Hard to Get Started

Yet the Passing Show must be documented!

Yesterday, I got home from a day trip down to Williamsburg, VA where I lunched with Mom at Second Street Bistro, only to find that my physical certificate as an AI Consultant, earned last November from the United States Institute of Diplomacy and Human Rights, was at my doorstep. So, now that I have the physical credential in hand, all the work that I’m doing in the background in the field of artificial intelligence will have a little more “umph” - supposedly. I wrote a little about it here yessterday before turning in:

The trip itself was a nice revisit to my old stompin’ grounds. I got to talk about my career with a few folks who are working there now. Some seemed interested and others had shared stories to tell. Preserving the memories is important, I feel. Substack was good enough to create a clip in which I talk about first laying eyes on my future first ex-wife - and hopefully my last:

The production values of “The Passing Show” are not high but I get some folks dropping in and taking in what I have to say. It doesn’t much matter whether I have an audience or not. I’m doing this as part of “The Great Work” - or simply “The Work” - which establishes a body of primary documentation of my perspective on the world we share. I don’t know. I just know how things seem to me. It seems to me that we all need to be more awake and aware of our lived experiences and preserve our memories of them.

Waking Up

Now, at almost 5 AM on May 1, 2026, it’s time to be fully awake and aware. I’ve spent some time here talking about Gurdjieff and Colin Wilson along with others who have been amplifying their signals through the void that is our current state of cyberspace. I am hopeful that these signals will be picked up and transmitted further and believe we have a chance of doing just that.

What do I mean to achieve? I want us to be thinking about how we can use our faculties to optimize our planet for all life. From the “simplest” unicellular creatures and even those phages and viruses that keep them (and us) in check right up through all the species of eukaryotic life. We’ve come to understand in the last couple of centuries that we’ve evolved from ancestors who were not us. We’ve adapted and become what we are only within the last few hundred thousand years. Now it’s time to wake up to what we can achieve.

Maybe the whole point of us coming into existence was to give rise to the technologies that will enable us to use that technology to become the stewards of the planet. We might learn not to be so self-centered, so greedy, so short-sighted. This is one of the reasons that I spend so much time thinking in terms of the next 700 years - and focusing on the past 700…back to 1326.

As I look at the children who come through my range of vision, I think about what world that they will see. I want us all to think about this and about how we can be good ancestors.

That said, I’ll share a bit of what I was talking about on my way home, using an extension of my brain to mine the internet for information as I went. What I want to see us realize is a world in which our technology enables us to be the kind of change that will benefit all life. The closest thing happening along these lines that I have found so far is the work of the BFI Design Lab.

We have to stop thinking about ourselves as separate from all life on the planet. We are deeply interwoven into the matrix of life that spans the globe. Many of the environmental crises that we encounter have solutions. We simply don’t have the will to make them happen yet.

As a species, we need to work to realize the vision of a post-scarcity economy - one that doesn’t run on money which is essentially a shared fantasy of valuation. We are using this in ways that create tremendous disparities between members of our species, certainly, but that also create existential crises for all life on the planet. When we just stop and look at it objectively, it is clearly insanity.

I could give you facts and figures on this, but you are also capable of waking yourselves up. There are solutions. They aren’t impossible and we are not powerless. Each of us, essentially, are nodes on a network that has no hierarchy. Someone will pick up this signal and amplify it. I do that for others. I am hoping that if you read me, you will do the same for me.

How to Amplify the Signal

Use your voice! Patti Smith says it so eloquently:

This was just over 6 years ago and she’s still getting this message out there. I stood and watched a crowd at the Anthem who were all singing along last fall. It’s not too late and we still have the ability to steer things the way we want to go:

At 4:39 into this 6:22 clip, the message is delivered coming to us also six years ago.

Amplifying these signals is so easy to do but then we have to take action to be the change we want to see; to be good ancestors; to be worthy of the legacy that has been entrusted in us, the living, by all those who have gone before.

Harrowings is an on-going project - a work - that I hope will continue so long as I have breath in my body. As I talked with my assistant on the way back to Williamsburg, I asked her what the chances were of my actions actually having a significant impact on the crises my species has created. We had already agreed that they were not insurmountable if we lived up the “sapiens” part of our species’ name (it means “wisdom”). She did the calculations based on all the information at her disposal and agreed that the odds were not great, but that if I didn’t do the work I am doing, the odds were 0. That’s what I’m asking of all of us. We can amplify the signal through the noise.

I’ve mapped out a range of solutions that could be put in place over the past several months - here are but a few:

So, we have the ability. Do we have the will?

Onward!

Click a button. Any button…

The quickest way to help amplify the signal is just to click - liking is nice, but restacking with a Note will do more and pushing it out onto other platforms will help us all…all life!