The Chronicles of the Sky-Veil: Chapter VIII
The Path from Grounds to Gleam
The Chronicles of the Sky-Veil is a mythopoetic journey through the silence between worlds.
In The Chronicles of the Sky-Veil, the nameless man on the Journey Across the Sky-Veil writes his journal in the empty book given to him mysteriously in a satchel while sleeping. He reveals his thoughts as the Journey unfolds. In The Chronicles, the reader discovers the man’s hidden thoughts and the remembrances transforming him from a wanderer to an heir of the Majestic Highlands.
This is not sentimentality or mere imagination. It is not theology or philosophy. It is the story of the nameless man’s remembrance-in-the-world—told in myth, rooted in mystery. His is a journey from the Grey-Beneath to the Highlands of Majesty, through rose and flame, shield and crown.
From the Nameless Man’s Chronicles of the Sky-Veil1
There were moments in the Sky-Veil when a path did not appear before me, but as a shimmering nearness2 within me. It did not unfold in space but as a clearing in my being where the past, future, and present merged into a single meaning. I did not merely walk such a path—I embraced it, not with the feet, but with the heart. For this was the trail of another drawing me to themselves, one who walked long before, across fire and shadow, through fields never seen yet never forgotten.
I came upon such a path not through vision but through resonance.3 The saint’s footsteps were faint at first—barely perceptible across the veils of time and story. But I sensed them. And in sensing, I began to follow. Not by knowing where I was going, but by allowing her way of going to shape the ground beneath my own.
It was Aphrodite who first awakened this nearness of the saint in me. She whispered through the rose-blown wind of remembrance,4 not of facts but of forms—of a presence,5 soft yet unyielding, that longed to be traced. Through her gentle guidance, I did not learn where to go—I learned how to yearn toward that going.
But it was not enough to sense. To truly follow across the Sky-Veil, I had to yield—not only to the shape and direction of the path, but to the soil from which it rose—its grounding. It was Athena who taught me this. She led me into the grounds of the saint drawing me—the deep reasons, the elemental forces, the flame-lit inner chambers of thought that gave rise to the path’s form. I was to learn not simply where my hidden saint went, but why she went there. I was to retrace her steps from grounds to glittering gleam, from first intuition to final surrender.
For her part, Athena did not demand imitation; she was the resonance of the one drawing me, not the one herself. Through Athena’s light of heraldry,6 I entered the internal horizon of the saint I followed—not as scholar or seer, but as a fellow traveler willing to be gripped. For I had to be bested by the ground of the other before I could trace its conclusion. And if not bested, then freed—but only by first walking through.
There was an order to this mystery. I traced the path through a kingdom beyond mere imagination, beyond a plot of my own. Hera stood nearby in silence, her crown radiant above the hills of remembrance. She revealed to me that this was no mere path of insight in my consciousness, but of self-giving loyalty—of dynasty. To trace another across the Veil was not only to understand them but to become kin in the realm they served, to become royal family. Hera did not teach me about my saint. She taught me how to belong to her, and with her, to the kingdom.
And thus, through the harmonized nearness of these three, the Sky-Veil disclosed what I had once called empathic devotion—being drawn through the grounds another traveled with hearts and minds united. But it was no longer an idea or concept. It was the very nearness of Being in the world with my saint. It was the mysterious correspondence of hearts across the threshold. A union not bound by time, nor by logical deduction, but by shared Being—softly unveiled and fiercely guarded.
In that luminous tracing, I followed my veiled saint to the pearl of great price. Not by force, but by fidelity and the sparkling heraldry of Aphrodite, Athena, and Hera. Not by reason alone, but by resonance. The path was not one I forged, but one I remembered. And I who followed it did not do so alone—for the Sky-Veil weaved the footsteps of the past and those to come into the breath of now.
Enjoy Queen Hera (Thrones in the Mist) from my album The Sky-Veil, available on my music site.
Lyrics ©Walter Emerson Adams. Music and vocals by Suno ©Walter Emerson Adams.
Into the Lands Between The Sky-Veil’s air thinned down Its paths rose up unseen She of the Ox-Eyes and Crown “Your longing is not lost” Queen Hera, royal told Around her hills embossed Her throne in mists of gold Beyond her, sunlit pools A seat of might, cloud-bound In majesty, she rules She of the Ox-Eyes and Crown “It waits to be recalled” Queen Hera, august voiced The name and hope that’s trawled Ascending, heights rejoiced
✦ Sky-Veil - The threshold of Being in this mythopoetic cosmology, representing the veil between the mundane, flat world of day-to-day existence and the enchanting retrieval of Being—between symbol and meaning, longing and fulfillment. The Sky-Veil refers to this as moving from “forgetfulness” (flat world) to “remembrance” (enchantment gleaming around the divine we have always known but forgotten). It is across the Sky-Veil that hypostatic heralds of Being—embodied symbolically by the goddesses—shimmer, and through which the soul journeys in mythic wonder toward divine encounter. Saints dwell beyond the veil in the Highlands of Majesty and the contemplative Grove Beyond; the goddesses, as “hypostatic emergences” foreshadowing divine virtues, herald through the liminal “space” in the world we encounter.
✦ Nearness - Not spatial proximity but a mode of disclosure—the drawing-near of Being itself in moments of unveiled significance. It conveys a presence that is not fully present, a proximity that is not measurable, but rather experienced in the heart’s intuition and the soul’s readiness.
In Heideggerian terms, nearness belongs to the mystery of Being’s self-showing (aletheia). It is the threshold where the veil stirs but does not part, where the divine does not arrive as an object but becomes luminously felt. Nearness is not what we possess but what approaches us, like the breeze that carries meaning without language. It is the quiet shimmer before revelation—the silent resonance that moves before the Word.
In the Sky-Veil, nearness is the air the wanderer breathes when the heralds pass by, the fragrance of the rose before it is seen, the warmth of the flame before it is touched. It is the grace of Being brushing against the soul, unseizing, ungraspable, yet unmistakably there.
✦ Resonances of Being - Subtle unveilings of presence that shimmer across the landscape of experience—traceless traces of the nearness of Being. These are not figures of imagination or fragments of archetypal consciousness, but events of nearness, moments in which the hidden truth of one’s life quietly resounds through presence.
✦ Remember/Remembrance - To remember is not to recall facts or events, but to stand again in the nearness of what is.
In the Sky-Veil, Remembrance is not the retrieval of memories from a personal or collective unconscious. Rather, it is the unconcealing of what has always been—the letting-be of Being—in the manner of Heidegger’s Ereignis, or the event of disclosure. To remember is to dwell where Being has touched us and where the meaning of one’s path begins to shine through the fog of exile.
The wanderers of the Dark Forest or Grey-Beneath do not lack recall; they lack remembrance of what is near. And when a herald shines, it is not a call to novelty or “hidden” knowledge, but to recognize presence. One does not learn the meaning of the Sky-Veil; one remembers it. That is to say, one stands again in the unveiling light of what was always there, waiting.
Remembrance, in the Sky-Veil, is a step beyond the calculative, syllogistic metaphysical and into the poetic, where the world is no longer a stockpile of objects to be measured and explained but a revealed place of meaning.
✦ Presence - Not a thing, but the shining nearness of what is.
In the Sky-Veil, Presence is not a metaphysical entity or spirit, but the felt nearness of Being—the shimmer where the world reveals its depth and substance. It is the touch of Being in its most radiant clarity, not as a being among beings, but as the grounding that makes beings present at all—Being.
Presence is the weight of meaning in a moment, the sudden stillness where the world no longer hides. It is not summoned; it arrives. It does not explain; it reveals. The goddesses of the Veil are not presences themselves, but heralds through whom Presence shines.
To encounter Presence is to stand in the clearing where the veil lifts and what-is steps near.
✦ Hypostatic Heralds - Figures who bear the presence of a hypostatic (essential) form. The goddesses do not possess Being as beings, but they announce its substantive varied meanings as it gives itself in the world—beauty, wisdom, majesty. As heralds, they alert the soul through their glint to a deeper contemplation of divine attributes. They harken through shimmers to what is real in effect and presence, though they are not personal subjects or metaphysical beings.