Field Guide to the Haunted Forest (Haunted Forest Trilogy)

by Jarod K. Anderson

Poetry is an odd creature.

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.

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.

Home Safety Tip If you are awoken by a strange sound, make a stranger sound. If there’s no response, congratulations. You are the monster now. Get out of bed. You don’t need to sleep anymore. Now, all you need are the shadows and the endless whispers of dark corners.

Your choices outweigh your substance.

When you were born, your enthusiasm was a red flame atop a mountain of fuel. As you age, the fuel burns low. No one warns you. Yet, with intention, you can learn to feed that warming fire long after the fuel you were born with is ash on the wind. Be kind to yourself. Learn this. They say cut all the wood you think you will need for the night, then double it. Cut it during the daylight when fuel seems irrelevant. Dead limbs hanging low, sun-dried, hungry for fire. The night can be longer than we expect. The wind can be colder than we predict. The dark beneath the trees is absolute. Gather the fuel. Double it.

Our blood is red because of the iron we inherited from the Earth. Iron to bind the oxygen from trees and phytoplankton. Our blood and breath are hand-me-downs. The landscape is not scenery. It’s family. Notice the resemblance.

Our blood is mostly water. Iron to bind oxygen, built using the energy of sunlight. Water. Earth. Air. Fire. You may feel separated from the natural world, but just look at what you are. Look at how you live. You are not born to this place. You are born of this place.

Our bodies speak of contradiction. Bones and soft tissue. Teeth and lips. Sensitive resilience. What strong family resemblance we share with the landscapes that shaped us. Wind and stone. Rivers and oaks. This old dance of opposing forces creating a unified whole.

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. There is no culmination in success or failure. We are not curated collections of achievements or mishaps. 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.

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.

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.

All living things are the same living thing, a branching tree spreading from a shared past.

The entirety of your personality resides in an organ the size of a guinea pig encased in the living stone of your skull. 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.

The universe is an ongoing explosion. That’s where you live. In an explosion. Of course, we absolutely don’t know what living is. We don’t know what happens in the gulf between molecules and cells. Sometimes, atoms arranged in a certain way just get very, very haunted. That’s us. When an explosion explodes hard enough, dust wakes up and thinks about itself. And then writes about it.

The world will always be troubled. This is true. You deserve to feel happy and comfortable. This is also true. If you feel the first truth undermines the second, I offer this: Own a share of the virtuous work toward solutions. Don’t burden your worth with global outcomes. The good and the evil are happening concurrently. The choice to focus on the good is itself a way to defy the evil.