When the days are empty of work except for what I choose–reading and writing, some chores, the garden–I take long walks in the forest arboretum not to raise my heart rate but to lower it, to follow–after the admonition from yoga–the breath of everything. Lately my thoughts roam unleashed there, thinking of natural beauty in other forms, and of desire still easily kindled even at my age with the right spark.
Today the green heron and anhinga, who can distract me for an hour, were nowhere in sight. Cardinals and jays shouting at each other. Not a single Carolina chickadee. It was a disappointing day but you can’t always get what you want. It is almost as if the birds knew I was distracted by my baser nature. I need to remember to slow down and watch the woods and the water. To sit longer and wait for beauty which only arrives if one is patient.
As I left an egret swooped low over my head then sauntered over the avenue and fence to Scout Island. To each beautiful form its proper place and time. Tomorrow I will go to the island to find the great blue heron. The woods are my Dream Time, walking with something much larger than myself, as close as I’ll ever get again to church. I need to keep my other dreams each in their proper place and time.
Back to the Island
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, Trampoline, Unlikely Stories, Peauxdunque Review, LMNL Anthology, 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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