An ecosystem reveals its integrity long before the canopy closes. Earliest signals reveal themselves as fungal threads, soil chemistry shifts, and the return of a keystone species. Easy to miss when we zoom out and focus on the landscape instead of the lineage. But nature speaks in the margins. Once you learn to read those spaces, coherence becomes visible. You stop seeing a collection of trees and start seeing the underlying structure allowing the system to function. Pattern literacy is the practice of noticing what has always been there, waiting to be clarified.