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The 52:52:52 project, launching on this site and on social media in 2025, will help you address 52 issues with 52 responses over 52 weeks.

This site addresses what's changing, at the personal, organisational and societal levels. You'll learn about key changes across more than 150 elements of life, from ageing and time, through nature and animals, to kindness and love...and much more besides, which will help you better prepare for related change in your own life.

Halcyon In Kaleidoscope features irregular and fragmentary writings - on ideas and values, places and people - which evolve over time into mini essais, paying humble homage to the peerless founder of the genre. The kaleidoscope is Halcyon's prime metaphor, viewing the world through ever-moving lenses.

A Mundane Comedy is Dom Kelleher's new book, which will be published in 2025. The introduction is available here and further extracts will appear on this site and on social media in the coming months.

Welcome

On the Veil

Veil

 

I have always been attracted by the veil, by seeing through a glass, darkly:

 

And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for

But heard, half heard, in the stillness

Between the two waves of the sea

- from Little Gidding, T.S. Eliot

 

When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse,
Out of the corner of my eye.
I turned to look but it was gone.
I cannot put my finger on it now

- from Comfortably Numb, Pink Floyd

 

Two notes of the chord, that's our full scope,
And to reach the chord is our life's hope,
But to name the chord is important to some,
So they give it a word and the word is Om.

- from The Word, Moody Blues

 

If we must define Faerie it must be as a mask. For they do not let us see the full truth of themselves or their realm. - Rev. H.R. Fade, 1898

— Hookland (@HooklandGuide) August 2, 2022

 

I realise living in Hookland that I've slipped into the other England. An out of the corner of your eye, just to your left England. A place where the strange is familiar, a Wicker Queen to guard a field is no longer oddity, but a signpost to say you're home

#MattAdams, 1981

 

See also:

 

Veil references are all around, if we could but perceive:

  • In Sculptor of nightmares, David Lynch’s memoir, we get a glimpse behind his creative curtain.
  • @HooklandGuide points to the erasure of name, to the failing of stone to hold memory.
  • psychologist described experiencing the momentary lifting of the veil, "For time to be meaningful, one must have purchase on a moment, and then another, and the temporal distance between the two can be measured, like the distance between two pitons on a rock face. But on the other side of the veil, the pitons cannot hold. There is only presence, and presence does not have a duration. Nor does presence, at this deepest expression, require a subject. As time collapsed, so too did any sense of a self that was separate from other things."
  • Maria Popova noted that, in Faith, Hope and Carnage, Nick Cave's conversation with Seán O’Hagan, he considers how music parts the veil between the known world and the mystery of being: "I think music, out of all that we can do, at least artistically, is the great indicator that something else is going on, something unexplained, because it allows us to experience genuine moments of transcendence...I think there is more going on than we can see or understand, and we need to find a way to lean into the mystery of things — the impossibility of things — and recognise the evident value in doing that, and summon the courage it requires to not always shrink back into the known mind."
  • Popova also noted that every once in a while, the curtain of the ordinary parts and we touch the miraculous - the sense that there is another world not beyond this one but within it, a mirror-world any glimpse of which returns our own more luminous and full of wonder. This can never be willed, but one can be willing for it - a willingness woven of two things: wakefulness to reality and openness to possibility.
  • The School of Life notes that veil-related words exist in many languages, e.g.

 

Further reading:

Timelines
Spaces
Signifiers
6 November 2024
Emotions

 

Please see below selected recent emotions-related change.

 

See also:

 

November 2024

Topics
Timelines
Spaces
Signifiers