Field Guide to the Haunted Forest (Haunted Forest Trilogy)

by Jarod K. Anderson

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.

You are as natural as any postcard landscape and deserve the same love.

Naming the River The water in your body is just visiting. It was a thunderstorm a week ago. It will be an ocean soon enough. Most of your cells come and go like morning dew. We are more weather pattern than stone monument. Sunlight on mist. Summer lightning. Your choices outweigh your substance.

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.

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.

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.

If you whisper a secret to a candle flame, then all fire everywhere will know that secret.

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

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 Big Bang 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....

Bats can hear shapes. Plants can eat light. Bees can dance maps.

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?

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.

Candle Facts #2 A lit candle is a tiny, flickering animal standing on top of all the food it will eat in its lifetime. A candle is a leash. They let us tame an ancient, devouring force of nature, older than life, and st...

It’s easy to shrink your world to what you can see. But thankfully, somewhere, there are orcas.