The Hollosphere

Until recently, I was the only Holly Croydon on the planet.  Or so I thought.  Having a completely unique name gave me something I’m not sure I can describe or even understand myself, but I liked it.

Whatever it was, I’d better get over it because I’m *not* the only Holly Croydon.  The other Holly Croydon is a lovely young blond woman just a couple of years older than my daughter, who lives in the U.K., is a cyclist, and–if Facebook photo albums are any indicator–loves to go out partying with her many friends.

Perhaps as long as a year ago, I started noticing my name showing up online in results for competitive cycling in England.  After four decades of life as the only Holly Croydon on Earth, it came as a quite a shock to discover I was no longer the sole possessor of the name.  Eventually, I found the U.K. Holly’s Facebook profile and sent her a friend invitation with a note that I hoped made it clear I wasn’t a weird stalker, just the only other Holly Croydon (or at least one of a very rare few) on the planet and thought that was cool.  She accepted.

Now my Facebook news feed includes items that say things like, “Holly Croydon commented on Jane Doe’s photo,” or “Holly Croydon is now friends with…”  Which is really weird when it ISN’T ME.

If you are someone who shares a name with lots of folks, you might not realize how big and strange a shift it is for me.  But I’m beginning to like it.  Perhaps that’s because I take it as yet another reminder that our separateness is illusion, that uniqueness is just an ego-story.  I think I’m ready to let that story go.

Holly, if you’re out there, I wish you many blessings and much happiness and grand fun with our name!

This morning my Gmail in box contained a message with the following notice:

Hi, Holly Croydon.

Stephen Fry (stephenfry) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out Stephen Fry’s profile here:

http://twitter.com/stephenfry

Best,
Twitter

Okay, so Stephen Fry follows everyone who follows him, but it made me smile anyway.

Twitter, as you will know unless you have been living on a desert island recently, is an online site where jillions of people share whatever is going in on their lives and/or heads with short entries called “tweets.”  And I do mean short.  Each tweet can be up to only 140 characters.  My favorite descriptive term for what goes on at Twitter is “microblogging.”

I’ve had a lot of fun Twittering and reading tweets, although I tweet a lot less than some folks.  In addition to Mr. Fry, my list of follow-ees includes Will Wheaton (Isn’t that a familiar name? Think now, where have you heard that?), Xeni Jardin, Penn Jillette, Al Gore, and Barack Obama.  Also, hilariously, Jed Bartlet.

I’m enjoying Stephen Fry’s tweets more than those presidential types, though, because it’s obviously really him, tweeting away, not a staff member or something.

In our never-ending quest to discourage the local woodpecker gang from slowly turning our home into swiss cheese, we ordered a fairly realistic plastic owl to stand guard and hopefully fool the wood**ckers into thinking that they are being watched by a terrifying predator.

This life-sized plastic owl has motion and sound sensors, and when it detects movement or sound nearby it hoots repeatedly and rotates its head to peer in the direction of whatever it senses.

So far, the woodpeckers are not terribly impressed.  The owl has perched mute during the day as the hoodlums fly about.  They don’t go too near it, or anyway not near enough to set it off, but I don’t think they’re exactly scared.  Cautious, perhaps.

The owl apparently has other ideas.  It seems to want friends.  For several nights in a row, we have heard a wild owl trading hoots with the plastic owl.  I am not kidding!  We haven’t heard an owl for a long, long time, so I have no doubt that the realistic hooting attracted the real thing.  On one particular night, we heard two real owls alternating hoots with each other and the mechanical owl, which was quite entertaining.

The plastic owl is embarrassingly limited in vocabulary, being equipped with only one short hoot sequence to say over and over and over.  My daughter Tasha commented on the comic potential of the situation when I told her about it and imagined a rather one-sided hoot-versation:

Plastic Owl: “Hey!”

Wild Owl: “Hey!”

Plastic Owl:  “Hey!”

Wild Owl:  “What’s up?”

Plastic Owl:  “Hey!”

Wild Owl:  “Hey?”

Plastic Owl:  “Hey!”

Wild Owl:  “Dude, we said hello.”

Plastic Owl:  “Hey!”

Wild Owl: “Seriously, wtf is wrong with this guy!?”

Poor plastic owl.  He apparently needs to learn some life lessons or something before he can become a real owl. However, even though he pretty much sucks at scaring wood*?#!$!%!!’s, I might keep him around just to encourage the wild owls.  Perhaps having *actual* owls zooming about will make the rotten woodpeckers want to move on.

Articles on the “news” site The Onion usually inspire me to cringe, roll my eyes, shake my head in bemusement, gasp and cover my mouth with my hand in shock, or rotflmao.  Sometimes all of that at one go, which must be a sight.

And sometimes, The Onion calls it right on the money.  Twisting and mocking facts, they are capable of mercilessly aiming a light of razor-sharp clarity onto ourselves and our culture.  It can pretty much bring tears to your eyes.

Especially when viewed from the future.  Ouch.

From my perch on the steep slopes of Mt. Zion, as the Elliott family has named the peak above our home at Murray Creek, I have the luxury (so far) of watching the American economic fracas from a distance–literally and figuratively.

Our home is paid for. We live modestly, our freedom more than making up for any lack of shiny toys. We don’t own a car, sharing a fuel-efficient 2000 Honda Civic and the old ranch Blazer with Conal’s mom. We carry no debt, though we came within a whisker of borrowing money to do some major home improvements last year. Knowledgeable people advised us that using someone else’s money rather than our own was good financial sense. Thank heavens we got the willies about letting go of our debt-free status and went against that advice. We pulled money out of stocks to build our deck (now one of if not the best feature of our house). As Conal pointed out to me the other day, those stocks were worth a lot more then than they are now. We would have to fry up a much bigger hunk of nest egg to pull that off today.

My mom and I sold our big house in Seattle back in 2007 just as the market there was having a final peak of excitement. I don’t think we could have timed that sale much better if we had traveled into the future and then gone back, armed with the knowledge of what was to come. I still shake my head in amazement, wondering at our incredible good fortune. Ours was one of the very last bidding wars in our area, and a very merry, profitable war it was for us.

Though we value our life of freedom very highly, Conal and I are relatively young and can go back to work if we need to. Conal’s skills are highly marketable, and interest in his research is building around the world. His knowledge and expertise allow him to get paid well to pursue his passion. My professional skills are not nearly so unique or highly valued, but are broad-based and widely transferable. If it came down to it, I would not be worried about finding some sort of at least mildly enjoyable job. And that honestly would be the lazy way to go, ironically. We’re resourceful enough to figure out interesting, alternative ways to make a living, if we really put our minds to it.

My heart goes out to those who are losing their homes, or staging garage sales, taking on second jobs, cutting back on doing the things that give them joy, or all of the above in desperation to pay the mortgage on a house that may be worth less than they owe. I’m troubled and saddened to think also of those whose retirement plans have gone sideways, dreams evaporating along with the worth of their 401k’s. I can’t even imagine the stress and pain folks these situations must be going through. I have, however, had the experience of being laid off from a job that I depended on, and thus can viscerally relate to those many thousands who’ve lost their jobs. I wonder how bad it will get and how many people will sucked into calamity.

Even if things get a lot worse before they get better, Conal and I will be okay. If things were to get really weird, our property has an excellent well, tillable soil, and plenty of sunshine that could be harnessed to create electricity. With a big garden, some fruit trees (there are already a few growing down in the meadow) and perhaps some goats and chickens we could go “off the grid,” as the saying goes. Conal’s mom’s expertise in the area of animal husbandry and self-sufficiency would give us an invaluable resource of knowhow should the worst happen. Surviving and even thriving will be possible for us even if civilization as we know it ceases to function.

Here on my perch overlooking our private slice of paradise, you’d never know that anything was amiss. Conal is heading off into the cool of evening to gather kindling from the ample supply of downed wood that’s lying around, taking a break from working on his research projects. The evening sun is slanting streams of warm honey through the rich green boughs of the forest, while squirrels chatter and chase each other merrily about. The deep, gentle hiss of the breeze through the valley sounds like a far off, powerful river. Birds zip hither and thither among the craggy oaks doing their fall chores, and furry bees bumble about the rosemary hedge below the front porch. So much to enjoy and be thankful for.

I’m swept by a wave of gratitude for my life, my beloved cuddle buddy Conal, my family, the warm sun, clean water to drink, healthy food to eat, and a snug nest on a mountain to call home.

Following is an excerpt from an email I wrote to a friend in Seattle back on July 7th.

It is an overcast, on-and-off raining kind of day in Antwerp. My upstairs neighbor and I are going to have a coffee (tea for me) at the cafe across the street in a few minutes. Such a luxury to me! I’m enjoying the contrast in city living from our country mouse existence at home. There isn’t even a nice cafe in town, let alone across the street! At home, we don’t see anyone for days, unless we seek them out. Here, the sight and sound of humans are all around every minute. I think I like both ways of living, and notice that the experience of one deepens the appreciation of the other for me.

At the moment, a group of school kids are trooping by in two neat lines behind their teacher, their giggles and squeals echoing up and down the square and in through the open windows of the apartment. Cars are swishing past on the wet pavement. Occasionally, and unseen pair of high heels lightly clip-clop-clip-clops down on the sidewalk below the windows, a feminine sounding gait. I wonder if she’s pretty, or what she might be wearing, but instead of checking to see I let her go past and remain a mystery. There are no shortage of opportunities for people-watching here, so I don’t have to be greedy.

Last night, Conal and I had dinner at a lovely Greek restaurant a couple of blocks away. The waiter was charming and chatted with us about America and his first love, who was from New York. There is a huge variety of experience here with people in service positions, everything from haughty to spacey-uncomprehending to absolute charm and graciousness. Our gentlemanly waiter last night certainly fell into the last category. We decided we’d like to go back there, since the food was also excellent. They were out of their vegetarian mousaka, a great reason to go back.

I like remembering life in Antwerp, which is beginning to take on the flavor of a dream. Here is a picture of Oever Street, with our apartment balcony just visible to the left of Jacob Jordaens. Jespers, the little grocery in the white building, and just beyond it the cafe with the red awning, are on the right:

It’s crazy quiet here at Murray Creek. The deers are cute and all, and I have my beloved Conal with me of course, but I guess I’m kind of missing the random company of strangers.

Okay, okay, I know I said I would start blogging again and then once more went virtually silent. Le sigh. In my defense, on top of my technical difficulties with WordPress, my HP laptop gave up the ghost the day we got home from our travels. A venerable machine, scraped and cracked and dented, with screen flopping and speakers crackling, my old lappy was originally purchased in 2004 and has gone through a memory upgrade, a couple hard drives, and I lost count of how many batteries. The poor thing finally did the laptop equivalent of the Blues Brothers car meltdown. Godspeed, my old, familiar-if-not-trusty companion.

So now comes the big question for me: Another Windows machine? Pfft. I’d like to support an alternative to the Behemoth of Redmond.

At the moment, I’m working on an old Acer laptop of Conal’s, which became his Linux experimentation toy after upgrading to a new Windows laptop awhile ago. Although Ubuntu is being pretty friendly with me so far, I suspect I’m not nearly technical enough to be really comfy in a Linux environment for the long term, even sitting next to a computer scientist as I do. If I caved in and bought a Windows machine, I could use all my hard-won knowledge, decades in the accumulation, of how to get anything at all done on a PC. I’d still bug Conal plenty, of course, but Windows is the devil I know best.

But wait. Here’s a thought: how about if I consider a computer that claims to help me spend more time getting things done, being creative, and enjoying myself, rather than investing a significant portion of my life attempting to prevent or recover from breaking, freezing, crashing, becoming overrun by malicious software, and just generally being a pain in the ass? Yes, I am truly considering a Mac. ::GASP:: Steve’s got me all in a froth about his new forged-from-one-piece-of-aluminum notebooks. This in spite of the fact that there is at least one piece of software I’m not sure I’m ready to do without (MS Money), although I understand that Boot Camp can solve that problem by allowing Windows software to run on a Mac.

Ooo, baby, my kingdom for a durable, reliable, robust, fun-to-use lappy. I entertain visions of making art, music, and even movies with ease and pleasure. I would even consider paying the much ouchier Apple prices to gain entrance to this life of joyful productivity. My eyes are tearing up just imagining such a life…

I dunno really, though. I’m vacillating. I could stick with my comfort zone and grab a great deal on a Windows laptop. Or, I could set off into a new, more expensive venture into the world of Mac, which I find tantalizing and also a bit scary. Meantime, I’m getting to learn a little about Linux, so who knows.

Any PC-to-Mac converts out there? How was it? Are you glad? Any regrets? How ’bout proud Linux geeks? Any words of encouragement for a newbie?

Sparkling dew in the trees + hushed forested hills + clear fall sunlight + deer, hawks and other critters + 80 degree weather in late October + Ann next door + my own bed + the smell of warm pine sap on the breeze + other sun-warmed forest scents + home cooked meals + slow satellite wifi (hey, it’s better than nothing!) + my sweetie Conal with me = Awesome.

The morning view from the front porch:

Sparkling sapphire water + emerald hills + clear fall sunlight + Mt. Rainier + seaplanes + sailboats + family + friends + the smell of fresh and salt water on the breeze + other real mountains + fast wifi everywhere + my sweetie Conal with me = Awesome.

The view from lunch:

Oh hai.  Were you holding your breath, in trembling anticipation of a blog post?  For, like, evar????  I sorry.  Blog was broke, but will blog now (also pleez pardon lolcat silleez.  Iz adikshun!!).

But srsly, as many of you know, one of my grand adventures this summer was traveling to Switzerland to record with Michael Stillwater.  The recording was done at a big pro studio called PowerPlay, located in a charming little town outside Zurich called Maur.  That was back in July, and I’ve just gotten word from Michael that the CD, which is called “The Honoring,” has been released online.

The entire album or individual songs can be downloaded from the site.  Song clips are also available for your sampling pleasure.  If you click on individual song titles, you can find out which ones include my vocal tracks.

“The Honoring” is a collection of spontaneous songs created by Michael in his Honoring Ceremony sessions, in some cases embellished with additional instrumentation and/or my vocals.  The original live recordings used as the base tracks for the album were chosen from the hundreds of songs Michael has collected over the years.  In each, Michael is doing his lovely work of improvising a song at the request of a session participant.  Based on what the person asks for and Michael’s intuition and connection to Source, a song is born on the spot, crafted with loving care in the moment for that person.

If you’d like to hear more of my vocals with Michael, check out Feels Like Home, a very cool chant-style song we recorded in 2006.  My vocals are also heard on Michael’s live CD O Great Spirit, which is a recording of a Chantwave concert at The Center for Spiritual Living a couple years ago.

Hope u enjoyz da musik!