In Megalithic Sites

by Gary White

I place my hand over your hand print and trace your spirals, painstakingly cut in the hardest stone you could find, without benefit of power tools. I wonder what messages you intended to send and what language you were writing. What did you see and experience deep in the caves and caverns you found and built all over the landscape of Europe and the British Isles? Did you see that the stones were just entries into other realms and were your spirals and zigzags the tracings of what you saw there?

Or were they just graffiti? “Harry + Sally—True Love;” “Kilroy was here;” “What I think, you will think;” or these little pebbles I’m dredging up out of my own memories, worn smooth in the telling and retelling to myself and others?

This much I know: it was an insult for me to ever think of you as primitive and stupid. An insult to you and an insult to me, because we are not so distant relatives, you and me. For me, whose feet have never truly known the earth and whose eyes have never truly mapped the sky to look down on you whose knowledge of such things so eclipses mine is the true stupidity and I freely acknowledge it to you now.

I have had the map of my own DNA drawn. I see my essential self moving slowly up out of Africa, through the Middle East, and across the map of Europe to finally leap to these shores just a few generations ago. Yes, you and me, we are one. Your flesh is my flesh. “We are family.”

So I place my hand again over your hand print and say, “Hail and farewell, brother and sister.” I think that a glimmer of understanding is beginning to develop in our collective consciousness here and in this time. We have all of us passed this way and will continue so long as the earth is hospitable to our species. Is that what you are trying to tell me? I get the message, loud and clear.