Youth Inspiration

I remember going to see one of these performances and boy, was it inspirational.!
I loved the costumes, especially the way the girls were decked out in ribbons and embroidered skirts and aprons
I so loved the soft red boots and made sure to buy myself a pair.
I wore red boots for the longest time and when I walked in them, I was dancing in my head, floating on a high that kept me in ever lasting dream land..lol
 I guess this is why I understood Michael Jacksons' Never land. It was his place to be, who he wanted to be.

The guys dancing these dances were so young virile and  handsome, you couldn't decide who was the nicest looking and they jumped so high, almost 6 feet. You'd meet them at weddings and they would take you away in their arms and make dancing look like something you were born with knowing how to do.
Wow!

I decided there was nothing more macho, than a guy in baggy pants, doing a jig like this and I wished I could also have been born a boy, so I could do all those things they did.

Thats how I got into the study of the Cossacks, and one famous one Stenko Rasin, the King of the mighty Volga River.

It was all so romantic, mystic, powerful, meaningful as legends often are.
It stretched your soul and feelings  thread bare and in danger of  breaking, leaving you to fly away into the horizon and into outer space never to be seen again.
You had to learn to take a breath and rein yourself in, not to lose yourself .

Is this what total insanity is like? Expressing a passion so strong, so as to feel your chest bursting, to the music, is not something people today experience.
 I could ride the plains in the wind, on a black steed, defying all and everyone who tried to go against me.

LIFE! LIFE! AIR! BREATH!

I guess it was the Amazon in my blood that made me so powerful and strong of spirit.
Zena, the warrior Princess, meeting the moustachioed Stenko Rasin on the Volga.lol

As a pair , no one would dare laugh or snigger or throw her off the ship to drown in the blackest of waters, as Stenko Rasin did the woman he loved, not to seem to look as if he was womanized, to his men.

And even if he did, she would survive, for warrior Princesses are instilled with magic.
Stenko Rasin in his baggy pants, furrowed eyebrows behind which lay the blackest, deepest of eyes and the softest of beards moistened by the misty sprays of the high seas, was simply put... sexy. lol

But time flies by and we all grow up and men are not powerful and strong as legends portray them to be.
We are all full of insecurities.
We do not live by the sword or die by the sword and if men do, they are listed in little black books as monsters to be shot on sight.
But the legends live on. These men and women are left to be seen as Gods and Godesses because they defied traditions and created their own realities.

We build statues in their names and sing songs secretly wishing we could express such passion and freedom such as we find in a dying race of  wild steed still running in the windy snow covered plains. They rather die than be reined into clausterphobia.

Today
We are left to watch dying cultures as they continue to remember and dance the viral dance, in baggy pants
and soft red boots, legends in their own right.
:)