Shyness Sets In

At times, it seems necessary to withdraw into one's Self.

Sitting in the Bunker monitoring the world with Eris, the Goddess of Chaos, mulling things over...while typing into the void.

It’s 3:49 AM on May 6, 2026, and I’m up listening to Terence McKenna’s lecture called “Everything Teaches” after getting up from a dream in which I was reading a negative review of my LinkedIn profile. A couple of days ago, I wrote a note, now lost in the stream of activity, about how I feel that I am withdrawn from some of my rather extroverted behavior here on Substack. Growth of subscriptions seems to have also plateued. A while back, I wrote:

I’m realizing that this was just about 18 months ago and here we are. We are all participating in creating the world that we will be leaving to our descendants. To do better, we have to know better, I believe. From here, where are we going?

Harrowings has been attempting to move the needle of history in a positive direction. It is, as often mentioned, the publishing arm of “The Harold B Gill Foundation, LLC” which is striving to collect, protect, and preserve the creative work of the Harold B Gills that have been a part of this world. I’m the last man standing so figured it was time to set this into motion last in September 2024. The first of us arrived on January 16, 1907 and departed this life on August 13, 1979. The second arrived on January 16, 1933 and departed on April 7, 2024. I’ve arrived on February 4, 1963.

While this is not about me, I have been participating as an individual since that early morning of the winter of 1963; a morning my father said was very cold and clear. I’m grateful for my parents being able to raise my sister and myself. We were very lucky, even as there was trauma involved in our upbringing. Who doesn’t have trauma.

For my own part, I’ve done what I can with what I have to help those who are suffering. A part of that has been to help fund, and then help amplify the film, Cracked Up: The Darrell Hammo:nd Story:

I’ve also sought to amplify the signals of others as I go from dawn to dusk and back again. This is because my life is not about me. It’s about what I can contribute to the stream of life. It’s not about us, even; those of us who are here on earth now. It’s about legacy and what we choose to leave for the future.

It could be that everything is exactly as it should be. Another dream that I had last night is emerging into consciousness. In it, Donald Trump appeared to have died. I was with those who were planning his funeral and members of his entourage were unwilling to accept that he had died and managed to resuscitate him. He then turned into a dog - a wild looking, feral dog that began running about. This all seemed to be completely normal. The dream then changed to going to a childhood friend’s family’s house and destroying lawn art in the front yard. Then suddenly a number of people arrived and were having a cook-out party there and I realized that I had been trespassing.

In the dream, and in reality, all the four members of that family have now passed away. My friend’s mother was the last one to go. They are in niches in the memorial garden at United Methodist Church at Williamsburg, Virginia where my father is interred. I really miss that guy!

This brings me to another thought and that is that we are all very temporary iterations of our species. We are part of a web of life and love. We were loved into being. If we can forgive those who have gone before, we can focus on love. This brings me back to Mr. Rogers (AKA Fred Rogers.

The Fred Rogers Institute will be receiving half of our estate since my wife, Lynn Bush Gill, is a native of Latrobe, PA and I spent some critical years between August 1994 and November 2000 living, literally, in Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. This will help insure my goal of being a “good ancestor” is realized.

The other half of our estate will go to Seva. That organization restores eyesight to the needlessly blind and works to help vision around the world. We need to be able to see.

It is hard to see for many of us. We think our vision is reality, often enough. However, our vision is colored not only by the limitations of our physical apparatus, but also by our lived experiences. We project our perceptions onto that which we see. I try to keep myself in a state of “maybe logic” - maybe I am right, but maybe I am wrong. I just know how things seem to me. It links back to John von Neumann. I’ll leave you to dive down into that rabbit hole. The point is that we are all projectors but most of us don’t realize it. We are the centers of the universes that we are creating through our perspectives.

Being a good ancestor is very important to me. I can see that my own ancestors have been quite good also simply by dint of my being here against all odds. We are all miraculous manifestations of the pattern of our species. We are dependent on so many other species also. I think of this as I eat my blend of seeds, wheat germ, oat bran and Kefir this morning. The cows that produced the cultured milk, for example. Every bite depends on all these different creatures that live within the milk as well as the plants that produced the seeds, the germ, and the bran….and then there are all those of our species involved in getting those things from where they grew to my bowl. I’ve sweetened it with a bit of maple syrup. See where I am going?

If we were all more mindful of the Web of Life, we would do better than when we simply go through life robotically without thinking about how all of these things interrelate. It is now 4:47 AM on May 6, 2026. We have done so much work to get to where we are. I’ll leave you with a documentary to which I have been led:

As always, I’d love to hear your comments. While liking these posts is nice, it’s so much more helpful to get your own perspectives on what I have written and collected here. Even more helpful is to have you restack it, particularly with your own note on what you have picked up from what I have laid down.

Onward!

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