In Vienna there are shadows. The city is black and everything is done by rote. I want to be alone. I want to go to the Bohemian Forest. May, June, July, August, September, October. I must see new things and investigate them. I want to taste dark water and see crackling trees and wild winds. I want to gaze with astonishment at moldy garden fences, I want to experience them all, to hear young birch plantations and trembling leaves, to see light and sun, enjoy wet, green-blue valleys in the evening, sense goldfish glinting, see white clouds building up in the sky, to speak to flowers. I want to look intently at grasses and pink people, old venerable churches, to know what little cathedrals say, to run without stopping along curving meadowy slopes across vast plains, kiss the earth and smell soft warm marshland flowers. And then I shall shape things so beautifully: fields of colour…
— Egon Schiele, as quoted by Reinhard Steiner in Egon Schiele, 1890-1918: The Midnight Soul of the Artist.
Notes:
- Photo: Angelika Horschlager, “we made no sound…and deep in the forest we get lost.” Taken in Lichtenau im Muhlkries (Austria)
- Quote via The Vale of Soul-Making
- Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”
Live & Learn 
and all senses would be fully engaged –
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and that they would…
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Such beautiful thoughts from such a tortured soul. Have always loved Schiele’s work…it’s incredibly visceral. The tension in every line almost crackles.
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Beautifully stated Lori.
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I felt echoes of Henry David Thoreau. I was blessed to be stationed in a town on the Pfälzer Wald, and I loved taking walks or riding my 10 speed Peugeot there. Nothing like the forest for meditative time spent.
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Pfaizer Wald. That sounds like Something memorable.
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German forests are magical. I think it is because they are so well maintained compared with American forests, which have a wilder feel about them.
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I must visit!
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I has great walking paths in the Kaiserslautern area, south of town.
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Egan Schiele was a friend of my grandparents for a very brief time…another Zelig moment coming to you from the unassuming, devotee of yours..
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Wow. That’s Something Mimi.
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Wow, that is SO COOL, Mimi!!
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He’s truly in love, like a lover, with the earth…
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Yes!
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What wonderful prose. He expressed how I feel when I get “lost” in the woods.
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Agree!
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Me too. Me too.
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Reblogged this on It Is What It Is and commented:
I would love to do that too!! … “Egon Schiele, as quoted by Reinhard Steiner in Egon Schiele, 1890-1918: The Midnight Soul of the Artist.”
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The forest as a cathedral. I don’t know how many times I’ve read that in various writings and it always stayed and stays with me because I so often felt the same. In Swiss and Canadian forests. A church like experience, but also an utterly peaceful, calming one. Fall is a wondrous time, and my best autumnal memories are of the riot of colours in Canada and high up in the Swiss mountains. But I fail to see these in Schiele’s work and I am equally bewildered and amazed about this revelation.
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Wonderful observation Kiki. Agree!
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