Field Guide to the Haunted Forest

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.

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

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 inexhaustable.

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.

When we die, they may bury us or collect our ashes, but remember this: from baby teeth to skin cells and everything in between, most of the matter that has worn your name is already spread throughout the world. We bury our remains in the soil of our lifetimes. Can you feel it? So many of the cells that have formed the community of your body have returned to nature. Most of the water that has fueled your life has returned to the sea. The substance of your form is not fixed. It flows like a river to and from the wilderness.

If you whisper a secret to a candle flame, then all fire everywhere will know that secret. The words will crackle in every campfire and churn like an ocean deep in the bell of the Earth. Fire will translate your words to smoke and ash, telling no one but the sky.

SIT WITH ME I’m not trying to write a tailored suit. I’m trying to write boot socks, warm from the dryer. There’s an endless autumn in me, scenting my thoughts like campfire smoke. I write for the weather I know.

The Truth About Owls You flinch at leaf shadows tumbling across your driveway and the shadows notice you flinching. The thought gets under their skin, starts them asking questions to your back as you walk away. "Are we something to fear?" Two nights later, the shadows pile into three dimensions, hop twice, and fly off on soundless wings.

Weigh a leaf in your palm. Imperceptible. A green whisper. A cool nothing. Weigh it again in your lungs, with the iron in your blood. Feel your genes clinging to those soft green cells like ivy on an oak.

Spoiler Alert I just read ahead to the last page of your life and it turns out that you were always worthy of love and hope and surpassing kindness.

ECONOMICS We borrow our atoms. The universe owns them. The universe borrows our love and wonder. Those belong to us.

You are nature and nature will go on, but there is kindness that only you can choose to bring to the world.

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.

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.

These sounds belong to the same unfinished poem as you and your fistful of years like copper coins. It wouldn’t be poetry without you.