Field Guide to the Haunted Forest (Haunted Forest Trilogy)

by Jarod K. Anderson

Many of these poems started as social media posts or fragments of scripts for The CryptoNaturalist, my fiction podcast about strange nature and a man who finds beauty and meaning in the unusual.

It’s easy to look at the contours of a forest and feel a bone deep love for nature. It’s less easy to remember that the contours of your own body represent the exact same nature.

You are as natural as any postcard landscape and deserve the same love.

Yet, with intention, you can learn to feed that warming fire long after the fuel you were born with is ash on the wind. Be kind to yourself. Learn this.

The night can be longer than we expect. The wind can be colder than we predict. The dark beneath the trees is absolute. Gather the fuel. Double it.

You may feel separated from the natural world, but just look at what you are. Look at how you live. You are not born to this place. You are born of this place.

This old dance of opposing forces creating a unified whole.

We all consume so many purposefully crafted stories that it’s easy to forget life doesn’t follow conventional narrative structure.

The plot is happening now. Today is the story of you and me.

Asking for a life-jacket is more important than knowing the physics of buoyancy.

It’s too late for you not to matter.

I wish I could know the whole, so I could love it more completely.

Own a share of the virtuous work toward solutions. Don’t burden your worth with global outcomes.

You can be still while the world is whirling. You can be silent while your heart is thundering. You can be alone while your memory is teeming. You can live forever in the span of a moment. You can grow kindness in the soil of hatred. You can decide purpose. You can decide victory.

To live is to collect risk like a bee collects nectar.

It’s easy to shrink your world to what you can see.

You comprehend death and make art. You are a surpassingly strange animal, worthy of study. I love you.

We borrow our atoms. The universe owns them. The universe borrows our love and wonder. Those belong to us.

Your matter recalls cosmic explosions and you tasted oblivion before you learned your own name. Fear nothing.

Truth and fact are sisters, not twins.

Your night and Earth’s night know each other.

It’s wise to foster diplomacy with a neighbor older than starlight.

Our survival will require us to understand value independent of cost.

The world is you making meaning from marks on this page.

I think my bones remember, even if I don’t.

I just read ahead to the last page of your life and it turns out that you were always worthy of love and hope and surpassing kindness.

But I hear their footsteps in the attic, walking where I can’t where I will join them in the memory of a future me.

Treat your time likewise. Your moments deserve the same careful attention as your years.

You are nature and nature will go on, but there is kindness that only you can choose to bring to the world.

Shuttle the old you outside in a mason jar. Let it climb onto the lilac in the sun.

Soon, you will be these things again. Mountain. Rain. Forest. Sunlight. So, what will you do until then?

We bury our remains in the soil of our lifetimes.

So many of the cells that have formed the community of your body have returned to nature.

To worry about death is to forget that we, the moss, and the mountains are all part of an undiminished whole that isn’t measured in breaths.