My short-story. 8)

 ‘Flower Power’, ‘Maker love, not war!’ and ‘Give peace a chance’. These slogans are still well-known, though they were advanced by hippies in the 60s. But do hippies exist nowadays? They do, though most of the people tend to think that their epoch was over at least thirty years ago. I was lucky to meet them.

I first read the word ‘hippy’ in a dog-eared magazine dated 1974. The article told about dreamy young people, who believed in peace and universal fellowship, who sought enlightenment, who rebelled against Vietnam War and put flowers into barrels of policemen’s guns. Who left America for India, their ‘Land of Promise’. Who met tragic and premature end there. I was about ten years old, and that article astounded me beyond words. I was eager to meet those mysterious people. And I did one day.

I spent in ‘system’ (that’s how hippies call themselves) about a year, and it was an outstanding, though a rather nutty period. Once I took part in the festival called Rainbow and spent three months in a row away in forests near Pskov, walking barefoot, gathering blueberry, carrying on philosophical conversations and watching shooting stars at night. Another time I lived stone-broke for two weeks in St.-Petersburg. I hitchhiked from Moscow to the Crimea, from the Crimea to the Ukraine, Moldova, Byelorussia and then back again to Moscow. I wore heaps of bracelets and clinking beads, Hindu clothes and torn jeans – the very gear that old article described. But it was not clothes that mattered. I experienced incomparable sense of freedom – no rules to follow, no tasks to fulfill, no problems to worry about, only never-ending travels, and friendship, and music. Of course, I was very young, and this one-year-long riot could have been merely a game, I assume. But still, I don’t regret anything.