Walking is meditation if it is morning chorus and kaleidoscopic green. Not stillness. Not silence. Not transcendence. Follow instead the breath of everything. I don’t want to escape this world but instead to live deeply within it. I don’t want to approach the lotus unless I can wade in to admire it.
Walk widdershins around the best trees. Resist the dominant habit of humanity. The interleaved commune that surrounds you is what any loving god would have intended instead of conquest. Forget the gods of deserts. You are just one part under the dominion of everything, together with the fish and birds and all the terrestrial animals down to the bugs a sparrow falls upon for supper.
Walk the essential topsoil of weather broken stone and centuries of fallen leaves in the soothing rain. Bring a sinfully sweet apple and a book. Bring a friend, a lover. Contemplate never coming back.
The Only Worthy Lotus
About Me
Mark Folse is a provincial diarist and aspiring minor poet from New Orleans. His past blogging adventures included the Katina/Federal Flood blog wetbankguide on blogspot.com which David Simon told NY Magazine was one of three blogs that helped inform Treme, and Toulouse Street–Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans, which once outranked the Doobie Brothers on Google Search. His work has appeared in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The New Delta Review, Metazen, New Laurel Review, Ellipsis, What We Know: New Orleans as Home, Please Forward, The Maple Leaf Rag IV, and A Howling in the Wires (which he co-edited).
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Well Bottom Blues 
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