1. Lucy
I believe in God when it’s only me and Lucy in our own green wood. The white tip of her tail. A kingfisher skimming the pond.
OK—and Barb and the kids and a few of our friends. Say a village.
But not all the faces blurring by on the freeway and the endless mothers jostling at the mall in their bulky parkas and the farmers coming in from the centuries to drink a cup of buttermilk, all their widows keeping lilacs on all their grassy graves—or the land and the birds and the beasts on the land, forest after forest primeval seething with snakes and bacteria for eons too glacial and cataclysmically slow even to contemplate, this one small planet whirling in the great mass of stars and the other galaxies blurring in that poster with the arrow pointing at this one tiny dot of light because that’s the only place you are and ever can be: you are here.
Where the kingfisher is gliding over the pond, and the mist is lifting, and Lucy is trotting along the shore on her four proud white paws.