Rambling on through a broken heart about fictional worlds and losing the light in a world that is growing darker day by day…

There is something wonderfully tempting about the idea of living inside a fictional world. Who wouldn’t want to step through a wardrobe, traverse a secret entrance behind fireplace, board a starship, wander into a magical village, or wake up somewhere the good guys still get theme music?

But then again, aren’t we already living in one?

These days, reality has started to feel like a dystopian novel nobody remembers agreeing to read. The plot is exhausting, the villains are overfunded, and the chapter titles keep getting more ridiculous. So if I had the chance to spend one week in a fictional world—somewhere built for joy instead of outrage—I know exactly where I would go.

I would choose Dollywood.

Not because it is perfect. Not because a funnel cake can fix the world, although I would support a serious study on the matter. I would choose it because Dollywood feels like the kind of place built from light… music in the air, mountains in the distance, laughter around every corner, good food, fresh air, and that rare invitation to simply enjoy being alive for a while.

Dolly Parton has been singing, acting, giving, joking, and walking right alongside my life for as long as I can remember. She has always seemed to carry the kind of values that sound simple until you realize how badly the world needs them. We are all human, we are all who we are, and we are all God’s children. No one was put here to judge another person into smaller pieces.

The world lost that kind of light yesterday, it lost more than it knows. It lost a voice that made hard things feel survivable, a presence that made kindness seem both ordinary and revolutionary, and a reminder that decency does not have to be loud to be powerful.

So yes, give me Dollywood for a week. Give me the smell of cinnamon bread drifting through the air. Give me banjos, porch lights, roller coasters, mountain views, and children laughing like they have not yet been handed the world’s bad news. Give me music that rises up without asking permission. Give me a place where entertainment still feels like generosity. A place where the troubles of the world are kept outside the gates and life is as you dream it to be.

Maybe that is the real magic of a fictional world… not that it lets us escape reality forever, but that it reminds us what reality could feel like if we built it with more grace, more music, more fairness, and fewer billionaires trying to convince everyone else to live smaller.

Dollywood for a week? Yes, please. Call it a vacation, call it a dream, call it fiction if you want. Right now, it sounds like utopia… I am sure that even though Dolly traded in her butterfly wings for Angel wings yesterday, her spirit still lives there and will…