My regular posting routine has been interrupted seriously by this trip to Ireland and the U.K. And my publishing is going to get worse.

 

Internet access overseas is spotty, and when I haven't been in law school or maritime safety classes, I've devoted my free time to being a stupid American tourist or devouring fiction like American Tabloid by James Ellroy and The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas (mentioned in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist and Alan Moore's V for Vendetta).

 

So, this week I spent at Warsash Maritime Academy earning my STCW '95 basic marine safety certificate (hence the basic firefighting). Yep, I am boarding a 46-meter yacht to work as a deckhand on a delivery to Thailand through the Suez Canal and possibly Sri Lanka. And I am certain there will be many other stops in between.

 

We don't have a precise departure date, but I am leaving for Florida on Aug. 6 to jump on board. I will continue to write my weekly column for the dead tree media known as the Hartford News. When and where I can post from ports, I will.

 

But traveling always makes me think. Like about Stonehenge, which I visited this past Sunday on my way to Warsash.

 

Thousands of people circled around the giant obelisks, placed there some 5,000 years ago by people we don't know, for reasons we don't know. Because no records survive, we don't know if they employed mathematics or written language to accomplish the task.

 

For certain, our ancestors lacked diesel engines, and cranes and chains to put these rocks in place. The theory is that the prehistoric folk put rocks on boats then carried them miles and miles inland to make a temple that we now worship at today.

 

It's not the God is great! Praise Allah! Praise Jesus! Lawd! Lawd! Lawd! kind of reverence. The reverence I saw and experienced was that awe of humankind itself, awe of human community and devotion, awe of mystery of humanity and its unknown potential and untapped reserves of power.

 

This Stonehenge society spent a considerable amount of energy on building a circle for the sun, and extolling their relationship to the cosmos. But when we go there, we don't pay homage to the sun, we pay honor to the people who built it.

 

We wonder what their monuments mean. Put in terms of mass media, what is the message of the Stonehenge society? What are they trying to communicate to us across the millenia?

 

Maybe that the summer and winter solstice are the most important days of the year, and you should respect them? It is the same message the tomb builders in Ireland at New Grange put forward.

 

Or maybe that when you feel something that gives you life, you should respect it, and go to great, even superhuman lengths to praise its power in your existence. That you should devote your energies to something that 5,000 years from now, people will marvel at and say, gosh, those people were amazing for being able to move the earth like that to celebrate heaven.