Undercurrents

I'm looking up from the base of a beech tree, the canopy of young leaves newly unfurled like paper flowers in water.

Directly above me, ten feet up the trunk, is an enormous bracket fungus well over two feet across. It's been growing slowly and inexorably for several years on a dead portion of the tree. During that time the beech foliage has come and gone as the seasons pass, sprinting hare-like from bud burst to final fall. The fungal tortoise has its own gradual pace and will endure many years to come, perhaps the final victor of the competition for survival. For now though the two organisms seem yoked together, the bracket exploiting the rotten wood and the tree reliant, though its root system, on a myriad of microscopic fungi that provide it with nutrients.
Such is the complex chronology of the natural world.