Field Guide to the Haunted Forest (Haunted Forest Trilogy)

by Jarod K. Anderson

Limits 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.

Blueprint If you write out the basic facts of trees, but framed as technology, it sounds like impossible sci-fi nonsense. Self-replicating, solar-powered machines that synthesize carbon dioxide and rainwater into oxygen and sturdy building materials on a planetary scale. What do we make that compares?

We all know facts that are as inert as chalk dust, but some knowledge is medicine.

Pact Iron in birds’ inner ears helps them navigate using the Earth’s magnetic field. In other words, the birds carry within them a piece of the Earth, a talisman, which speaks to the Earth and whispers its knowledge back to the birds.

The essential piece of you that lingers is the love and knowledge that you set in motion while you moved through the waking world.

A Time for Choice You are the mountain, but awake. You are the rain, but breathing. You are the forest, but unanchored. You are the soil, but with choice. You are the sunlight, but dreaming. Soon, you will be these things again. Mountain. Rain. Forest. Sunlight. So, what will you do until then?

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.