I was always troubled by the title of the beautiful John McLaughlin and Carlos Santana collaboration Love Devotion Surrender. Surrender was never an appealing option for me. I burn with a defiant Promethean fire only death will extinguish. And yet as I grow older, surrender calls me: not to the feet of the tin idol of a guru or to any particular abstract divine Aspect but to the forest. There I can sit with that first, eternal breath of wind as it plays in the leaves and tall grass, contemplating not an ascension to a cloudy heaven but a return to the earth, reincarnation in a blade of grass, in the pleasure of a berry to a bird, in the calm of anhinga drying his wings.
Surrender
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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