Walking into 2009
In the desert outside what has become Yuma, Arizona, people made a picture of God. They etched it into the surface of that hard bright land -- hands, feet, mouth, body, thin lines stretching wide and long across the emptiness, until the emptiness was filled. And day by day throughout the year God lay on that dry flatness and watched the people come and go, to the river, to the fields, hunting, dancing, telling stories, singing. Stepping across the line of God's foot a father would say something quiet to his son to mark their passage, and the son would respond in kind to his father. Once each year the people would gather to walk the body of God together, tracing the worn path from head to torso to foot, and then back, on the other side, to the head again. As they walked, perhaps, they cleared brush and small stones from the etching, restoring a short section erased by the summer winds, or in another place, a part of God's arm that had been washed away by the winter rain.