Field Guide to the Haunted Forest (Haunted Forest Trilogy)

by Jarod K. Anderson

There’s an endless autumn in me, scenting my thoughts like campfire smoke. I write for the weather I know.

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.

We can’t wait for our climax. We don’t have character arcs. We live and then we don’t. There is no culmination in success or failure. We are not curated collections of achievements or mishaps. Don’t fear you won’t be good enough. Just be here. Present in this dance between joy and sorrow. The plot is happening now. Today is the story of you and me.

For me, the outdoors changes sadness from a pain to be endured to a state to be experience. It’s still sadness. But in the context of green growing things under a limitless sky, sadness is simplified. Not a wound. A tile in the mosaic.

You can’t think your way out of depression any more than you can think your way out of drowning. Asking for a life-jacket is more important than knowing the physics of buoyancy.

They let us tame an ancient, devouring force of nature, older than life, and stick it in a little jar on the shelf. A candle is a pet god.

We are creatures born to thrive on the borderlands of ruin.

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

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