Field Guide to the Haunted Forest (Haunted Forest Trilogy)

by Jarod K. Anderson

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. The pathways of your mind. Your dreams, dark and strange as sprouts curling beneath a flat rock. Your regret, bitter as the citrus rot of old cut grass. It’s the same as the nature you make time to love. That you practice loving. The forest. The meadow. The sweeping arm of a galaxy. You are as natural as any postcard landscape and deserve the same love.

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.

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.

The Text 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.

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.

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.

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

Nameless Remember this: Someone made-up the word “sky.” Likewise the word “wolf.” The words “leaf” and “raindrop.” Words are jewels. Precious to us, but small and finite. Forget these words and try to name these things anew. You will feel their scope and meaning weigh upon your mind. Pour a new word into the sky and see it fade like smoke. Look for the noise that equals the reality of wolves. How will you wrap such things up in syllables And set them upon your tongue.

Soft Our fingers are built more for feeling than fighting. Nerve endings prioritized over talons or claws. Our relatively modest strength. Our long, vulnerable road to adulthood. Our species’ success is the story of betting ...

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.

Unlearning Death When we die, they may bury us or collect our ashes, but remember this: from baby teeth to skin cells and everything in between, most of the matter that has worn your name is already spread throughout the world. We bury our remains in the soil of our lifetimes. Can you feel it? So many of the cells that have formed the community of your body have returned to nature. Most of the water that has fueled your life has returned to the sea. The substance of your form is not fixed. It flows like a river to and from the wilderness. Moss doesn’t think about being alive and mountains don’t consider themselves to be dead. Death has no place in the vocabulary of 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.