The Drama of the Atacama






In October of 2006 I traveled to northern Chile on a mission trip. My friend Ann was living there for a year, serving in mission through the United Methodist Church. She was based in the coastal city of Iquique, on the edge of the Atacama Desert, and had set up a project for us at the Insituto Agricola Kusayapu, located in Pachica. She took our small team to the school to live and work for a week. We traveled in a large van by way of one of the most perilous roads I've had the excitement of traveling.

 

The desert is vast, and said to have never received rainfall in some areas. It's like no other place I've ever been. I've spent most of my life within a day's drive of the verdant Rocky Mountains with their 12,000-14,000-foot peaks of stone and snow. I lived a short while in southwest New Mexico, and am well-acquainted with the vibrance of the Tucson, Arizona deserts. But the Atacama? I was awestruck by this desert's monochromatic, rounded mountains of dirt and copper. Rocks and boulders lie about. Some stones are stacked into cairns, standing alone miles beyond any other sign of civilization.   

I loved the other-worldliness of it, even (perhaps especially) in the dark night when starlight makes its soil glow like the moon. When I came back to Kansas, it began to sink in that I had sensed something sacred in the Atacama. 

 

And now, so very far away from it, I'm still moved by that feeling when I think about it just being there, unseen by most of the world. I can't touch it, or hear it, or see it except in my memory, imagination, and in my growing knowledge of the Creator.  

 

I simply can't explain how the Atacama has affected me. It's as though I've seen a long-ago earth in the making, bare yet revealing the handprint and heartbeat of God for any who seek to know Him. As though forever waiting, it lies silent beneath glowing stars and blazing sun. The desert is so fertile it would surely bloom into a profusion of flowers and food, an Eden, were rains to bless it.  Meanwhile, its soil carries the bones of ancient and modern people, as well as the tracks of those living good yet hard lives. 

 

 

 





A woman walks along the desert road--photo by BonnieB

 

 

An Incredibly Dark and Sacred Hour

I lie on bare earth that is the Atacama.

With God we are moving, Atacama and I, unheard and unseen.

No wisps of grass nor leafy trees grow here to rustle in the breeze.

It’s four a.m.

I stare into a moonless sky draped in sorrow-less black.

No grief can exist amid so many stars!

I long for, belong to, the mystery above.

A brilliance beyond starlight beckons soulkind to soar;

This soul, my soul, joyfully responds.

Surely I’m floating, detached from the world.

I am one with the Source and with all of creation

in this hour long before the desert sun rises--

when the heavens will have shifted

and a dozen satellites will have silently slid by.

Bonnie Hamilton Beuning 

©March 9, 2013