New visitors to the Tashi Gomang Stupa are often curious about the blue and yellow flag that flies above the site, and what it signifies. Known as the ‘Dream Flag,’ it’s the result of a vision the 16th Karmapa had in a dream during the summer of 1980 on a visit to Colorado – the same summer he came to Crestone to find the land on which the Tashi Gomang Stupa was later built.
Deborah Luscomb, who created the first Dream Flag, recounted its origin:
In the early summer of 1980, while His Holiness, the 16th Gyalwa Karmapa was visiting Boulder, Colorado, I had the good fortune to be his personal seamstress. One morning he called me into his sitting room at Marpa House and showed me three small colored pencil sketches of a flag. He told me (through a translator) that he had dreamed that “wherever this flag was flown, the Dharma would flourish”. He asked me to make one.
I sketched out on graph paper what I thought represented the complete symmetry of his drawings and confirmed my representation with him before proceeding to enlarge my pattern to accommodate a full-size flag. The first Dream Flag was raised on Midsummer’s Day.
The Dharma has been flourishing ever since.