No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

by Ursula K. Le Guin

There are people who need help. There are people who deny it, saying that God helps those who help themselves and the poor and the unemployed are merely shiftless slackers sponging on a nanny government. There are people who don’t deny poverty, but they don’t want to know about it because it’s all so terrible and what can you do? And then there are people who help.

When we had an artificial tree, its nonentity made me realize what I feel about a living tree, not only the splendid, big, tall Christmas trees we used to have when I was a child and when my children were children, but a little one too—that it is as much a presence in a room as a person or an animal. An unmoving presence that says nothing, but is there. A very taciturn visitor from Norway, perhaps. Speaking no English, entirely undemanding, wanting nothing but a drink of water every few days. Restful. A pleasure to look at. Holding darkness in it, a forest darkness, in the green arms held out so calmly, steadily, without effort.

How does a child arrange a vast world that is always turning out new stuff? She does it the best she can, and doesn’t bother with what she can’t until she has to. That is my Theory of Child Development.

I am appalled by my ignorance. Yet it had its own logic. I didn’t have to drive the bus, after all. I was a kid, carted around by adults the ways kids are. I had an adequate arrangement of the world, a sufficient understanding of my position, for my needs at the time. No wonder kids always ask, “Are we there yet?” Because they are there. It’s just the harried parents who aren’t, who have to have all this huge distance between things and have to drive and drive and drive to get to there. That makes no sense to a kid. Maybe that’s why they can’t see scenery. Scenery is between where they are. It takes years to learn to live between, and thus to get the relationships between things arranged, to make sense of them.

Lying, of course, isn’t the same as pretending. Leila and a grownup might have a fine time imagining the horsies in the bedroom, with Hank hogging all the blankets and Perla kicking him and Mel saying, Where’s the hay? But for this to work as imagination, the child has to know that the horsies are in fact in the horse barn. In this sense, truth to fact, insofar as we know what fact is, must come first. The child has to be able to trust what she’s told. Her belief must be honored by our honesty.

Incredulity is unlovable. I am opening my mouth now because I am too old to be lovable, but still incredulous when I hear people—adults!—mourning over the awful day they found out that Santa Claus wasn’t real.

To see a person who’s lived only two years in this world seeking and finding her way in it, perfectly trusting, having her trust rewarded with truth, and accepting it—that was a lovely thing to see. What it made me think about above all is how incredibly much we learn between our birthday and last day—from where the horsies live to the origin of the stars. How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us.

The sacred and the comic are not that far apart, something the Pueblo Indians seem to know better than most of us do.

“Gated communities” are not communities in any sense of the word I understand.

As my eyes begin to have to look away from the slow intolerable brightening I close them and inside the lids see the long curve of the ridge dark red, the darkest red: above it a band of green, the purest green. Each time I look and close my eyes again, the band of green grows wider, burning clear, unmitigated fire of emerald. Then at its center appears a circle of pale, unearthly blue. I open my eyes and see the source, the sun, one glance, and look down blinded, humble, to the earth, the dull black lava pavement of the path. The warmth of the sun is on my face as soon as its light is.

The old trees released their darkness finally.

It is risen. It is risen in beauty. The reliable miracle, a couple of minutes later and a little farther south each day. The lesser miracle, the brief transubstantiation of black lava into glimmering red-violet and blue-green light in my observing and delighted eyes, has occurred, is over. The rough black rock keeps its secret. The daily hummingbird assaults existence with improbability. He is drawn to my orange tea mug. The big black heavy cattle munch and breathe and gaze, each with its following of small black birds. All living things work hard to make their living. I sit on the rough black steps and try to tell the secret that they keep. But I cannot. They keep it.

Hundreds of blackbirds gathered in the pastures south of the house, vanishing completely in the tall grass, then rising out of it in ripples and billows, or streaming and streaming up into a single tree up under the ridge till its lower branches were blacker with birds than green with leaves, then flowing down away from it into the reeds and out across the air in a single, flickering, particulate wave. What is entity?