Field Guide to the Haunted Forest (Haunted Forest Trilogy)

by Jarod K. Anderson

Naming the River

The water in your body is just visiting. It was a thunderstorm a week ago. It will be an ocean soon enough. Most of your cells come and go like morning dew. We are more weather pattern than stone monument. Sunlight on mist. Summer lightning. Your choices outweigh your substance.

Millions of years ago it was in a dinosaur then a bird then a mouse and now you

So, as ever, love is risk. And, as ever, worth the danger.

Together in Absurdity The entirety of your personality resides in an organ the size of a guinea pig encased in the living stone of your skull. Your thoughts are spun like cotton candy from flesh and electricity and you expect to be perfect? All the billions of humans on Earth are living this same strange, awkward truth. There’s a reason we have empathy. We need it.

That’s us. When an explosion explodes hard enough, dust wakes up and thinks about itself.

Our goal was never safety. Our success is not measured in forever. Our years are seasoning, but the meal is meaning. Our task is to become our truest selves and to smile at the knowledge that we will not succeed.

Can you feel the joy behind this limitation? That there is always a new thing to discover,

Fossil The fossil is not the animal. The fossil is not the bones of the animal. The fossil is the stone’s memory of the bones of the animal. And that’s a poetry older than words.

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.

You are a wonderfully messy thing. An impossible thing made of salt and rainwater. Meat and electricity.

Crush Today you did things that humans 50 years ago wouldn’t believe and 200 years ago would struggle to imagine. You know the names of planets and the shapes of the bones inside you. You comprehend death and make art. You are a surpassingly strange animal, worthy of study. I love you.

Our fingers are built more for feeling than fighting.

Home An ant crosses your carpet. A spider weaves a pattern older than mammals beneath your stairs. Just nod, breathe, and think, good. It’s all still here. The forest, the mountains, the desert. At home in my home. The sterile white box is the stranger. Not the ant. Not the spider.

“Love is just chemicals.” Yeah? So is the churning inferno of the sun. So is the bedrock of the earth. So is the living fountain of a blooming cherry tree. If you need to call upon the word “magic” to fully appreciate the beauty of all that which is vivid and real, do so. Truth and fact are sisters, not twins.

One dangerous illusion of modernity is the link between cost and value.

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

We who stay awake are witnesses to the dormant, secret times. Seasonally nocturnal.

We keep watch through the cold and dark.

This world is not here for us. We are simply fortunate to live here.

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