FOREST SUCCESSION

From the hut's porch, seated in a classic red, plastic, curve-backed Disfruta Coca-Cola chair next to its matching red table-- disfruta means "enjoy" -- the view across the deep pit is one of a young forest. No tree trunk is thicker than my arm, and the trees rise no higher than the hut's ridge.

The view brings to mind the day I stood atop the water tower seeing that the whole ranch was covered with trees a little lower and paler than those along the property's perimeter. That's because trees on the ranch are younger. Fifteen years ago when the owner bought the property, it had just been burnt in accordance with Maya slash-and-burn technology.

The ranch's yearly burning ended then. Among the weeds covering the ranch the next rainy season were untold numbers of germinating Wild Tamarind seedlings that by the second rainy season mantled the entire ranch with fast-growing, chest-high Wild Tamarind saplings. By the third rainy season the ranch's vegetation already looked like a young forest, but one consisting of little more than Wild Tamarind.

Now, sitting in my red Coca-Cola chair, at eye level from my Coca-Cola seat on the hut's porch I see Whiteseed Manga, Grape Tree, Yucatan Persimmon, Yucatan Caesalpinia, Limestone Senna and other species specially adapted to thin, dry soil atop limestone bedrock. However, I don't see a single ferny-looking, acacia-like Wild Tamarind's leaf. This, despite the forest's canopy being thick with them. That's because during those early days of the forest's formation, young Wild Tamarind trees shaded the ground and sheltered it from drying-out wind. That created a welcoming environment for seeds of many tree species to sprout, but under such conditions Wild Tamarind seedlings can't compete.

So, fifteen years ago, Wild Tamarind was a "pioneer species," a kind of first responder to the awful wound that decades of ranching and yearly burning had inflicted on the natural environment here. Conceivably someday yet other species than what I see now will form a "climax community" here atop my knoll. At that time, the same species forming the canopy will be those emerging as seedlings on the forest floor, and the forest will be "in equilibrium."

I like to sit in the red plastic Coca-Cola chair seeing and thinking about all this -- about the impulse and genius causing the forest irresistibly to evolve toward ever more diverse assemblages of species, with ever more numerous and sophisticated interactions among individuals and species, the forest structure over time ever more complex, investing more and more energy in maintaining its ever more intricately interrelating nutrient cycles and cycles of flowering, fruiting and going dormant, while at the same time always responding to populations of pollinators, hungry herbivores, diseases, all with their own, interrelating and evolving systems, on and on and on...

My mind isn't adequate for grasping more than the fundamentals of what's going on, but I sense that the whole thing is most meaningful to me when I experience it less intellectually than symphonically, and less symphonically than spiritually. Moreover, this forest's basic pattern of development seems to be harmonious with the blossoming and forthcoming of the whole Universe. I think of the forest at teaching how to conduct my own life, because -- as much as anything else I know -- this forest and its universally repeated patterns reveal what the Universal Creative Impulse wishes of its creations.

Forest succession is just one such teaching pattern. There's also the pattern of evolution of Life on Earth from simple to complex, and -- remembering that everything is natural -- the evolution of music from its first bangings to Beethoven and Bach, of the history of computer science from abacus to today's supercomputers, the history of any large, complex human community from its first pioneer no now, on and on.

Teaching patterns are everywhere. One just needs a red plastic Coke chair, or something like it, and the will to spend time paying attention, and reflecting on what's beheld.