Holly's Raggle Taggle Euroean Tour

I wrote the following story in Cesky Krumlov. I wrote it for my friend Brent especially, but I wanted to see what you thought and was hoping you could put it up on my travel journal.

A SORT OF ODE TO CESKY KRUMLOV

Once upon a time, people didn't have their own dreams. They weren't allowed. All dreams were allocated. They were handed out in square, dense packages and people had to wait in very long lines to collect them. Everyone was given the same dream and in equal amounts. Often when people opened their boxes in hopes of a good dream, they found they didn't even want the dream in the bottom of the box (the box was made bigger so that people thought they were getting bigger dreams than they actually were).

People dealt with this situation in different ways. Some people just stopped hoping. These people were like zombies-- going throughout their share of work, eating their dreams like they ate all their other rations, like dry stale bread. Other people tried to live without the dreams--the ones they were given were too painfully inadequate. These people didn't even open their dreams after a while. The boxes collected in a corner and eventually were burned in the fireplace, their hard sharp edges curling under the fire.

But some people, a very few, foresaw the restriction of dreams before it started. They realized that they wouldn't be able to keep their dreams. Not even in the most secret places. Not in their hearts. Not clutched in their fist under their pillow. Not even in the silent pauses of their tales of long ago. To keep them would eventually surrender them to the massive lapping tounge that ate everyone's dreams --eventually. To even know them was to leave them exposed.

So instead they let go of them. They hid their dreams in the wooded hills. Groves that were once their cathedral, forests of celebration now were quiet. Where once beltane fires blazed and carved pumpkins lined pathways, now only the birds sang. The people buried their dreams under powdered snow, burrowed them into bird's nests and breathed them silently, only lips moving, into the thin air. The people hid them deeply amongst those sacred trees. They stored them in hopes that someday they would able to retrieve them again.

Dreams sleep deep in the woods that hugged them through everything for so many years.

None of the original dreamers survive, so its a wonder if its hereditary. That gaze. That long collected gaze directed towards the hills which is seen on so many of the faces of the children of the dreamers.

Banshees wail
in these wooded sad hills
souls wrapped in tree knots
magic blanketed in snow.

--Holly L. Shaw