Description

For a life to be a life, by very definition, it needs to involve other people – to care for them, to love them, to labour with them. It is to reach heaven with others. I am asking you to help me do this here and now. What I want you to do is to make your own book from this book. I want you to select 84 sections, one for every year it takes to live a good life. You might select your favourite lottery numbers or consult an astrology book or think deeply, and, all in order to talk with others about which sections to use. In this task I want you to know that we have made a book together and that we should allow as many different editions to proliferate as possible. You and I are companions in our lives from now and forever. I thank you for giving me this because I am buried in the ground or burnt to ash or floating in the ocean of myth. In this wood and field, in this book, in our togetherness make your own life something to live for.

ROBERT WOOD is interested in love, community, and nature. He has been an editor, unionist, and teacher, and volunteered for prisoners, refugees, and student activists. Robert lives in Boorloo on Noongar Country in the East Indian Ocean.

Reviews

Shaiq Ali in The Sunflower Collective

A Guide to Field and Wood [] is an attempt to write a universal literature, a creation of a new legend, one where our absolute knowledge counts for nothing, where our origin is told through new objects, relations and permutations. There are no names in the text, no defined places, everything comes across to us as the narrator progresses, nothing is a given. Further, against the tendency to acclimatise nature to ourselves, his Herculean task is to acculturate himself to the natural, both human and non-human.