Field Guide to the Haunted Forest (Haunted Forest Trilogy)

by Jarod K. Anderson

Woodland You 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 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.

Sentry Kindness. Gentleness. Empathy. These things are fires shining in the forest night. They must be tended, but in tending them we are illuminated. We become a target for things that thrive in darkness. So, as ever, love is risk. And, as ever, worth the danger.

This and More The world is the sound of tree shapes decoded in a bat’s brain. The world is electric fields flexing in the mind of a shark. The world is a landscape of scents, recalled by a wolf like an old friend. The world is a mosaic of temperature shifts on the tip of a python’s snout. The world is you making meaning from marks on this page.

Dying Practice Every memory is a ghost and the house they haunt is you. 27-year-old me is gone from the world, but echoes of him remain. The same is true for 17-year-old me and 7-year-old me. Those people no longer exist. 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.

In the End You were a part of the sky on loan to a body. A part of the sea that awoke to thought. A part of the Earth who borrowed a name. The essential piece of you that lingers is the love and knowledge that you set in motion while you moved through the waking world. You are nature and nature will go on, but there is kindness that only you can choose to bring to the world.