forest bathing
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Another Anecdote of a Jar
You were never meant to hold that much without breaking, the ad for some tincture promising happiness said. Don’t buy it.There are flowers and leaves and mushroomsenough in the forest. The only bottle you needis one for cool water so you can remain quietly with the unmolested medicine still rooted in the earth, both you… Continue reading
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Green Pentecost
I was raised from childhood to place my hand in the Holy Roman wound and found it cold and hollow. Now I am waiting for that Pentecostal moment not in a close room but in the wood, for green fire like leaves to descend, teaching us the words of the birds and the subterranean language… Continue reading
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Drifting Into Brautigan
The more time I spend walking in the forest the further I’m drifting into Richard Brautigan. I don’t fish but I like to watch the herons do it and I sometimes write about it, too. He’s tonic to the orchestral noise blaring at what might be the last Fourth of July. It’s all John Phillip Firework patriotism here… Continue reading
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The Only Worthy Lotus
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… Continue reading
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The Green Fellow

Walking is meditation if it enters into sudden birdsong and kaleidoscopic green. Not stillness. Not transcendence. I don’t want to escape this world. I don’t want the lotus unless I can wade in to admire it. I want to enter into this world as a duck enters water, as a towering tree enters the earth,… Continue reading
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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