The day before yesterday I completed a recent pet project of mine: I narrated a  story in my mother tongue, Austrian-German language, and uploaded it into Youtube [link]. I didn’t know what the story was about when I started. Turned out to be an old, eerie fairy tale. A tale from the old days, a tale about the enchantments of the forests; the entanglements of knights and heroes with the mysterious and shockingly beautiful beings of the spirit world; a tale about friendship, passion, the seasons of nature… and madness.

„So once again I sat with good grace—for a short rest—by a forest stream. Crystalline, its fresh waters leaping through deep ravines, into the valley. Golden flashes, a glitter from its grounds, produced by pebbles rubbing against each other. Trouts standing, floating, motionless, effortless. So once again I sat by this enigmatic being we call water, which modern science calls a chemically dead substance”, wrote Viktor Schauberger, the Austrian naturalist in deep appreciation of nature, and gushing worry about the times to come, in the year 1939.

In my country, Austria, these kind of rivers and forests don’t exist anymore. At the moment peeps are very busy chopping down the last natural forests of Europe, in Romania. Merely the old tales remain. But now we have smartphones and tablets to read them from, and eco-friendly furniture for our indoor living spaces. Many years from now, when folks will be sitting cozily together, next to a fire, telling each other tales of these times past, they will tell of our knights and of our heroes who were entangled with the mysterious and shockingly frightening beings of our spirit world; of friendship, trauma, rage and natural disasters… and how we overcame our madness.