The Ceiba That Holds Three Worlds

That morning at Finca El Paraíso, Carlos Andrés Matas Contreras was walking alone through the forest when a movement among the branches caught his eye. Six tití monkeys — he counted them one by one — moving with that nervous agility that defines them, leaping from tree to tree as if the forest belonged to them, which in a certain sense it does. But the real discovery of the day was a ceiba that seemed to have summoned them all. Right there, at that very GPS point that Carlos Andrés kept sending before he could find the words to describe what he was seeing, three iguanas rested on the branches with the stillness of creatures who have occupied the same spot for centuries. And closer to the trunk, two woodcreepers moved up and down in search of insects beneath the bark, indifferent to the record being made of them. It all happened in a single moment and a single place: tití monkeys, iguanas, and woodcreepers sharing the shade of a ceiba in El Paraíso. Carlos Andrés managed to pull out his camera and capture the video before each of them went their separate ways.