Dear Friends,

And Friends of friends.

My first Zen teacher would say, “No beginning, no end.” And here I am, inviting you into a beginning.

Anonymous Forest has lived in my imagination for years—before I knew it was a brand, before I tended land.

Like many of us, my life was uprooted during COVID. I had been a committed Zen practitioner, assuming I would follow the path I’d seen before me: therapist to zen teacher. And then my spiritual community of years collapsed. The places where I practiced closed their doors.

As the world shut down, my practice turned to the forest—hidden old-growth groves. I wandered off trail and practiced something I didn’t yet understand.

Lying on the earth, I would dissolve into the roots below, breathing from root to canopy. My nervous system stretched into something vast.

A field of immense complexity and care.

And the trees began to tell me stories—stories of tending the sick and staying connected through fire, drought and storm. Stories of what it means to be a community of distributed care.

In those cathedrals of wonder, I began to imagine a sanctuary of wild practice. A contemplative forest.

And maybe, it wasn’t just my imagination, maybe it was the forest dreaming with me. Who’s to say what moves through us?

One request came clear: Remember.

I asked, “Remember what?” 

The forest replied, “Only you can remember. You are human. We are forest. We have not forgotten who we are. But you have.”

A vow slowly opened in my heart: to spend my life tending a forest. Tending to what is forgotten in me. What has been lost. To remember.

Before the land had a name, Skyhorse Sanctuary filled my dreams. Over the years, it unfolded, as imagined things do. I’ve found myself living among redwoods, tucked above the wild coast of Northern California.

I found places of practice — hollowed-out old growth stumps to hold my rage. Cliffs to cast off parts of myself I could no longer carry. Ancient cedars of ancestral memory. And still more to be discovered.

A contemplative forest began to weave its trails through the wild overgrowth.

And now I feel the weight. The weight of the long-now. The long-vow.

While wandering the forest my vow took shape,

To create the legal, economic, and social conditions for intergenerational forest stewardship.

An old growth church.

There are real needs: Supporting the regeneration of the forest.

And deeper needs still:

What are the social rituals? The shared practices of rupture and repair? What allows a community to endure around a shared goal for centuries?

I don’t have answers. Only a foolish commitment.

In my early years on the land, I wrestled with how to let it grow in its own time—without forcing it to become something it wasn’t ready to be, and without turning away those asking to experience it.

Anonymous Forest emerged from this tension: protecting the forest’s timing while resourcing the structures it will one day need.

Anonymous Forest is the forest, disguised as a company. Capital reimagined to tend a singular forest.

The futures we long for need our support now. Not to serve the urgency of the present—but to nurture what is not yet here.

I live inside the tension of an impossible future I’ve chosen to serve. 

And the human in me struggles to ask for help. I can speak of long vows, commitment to unimaginable futures. And it is hard for me to be a node in this network of humaning, signaling for help.

What is community if someone doesn’t ask for help? 

And I need your help.

I have three asks…

1 | Presence

Share your information, and we will reach out when we formally launch later in the year. 

2 | Represent

Let the forest walk in the world. Let your commodified body represnt a more beautiful future. A logo for the land.

Right now, it’s a shirt and a hat—limited releases to fund the launch and, if enough people say yes, some early forest work.

In time, each drop will fund specific projects on the land - like a sweatshirt funding the first guest dwellings — a small eco-village for visitors to Skyhorse Sanctuary.

3 | Propagate

This is the most vital. We have no marketing. We do not wish to be viral. We will grow like a forest does—from connection to connection. We will not grow through the games of algorithmic attention.

Please pass this to those who might resonate.

This page is hidden. It only lives if you pass it on. 

May the many needed futures weave themselves through us.

For those yet to come.

With Love, 

Brandon