On my back I see the elite of the forest, a select scattering of eye-catching sun-dappled green on blue, supported beneath by dark, anonymous branches.  I sit up and my view scrolls to see branches merge into trunks overshadowed by those above them.  Shorter trunks aspiring to join the ranks of the elite crowd close here, reaching out their own leaves to grasp at the sun not gobbled up by those above.  Their shadows spread wide, permitting only a fraction of the light to filter to the ground where competition among the bushes and seedlings and flowers and grass is more desperate.  Desperate because light isn’t a matter of aspiration or privilege here, but of survival as each small leaf strains for whatever golden scrap it can reach.  Even on the brightest days it can be dark, and it gets darker as I look lower, but in that darkness even the smallest pool of light in a forgotten corner can offer the color of hope.