Ravished by Romanticism....

This is "The Sea of Ice" by Casper David Friedrich, I saw this in person in the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam Holland. I remember the immediate impact it had on me...it was about like seeing a woman nude for the first time. I was stunned by it's beauty and mystery. It's a medium size painting at about 3x4 but the immensity of its impact had me enthralled. I was already in a art ecstasy being surrounded by Van Gogh originals...and when I saw Friedrich's work, it sent me over the edge. It's amazing when you discover an artist that speaks the language of your soul...they become life long friends in an instant. As I continue to discover the language and truth behind Impressionism and Romanticism...it's like hearing the voice of God. It's a resonance on a level that can only be felt. You step into a harmony that is as revitalizing as mountain air, flowing stream or lover's kiss. Finding people who you understand and understand you is a gift.

Too many people never discover tribes, sages, bards, voices, magicians, partners, icons or a god that presents a way, a truth and a life; that envelopes them and provides for them deeply liberating space to live and move and have their being.

Being known and truly knowing is a hunger and cry that is found at the deepest fissures of the human heart. It's the sacred root of what it means to Know God or be known by Him. To "know" is the phrase that the ancient biblical scribes and poets used to describe the bliss of sexual union.

It's the craving of every created being to return to it's Creator and to share in oneness with others because it's the image from which we were drawn from. It's our primordial palate. We yearn to be brought back to it's womblike generative power and comfort...because in it...we can be born again and again and again. New life springs from it's loins.

When one discovers this reality...you must do everything within your power to gain it...As a desperate romantic would plead, Jesus said: "Sever limb or gouge eye...sell all...leave all...hate all...in order to gain it."

Your life depends on it...or at least a life worth living.

I read this fromsome art history site and saw myself in the words:

"Romanticism in art, as in literature, followed the pendulum swing away from the optimistic Enlightenment idea of human dominion over nature and the credo that Reason would ultimately reign supreme. Revolutionary and chaotic, emotional rather than rational, often psychologically introverted, the Sturm und Drang ("Storm and Stress") movement in Germany - emphasizing subjectivity and unease - and its offspring the Romantic movement abhorred the 18th century's orderly imposition on nature and the designs of squared parterre tidy gardens with orthogonal lines of pollarded trees. Instead Romanticism preferred the vast wildernesses of an indifferent and unpredictable nature with its endless forests, towering clouds and deafening waterfalls from icy giant peaks.

Beginning in 1774, Goethe's Werther wept with newfound emotion in a landscape overflowing with undammed sentiment paralleled by swollen rivers and unmanageable floods of the world at large. Honesty about feelings were now more important in speech than wit and répartée; being and behaving genuine more important than artifice. Themes such as liberation, mysticism, exotic orientalism, human insignificance and a darker psychology ran counter to the eurocentric Age of Reason. Poems and paintings alike found the moon and dreams more interesting than the sun and conscious thought. Hermit shrines in the woods brought the artists closer to God than hollow liturgies in cathedrals of crowded cities darkened by coal smoke and religious hypocrisy, as Blake uttered like an Old Testament prophet in poetry:

"How the chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackening church appals..."