Field Guide to the Haunted Forest (Haunted Forest Trilogy)

by Jarod K. Anderson

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

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.

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 won’t see most of this planet. Under each rock. Beneath the water. Secrets of air and soil. Can you feel the joy behind this limitation? That there is always a new thing to discover, a new way to grow, is one of the sweetest parts of living, and it’s free and inexhaustible.

Flawless Things that are perfect are dead things. Empty things. A silence beyond change or challenge. An endpoint. A blank page. 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.

there is kindness that only you can choose to bring to the world.

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.