A poem to reflect on as the year ends. Ursula Le Guin’s Infinitive:

We make too much history.

With or without us

there will be the silence

and the rocks and the far shining.

But what we need to be

is, oh, the small talk of swallows

in the evening over

dull water under willows.

To be we need to know the river

holds the salmon and the ocean

holds the whales as lightly

as the body holds the soul

in the present tense, in the present

tense.

(from Ursula Le Guin’s collection of poems, Sixty Odd, 1999)