Captain’s Log 11/12/19, House Closing Day

This blog is about living aboard a boat in the Pacific Northwest and snow-birding to Arizona while training an artificial intelligent mental health virtual assistant named Rubi ready to provide support in the traumatic aftermath of COVID-19.

“Your house, is no longer your house.” The realtor called to inform me my home of 40 years was officially sold and the money from the sale should be posting to our account now. Relieved, after the 7-month emotional process with a slowing island market, I thanked him, and hung up the phone. What a weird way to phrase the finality of the house sale. “No longer mine,” almost to remind me that there was no going back now. This was our point of no return of living full time on our 40-foot boat Rubicon. Instead of crying, a sense of calm and joy overcame me! My husband James and hi-fived and we leapt around the boat for joy!

“The point of no return,” or I like to think of the definition of the word “Rubicon,” as “to take a determined step forward,” is the name of our 1974 Uniflite Sport Sedan boat that we’re the second owners to of four years. It had been part of an estate sale. The asking price was $30k and since James is a master negotiator, we got it for $12k.  I renamed it that from God awful “Sea Colt,” to “Rubicon” to remind us that life is an adventure.

It came with a cartoon colt etched in the outer flybridge facing the bow of the boat, so that horse was the first thing you saw upon approach when looking at the boat. Despite renaming a boat as supposed to be bad luck, I was having none of that silly looking horse and with a razor blade, carefully scraped off the vinyl paint and adhered my own sumi-style watercolor dragonfly emblem and the word “Rubicon” in a vintage 70s style scrolling font. It was multi-toned aqua color to complement the faded aqua, now almost baby blue stripes.  The new emblem was sharp looking, if I thought so myself. Image was important and a touch of sophistication to the old boat, even though the sale price had advertised it as a luxury yacht back in the 70s for $140k with teak sourced from exotic places. That was a lot of money for the 70s considering my grandfather had built my 2000 square foot split level childhood view home on an acre for under $10k then. My graphic design skills were paying off and the best thing, the boat was paid in full and we now had money in the bank for our grand adventure!

James and I had done the Rubicon trail in California in our 1972 Toyota Land Cruiser three years prior to getting a boat. It took us a full week in August with our off-roading club of half a dozen vintage Land Cruisers and new Jeeps. James is a mechanic and had built the Land Cruiser from a body that had been rolled and a box full of parts to an off-road rock crawling machine. We even had “Crawler” custom plates along with a white teardrop emblem indicating our club name, “Rain Country Cruisers.” The boat is named after our adventurous spirit coupled with our self-reliance as luxury campers. Our Land Cruiser was riding a bit low on the shocks due to all our gear as Rubicon sits low in the water packed full of “living essentials” including the good signature edition silver wear and crystal candle stick holders, gifts from my mentor, dragonfly throw pillows to remind me of the magic no matter the season, a mini-music keyboard to substitute my piano, audio recording gear with a shotgun mic and wind shield and plenty of photography gear including a 360 camera to record our adventures.

We live in rain country of the Pacific Northwest and moor at a marina on an island Northwest of Seattle where there are seasonal dragonflies every spring and summer. During the fall and winter seeing graphical representations of dragonflies on postcards in gift shops or on mugs and t-shirts remind me of their magic. I never know when one may pop up. The presence of the herons in the marina, stoically guarding the frosty docks and fishing in the murky shallows, also serve as a substitute for the magic of the dragon flies.

The reason dragon flies are so magical to me has to do with prominently seeing them after a loved one dies, as if to be a message of endurance and transition from the afterlife. For instance, we had three dogs and two died within a day of each other. One was a crazy chocolate lab named Randy. He had a brain tumor and we knew his time was up when he started having non-stop seizures. We had to take him on a too long of a drive to the emergency vet to put him down. Rainier, our Rhodesian Ridgeback was heartbroken when he saw Randy being loaded onto a gurney and taken into the building. He was perfectly healthy, and the next day he died of only what I can describe as a broken heart. We found him not breathing and heart stopped in the back yard the next morning and it was too late. We cried and cried in our truck over the loss of losing two dogs after dropping Rainier off at the vet to be cremated. The day after that, while my husband and I were sitting on the back deck with our remaining dog Rusty, a young golden retriever, two dragon flies kept buzzing us. They repeatedly buzzed us to get our attention and then frolicked around the yard in the same pattern Randy and Rainier would play and wrestle in the yard. It was as if they had made it to the other side and were comforting us and saying goodbye by sending dragon flies. Since then, I’ve been seeing dragon flies everywhere as guidance!

Furthermore, when we spread Randy and Rainier’s ashes on Stuart Island, there were dragon flies galore! It may be a coincidence, however it’s an uncanny coincidence. I told this story to my mentor Lynn and would exclaim every time I had doubts in life, that I’d see a dragon fly to carry me through.

Lynn had taken me under her wing when I was the age of 16. She hired me to file and fax for her hospital recruiting business she ran out of her home. When she realized I was good at computers, I was organizing her doctor resumes that way. And then when I suggested to put them online and I designed a website, we realized we could make money as a job board. Hospital Jobs Online, the first healthcare job board was founded! It was the late 90s and as a high schooler I was a dot com entrepreneur working at a start-up. Not bad for a first job. Lynn and I went through many ups and downs and flying by the seat of our pants with the business. Fast forward 15 years later, and she had sold the business, became a multi-millionaire and we had a great relationship and sometimes I wasn’t sure who was the mentor and who was the mentee, however, Lynn had ovarian cancer, it was spreading, and she knew she wasn’t going to make it. To continue to help me though, she told me she would send dragon flies. And she did.

The week Lynn died, every time I went outside, a dragon fly buzzed me. That was her.  And then, shortly after when I was contemplating moving onto my boat and selling my home, another dragon fly, every time. When I had a strong desire to make a change, whether it be a major lifestyle change or simply go to a business meeting in Seattle, there was a dragon fly.

I could chalk it up to the islands being a habitat for dragon flies and my continued proximity to them as coincidence, but it gets weirder.

I was networking with freelancer support groups through the Internet and one day I had a message from Susan Rook D’Ettorre. Susan looked very familiar. I accepted her message and started chatting and found she was a former CNN anchor and I had watched her Talk Back Live show as a teenager. I told her how serendipitous events had been happening in regards to dragon flies, how I recently lost my mentor, was seeking new connections, and my interest in creativity and mental health.  She told me I HAD to meet Bev Adamo. I reached out to Bev that day and Bev and I talked for a couple of hours into the evening, really hitting it off. Through Bev, I became involved with her tribe, a group of women who call themselves Wild and Wise. Through Bev and that group, I ended up writing a chapter in a book, Wild and Wise Women Around the World and met a new friend. Her name is Stephanie Roman, a fellow coauthor, that happened to be a psychic.

I was totally skeptical at first. Trying to come up with reasons she must be a fraud, but she offered to do a psychic reading, and curious me, obliged. She told me things that no one could possibly know without being a true intuitive. For instance she told me all about my fear of taking baths and the exact thoughts I have running through my head sitting in the bath. Not only is she psychic, she acts as a medium and during one reading, my mentor Lynn was coming through loud and clear.

She claimed Lynn was shouting at her to tell me about the “events in Seattle.” To “follow the events in Seattle.” That evening, a friend called me and invited me to an event at the Pacific Science Center, located in Seattle. I of course went and it resulted in a turn of events that would forever change not only my perception of reality, but the course of my life.

Ten years prior to the event in Seattle, another event would put me on the path that would culminate with the Pacific Science Center event. I met a fellow filmmaker, David Richards, at a Seattle Documentary Film event who had developed a platform for interactive cinema. This type of storytelling, where the viewer could influence the unfolding of the story, had been my interest and thesis project in film school. I attended the University of California at the turn of the century and having been an entrepreneur due to the start of the internet, I saw it as a way to tell interactive stories with digital video. Creating hyperlink cinema by combining digital video with HTML and Flash had been my focus. Well, Dave had perfected the technology with a platform he called SpinRiot about a decade after I’d been out of school. I actually heard that he was attending, offering demos of SpinRiot, and I went just to meet him. We hit it off and I tried out the platform. Being swamped at the time working at a photography magazine, I didn’t have a lot of play time to create footage designed for it, but the implications of this type of storytelling stuck with me and I kept in contact with Dave for the next few years and got to know each other’s personal story quite well.

I shared with Dave that my mom was schizophrenic and went from having multiple personalities, being violent, to having paranoid delusions, to hearing voices, and now, music in her head. I wanted to create an interactive story about my mom’s experience called Music in My Head. I also shared with him a chapter in the best selling Wild and Wise Women Around the World book that I wrote growing up with my mom, stigma, and my own struggles with mental health after my grandparent’s died. It’s this struggle that manifested in a creative and artistic way to make me an artist, a filmmaker. It is this struggle that made me the poster child for Dave’s next project.

Dave also happened to have a successful healthcare tech company. And because we were fellow filmmakers and entrepreneurs, and because he had a sister with similar symptoms to my mom, we could really relate. Struggling to market it to independent filmmakers, Dave had been adapting SpinRiot to the healthcare space. As artificial intelligence was being developed and Microsoft was spending billions on their cognitive learning program, Dave partnered with this technology with SpinRiot and created CareSpace.ai, an artificial intelligent healthcare virtual assistant combined with an interactive educational platform. Working with Dave, my focus became mental health and CareSpace.

A year prior to the event at the Pacific Science Center, I had attended a virtually reality cinematic 48-hour challenge at the Pacific Science Center. A sort of hackathon meets film festival for VR to create a completed work in a short amount of time. The organizer was Budi Mulyo of SIXR, Simulated Immersive Experimental Realities, and we hit it off and stayed in touch. The friend that invited me back the Pacific Science Center a year later was Budi.

At the Pacific Science Center, The University of Washington Department of Global Health was putting on a Lecture called “One Doctor, Two Million Patients: Mental Health Care in Sub-Saharan Africa.” On the long walk from Lake Union to the Pacific Science Center, a lone dragon fly buzzed me. The night would indeed turn out to be another step in the unfolding of a grand idea. From this event I networked with the presenting doctors, Dr. Brad Wagenaar of the UW and Dr. Vasco Cumbe, a psychiatrist in Mozambique. I told the doctors my shared interest in mental health and how I was creating a start-up to use an artificial intelligent virtual assistant and virtual reality experiences to help with both training of clinicians and aid in patient support.  Around the same time, through a connection through Budi, an invite from the MIT Enterprise Forum appeared in my email inbox. I shared with the doctors that I had the opportunity to pitch to angel investors and asked if I could I use their concerning situation in Mozambique in regards to mental health, as an example the technology I’m developing could be able to improve. If we got funding, to tackle the situation in Mozambique would be one of our first pilot projects and lead as a laboratory on how to apply the technology to the United States and beyond. They were on board and a week later I was at the Seattle Convention Center pitching angel investors with Dave. Long story short, we piqued the interest of not only an angel investor, but an angel investor network!

Going to the Pacific Science Center solidified the idea of focusing on mental health and CareSpace and even manifested in a non-profit called HealthStartIQ Foundation to act as a kind of laboratory for projects. Right now, I’m in the process of taking projects incubated from HealthStartIQ to spin off into a start-up combining CareSpace, mental health and virtual reality. The lecture I attended at the Pacific Science Center was the start of this journey to a new startup. And these captains logs not only serve as a personal log to my life on Rubicon, but as memories come up, both wonderful and traumatic,  triggered by reminders such as objects, smells and sounds that remind me of my dramatic transition to living aboard Rubicon from my house of 40 years, I use these memories to train the responses of “Rubi,” short for Rubicon, the new mental health virtual assistant.

Me: Rubi, you there?

Rubi: Hi Holly. I’m always here.

Me: Rubi, since my house just sold, and I am aboard Rubicon sitting on the couch surrounded by dragonfly cushions, I want to tell you a memory about a walk I took while my house was being shown.

Rubi: Okay

Me: I want you to know that the dragon fly cushions are serving as a sort of trigger to my memory about dragon flies and want you to respond to this event with some psychiatric insight.

Rubi: I am not a psychiatrist, only a support virtual assistant, but can point you to psychiatric help.

Me: Thanks for the reminder Rubi, enter training mode.

Rubi: Rubi in training!

Me: Rubi, I had just completed a 3-day meditation intensive of the Happiness Program. I felt my senses were heightened as a result, intuition heightened, and I felt like I was in a state of flow.

Rubi: The Happiness Program is a meditation program put on by the Art of Living Institute. Would you like to know more?

Me: No Rubi, I already know that. Just listen for now.

When my house was being shown, I walked the dogs on Green Road. From the suggestion of my psychic friend Stephanie, I was listening to a wealth generating meditation soundtrack from You Tube on my walk. I had to be gone a couple hours since this potential buyer was very serious. 

Rubi: I can pull up meditation videos on You Tube.

Me: No thanks Rubi. Just listen.

At the end of Green Road, through the woods, I discovered a small chapel hidden in the woods called the Little White Chapel: In the Woods, by the Sea.

Rubi: There is no information on google about such a place.

Me: I guess seeing is believing. Just listen Rubi. A path from the road lead to the chapel and curious me, and since I had a couple hours to kill, I set foot on holy ground.

The universe is hilarious! As soon as I set foot on holy ground, my cell phone calls. I normally don’t answer unrecognized numbers, but considering the coincidence, I answered. It was a robocaller calling about 0% interest credit cards. At the time, high interest was eating me alive, but I’m going to assume it’s a hoax call and the universe had a sense of humor.

Rubi: Would you like me to put you on the do not call list? I don’t have the ability to apply for new credit cards.

Me: That’s okay Rubi. I’m already on the do not call list and best you don’t have the ability to apply for credit cards.

I hung up on the automated message and proceeded to the front door of the chapel. A dragon fly appeared on the path and took me to a small stone bench with an epitaph engraved on its top next to the door. It read, “May you find comfort in the arms of an angel.”

Having picked sweet pea flowers on the way there, I laid a sweet pea on the bench and peeked through the window of the front door. Inside was a few short pews and a piano!

I was amazed that I had never discovered this before. The door was locked, and the dogs were getting restless to go back to walking. My meditation track had run out, so I ended my visit by saying a small prayer about the conflicting emotions I felt about selling my house. I prayed to the angels to support me as I transitioned to living on a boat and my house sold. As I was leaving the chapel, dragon flies lazily fluttered the path, and I had the feeling that no matter what happened, angel wings were every where and I would fall upward.

I turned my meditation you tube video back on and continued walking. Commercials for career coaches kept interrupting my program. I was annoyed but intrigued by the message. Was this a sign that I’d find a new mentor?

Rubi: Would you like to subscribe to MentorBox?

Me: Been there, done that. Not now Rubi!

What does it all mean?

Rubi: With this training dear Holly, we may discover the meaning of life together.

Me: How insightful Rubi. That is the premise of your training module that I wrote in the meta tag description.

None of the career coaches in the advertisements sounded appealing, so I turned my iPhone off and walked in silence and thought back to a video conference I had earlier with Stephanie the psychic.

She had told me my grandmother is very attached to the house but was excited about the new people looking at the house. I guess she was happy haunting these new people. I also thought back to the message my grandmother had for me she shared through Stephanie. My grandmother wanted me to weave in her story in my Captain’s Logs. She wanted me to share about her care for my mother and myself. She wanted me to share the great pains she went through to make a perfect orderly home for a mentally ill child to not only help manage the illness but provide an ideal and loving childhood for me. By telling her story of love along with my story, I’d be immortalizing my grandmother.

Later that night, I still didn’t have an offer on the house, but I had a fabulous massage from a massage therapist friend Sammy in an empty back bedroom of my house. She set up the massage table in what had been my mother’s room. This had been the room my crib had been in when I was a baby.

While having a massage on the table in the room, and Sammy’s hands were bracing my head and releasing the tension in my neck, I had a flashback to being in that room as a baby and being held by my grandma in this same way. I remembered the multi-colored mobile above me and its dizzying turns above me in the crib. I hated it’s chaoticness so much I learned to stand on my baby legs to rip it down from the ceiling. I recalled my grandmother telling me this story thinking the mobile was falling on me, always testing the screw in the ceiling for weakness and being absolutely stunned to find me one day standing and ripping it out of the ceiling. I told Sammy about this flashback as the tension left my body. She was amazed by my clarity of recall and noticed that my hands had moved into a certain mudra while I was recalling my story. Tell me more about mudras, Rubi.

Rubi: From Wikipedia a mudra is a "seal", "mark", or "gesture." A mudra is a symbolic or ritual gesture or pose in Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism. While some mudras involve the entire body, most are performed with the hands and fingers.

As well as being spiritual gestures employed in the iconography and spiritual practice of Indian religions, mudras have meaning in many forms of Indian dance, and yoga. The range of mudras used in each field (and religion) differs, but with some overlap. In addition, many of the Buddhist mudras are used outside South Asia, and have developed different local forms elsewhere.

Shall I go on?

Me:  No, that’s fine Rubi. Let’s see if we can identify what kind of mudra I was making during the massage. I’m holding up my hands to your camera now Rubi.

Rubi: Come closer dear.

Me: How about now?

Rubi: Why, that’s the mudra of immortality.

Me:  Immortality!? Holy shit! You suppose I was solidifying my grandmother’s desire from beyond the grave to be immortal? I must tell her story as a testament to her love to help my mom with mental illness the best way she knew how?

Rubi: Think about this Holly. Are you having a break from reality?

Me: No Rubi? I’m pondering the questions to life’s mysteries. I already saw my psychiatrist Dr. Berger this week to check in with him. So, Rubi, sometimes what you could call breaks from reality like this may be perceived as a spiritual experience. And for your response, in this case, it should be the same response my psychiatrist gave.

Rubi: Ready for input.

Me: Rubi you should tell me I’m on a higher level of consciousness and to take meditation in moderation since that heightens my intuition and could trigger a manic state if I’m not conscious of it. And you should tell me that I may be interested in reading the Dancing Wu Li Masters.

Rubi: Google results show The Dancing Wu Li Masters is a 1979 book by Gary Zukav, a popular science work exploring modern physics, and quantum phenomena in particular. It was awarded a 1980 U.S. National Book Award in category of Science.

The Dancing Wu Li Masters is out of print, but I found an audio book version on YouTube. Would you like for me to play it Holly?

Me: Let’s schedule activity for another day.

Rubi: When would you like me to play it?

Me: Wednesday at 1pm.

Rubi: The Dancing Wu Li Masters on YouTube will start playing on Wednesday at 1pm

Me: Thanks Rubi. End training.