itself a Refuge for World Truths.
At this elevation, with those peaks, in that silence, it is not hard to see why so many traditions wanted to be here.
