Welcome to Inner Grain of Sand

Welcome to my web site .. Continued I can’t make this introduction to the site into a complete autobiography so will cover the last

30 years even more briefly by mentioning simple highlights and topics such as the groups

and organisations I’ve been involved with and some of the projects that have occupied my

time. Inner work has included Trancendental Meditation, Arica, Druidry, Reiki Integral

Psychology, Process Oriented Psychology, Taoism, Buddhism and Ken Wilber’s Integral

Psychology. The Oak Dragon camps and Mayfield Group meetings have been significant parts of my life

since the mid 80’s. Synectics and communication in Talking Stick circles has led to my

strong belief in the capacity of properly structured sharing groups to resolve problems and

find concensual agreements. Running parallel to these things other interests have been work

on lost Roman roads and canals, the archaeology of pre Celtic boats and housing,

sundialling, labyrinths, astronomy and astrology etc etc. As much as possible of all this will

appear in the various “pages” of the site and some will be inferred from the interconnections

between them. I’ve run workshops and taught some of this material in lectures and informal meditation

groups. Other elements have been published in special interest magazines but most of it has

moved with me from house to house in files and cardboard boxes waiting for the right

moment to see the light of day. Well, like dawn on the winter solstice at New Grange, light is

shining into the inner chamber. I have a sense that, from time to time, some of these ideas

were more of an inspiration than the result of painstaking research. Yet, elements like the

Stonehenge “0” work took years of revisiting and tramping round the countryside to verify

the initial concepts. Luckily insights come when the prior groundwork has been done.

Copious reading, integration of different fields of enquiry and, to some extent, lateral

thinking is required. There’s plenty of that here.

Along with the written research and information there are images of various sorts,

photographs, diagrams, pages from the notebooks and pictures of the rugs I’ve been making

over many years, mostly one rug per year. Each of them can and many have formed the basis for a teaching workshop with the rug on the floor and the group sitting round it. Sometimes I

describe them as pretty diagrams but they actually embody a lot of thinking and research

work condensed into symbolic form. That’s another area of interest for me and the

fascination of symbolic communication systems has created another of the branches on my

Lifetree. They often help to clarify complex belief and thought patterns and also act as

mnemonics for more complex associations.

Stemming from my work with the astronomical elements in henge monuments and

megalithic structures I’ve become increasingly interested in the way these sites have

alignments with calendrical significance built into them. Clearly this gives them ritual

significance. The piece on the Star Goddess at Avebury developed from wondering about an

observation southwards across the henge to the top of Silbury hill from a scoop in the bank

beside the northern entrance. All the work on “Stonehenge O” started from the simple sight

of the midsummer sun setting over the “mountains” above St David’s in Pembrokeshire. At

Danebury the whole vision of the ring of horizon markers for a ritual calendar was sparked

by wondering why the earliest Bronze Age users of this hilltop site had put up metre wide

posts close to the tumulus by the eastern gate of the later Iron Age hill fort.

There’s a lot of fun to be had from picking up threads of information and seeing where they lead. Like Ariadne’s clew for Theseus in the labyrinth they can lead to the heart of a mystery.