Realized Dreams

For a good six years of my life Ireland was "the dream". I played celtic reels on my viola, giggled with friends about adjusted blessings ("May the road rise to meet your face, may the wind blow always through your teeth"), and fell in love with the idea of rolling green hills and ancient rocky ruins.

The past two days in Wicklow have blown my daydreams out of the water.

I don't know if I dream in a gamut, but the hills are a burning green, the water windexed clear, the sky so blue I almost itch to turn it down. I didn't think places like this actually existed. I swore they were secret, unreachable locations preserved for postcard makers to plant dream-seeds and unfulfilled wishes in the common populace. And yet I'm here, and the hills and the sky are alive and furiously vivid. I can touch the grass and no matter how much I expect my fingers to come back covered in the green paint I know they must have slathered on it, there's nothing. It's real.

A dream realized.

Today I rode a chestnut gelding named Prada at the back of a line of four horses watching stereotype after stereotype pass me by. We saw the bright green hills with their mossy stone fences, the sun glittered forest with soft brown earth paths. Our horses clomped over bridges that covered babbling brooks trekking whitely down from waterfalls. It was a three dimensional world created out of postcards and pages from National Geographic. I had to remind myself over and over again: "This is real, you're here, you're in Ireland. Just like you always dreamed."