Field Guide to the Haunted Forest (Haunted Forest Trilogy)

by Jarod K. Anderson

Technically Speaking You can look at any human life as the sum of a complex collection of chemical reactions, in much the same way as you can look at any beautiful painting as a simple collection of pigments, Which is to say, you can miss the point of anything.

If you are awoken by a strange sound, make a stranger sound. If there’s no response, congratulations. You are the monster now.

Our blood and breath are hand-me-downs. The landscape is not scenery. It’s family. Notice the resemblance.

We all consume so many purposefully crafted stories that it’s easy to forget life doesn’t follow conventional narrative structure. We can’t wait for our climax. We don’t have character arcs. We live and then we don’t.

I resisted trying therapy for a long time because I thought I was too smart for it. Here’s the thing. 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.

You are a unique sentence built from the alphabet of our universe. The letters were here before you and the story will march on long after you’ve been read, but you will forever be a part of the definitive text of existence. It’s too late for you not to matter.

We become a target for things that thrive in darkness. So, as ever, love is risk. And, as ever, worth the danger.

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.

When an explosion explodes hard enough, dust wakes up and thinks about itself. And then writes about it.

The good and the evil are happening concurrently. The choice to focus on the good is itself a way to defy the evil.

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.

Birds are dinosaurs who shrugged off a couple apocalypses.

Somewhere, there are orcas. I’m in my little gray house in Ohio surrounded by the stale air of winter indoors, but somewhere there are orcas. It’s an easy fact to forget. It’s easy to shrink your world to what you can see. But thankfully, somewhere, there are orcas.

You are a wonderfully messy thing. An impossible thing made of salt and rainwater. Meat and electricity. A dream with teeth. You’re too good for perfection.

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

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.

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