HIPPOLYTA and how I brought her to life

I have a belief that old people are not so much lonely when their spouse dies but lost. You spend your life with the woman or man that you devout your life to and suddenly they are not there. It leaves a gaping great hole in your life that in some cases cannot be filled. Your life has been placed on hold because all those things you did together cannot be repeated. All of those places you visited having a great time so many times together, now they only add to your misery. I have always been told a person should never go back and after hearing my friend’s experiences I now know that to be true.

I lost my wife eight years ago and it has taken until now to start getting over my loss. Over those years I put a hold on holidays because being fourteen years older than her at sixty, I had a strange feeling of guilt. Thankfully it has started to fade and my life is a lot brighter. There is a saying that moving on is not forgetting the good and bad times with your late partner, but having the mind to deal with the situation.

The Greek Version of an Amazon Warrior

Like I said earlier there is a great big hole left in your life and if you do not deal with it, the hole will consume you. I was lucky in the fact that I could write stories and had a vivid imagination. It never took me long before I had written my first story called, The Last Warrior, I thought it was the best thing after a fresh warm bread roll first thing in the morning. However, that story would not be the path I would take to filling my hole by writing.

I placed the story in a folder and secured it on a CD and pushed it aside. I was watching a program on television about graves that had been found under burial mounds north of the Black Sea. They were supposedly of female warriors because they had all been buried with their weapon of choice. Carbon data proved the bones to be from the fifth century around the time of Attila the Hun.

A Statue of an Amazon Warrior Preparing for battle

There is in Greek mythology stories about Penthesilea and her sister Hippolyta who was Amazon warriors, Amazon is a Greek word. They were a fierce army of women that killed or enslaved men fighting in the Scythian district [Ukraine] north of the Black Sea. In my mind Hippolyta was born, but this time as a mortal, and I pulled her from Greek mythology and gave her a life.

The vision that most people have when talking about Hippolyta and her Amazons, is of half naked twenty-two year old women running around the jungle with a spear in their hand. It is purely wishful thinking on behalf of the male population, and Hollywood feeding their imagination. Nothing could be further from the truth, because that Amazon forest was still a bunch of sticks over ten-thousand miles from Greece and undiscovered in the fifth century.

I will write more about this mythological warrior in my next blog until then  

Be well Ian