Field Guide to the Haunted Forest (Haunted Forest Trilogy)

by Jarod K. Anderson

There’s an endless autumn in me, scenting my thoughts like campfire smoke.

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.

You were once very much part of your mother’s body. The same is true for your mother and her mother and so on back to the beginning. It’s a biological chain that stretches back to the first living cell awakening in a young ocean millions of years before the first spoken name. We are links in that chain. Can you feel its weight? A clear path back to ancient waters. You are here. In modernity. As familiar as thirst. Just remember what else you are. Your mother. Her mother. The ancient seas beneath a thin, new sky.

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 and breath are hand-me-downs. The landscape is not scenery. It’s family.

You are not born to this place. You are born of this place.

Unscripted 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.

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.

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.

I wish I could wander back through my ancestors like a steppingstone path. To Ireland. To Africa. Past organisms that were never named by humans. To the sunlit waters where life began to feel its own strange power. To the forest of hands that lifted me up into my own simple life. I wish I could know the whole, so I could love it more completely.

Fire will translate your words to smoke and ash, telling no one but the sky.

Many Hands 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.

You are the flame racing down the fuse.

Potential You can be still while the world is whirling. You can be silent while your heart is thundering. You can be alone while your memory is teeming. You can live forever in the span of a moment. You can grow kindness in the soil of hatred. You can decide purpose. You can decide victory.

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.

It wouldn’t be poetry without you.

Fossil The fossil is not the animal. The fossil is not the bones of the animal. The fossil is the stone’s memory of the bones of the animal. And that’s a poetry older than words.

Thanks to Birds Birds are dinosaurs who shrugged off a couple apocalypses. Some eat bone marrow. Some drink nectar. They outswim fish in the sea. They smile politely at gravity’s demands. I am grateful to see them. I am grateful to feed them. I am grateful to know them.

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.

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 on understanding over brutality. It’s the wise, patient bet.