Friends, this one is a weird blend of what’s been on my mind lately as I come home from Iceland. Part travelogue, I also touch on my need for stillness and process Ozzy Osbourne’s death.
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Coming home after a 10-day trip to Iceland feels lovely, like a much-needed exhale. We covered a lot of ground, driving over 1,500 km around the country. But I remain a Capricorn, and routine is nice.
Majestic Iceland. Gloomy Iceland. A vast, infernal land of volcanoes, dragon-shaped mountains, and relentless waterfalls. Heavy fog, misty rain, looming clouds, everything green, rebirth green. Lava fields slowly turn into mossy pillows, little by little, setting the food chain into motion. For life prevails.
Iceland is merciless and elemental. A land of extremes that swings between solstices and lingers at each pole. Either months of night, or a sun that refuses to set. A place of opposites, where the raw splendour of the landscape coexists with the mundanity of a well-oiled tourist industry.
I had high romanticized hopes to “connect” with the landscape, and let myself be swallowed by its sublime grandiosity. Like Chinese wandering poet Li Bai, I pictured myself “[sitting] together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains.” Alas, this did not turn out to be my experience of Iceland.
Instead, we joined the herds of tourists, all of us making our way from feature to feature, all trying to snap a photo that best captures what the place would feel and look like without tourists. For social media. As I sit, writing this “travelogue”, the irony isn’t lost on me.
We were constantly moving, crossing items off our ChatGPT-generated travel itinerary one by one, which is how you make the most of a 10-day trip. And we did. It was a completely stunning and extraordinary trip, albeit a dizzying one. Now, the time is ripe for integration, for stillness.
On long drives through Iceland’s fairy-tale landscapes, we filled the silence with the disembodied voices of podcasters, maintaining a lifeline to a world on fire even while vacationing. It wasn’t just the adventuring or the constant motion that made me dizzy, but the nausea of feeling tethered between beauty and ongoing collapse.
Thankfully, there was Björk’s extensive discography to set the mood to these emotional landscapes. We also found respite in Michael Anthony’s deep-dive art history podcast ArtHoles, which featured a six-hour episode on the French Revolution, an oddly reassuring reminder that, historically, the world has seen some shit.
I come home to find that something in me longs for a deeper kind of homecoming, for the sweet relief of resting in the awareness of the ground (or groundlessness) of Being, a “place” I only know to access via meditation and a baseline I feel an urgent need to cultivate with greater discipline, especially right now. As I see it, the “attack” on human attention is making the concentration necessary to achieve deep meditation states increasingly harder to sustain. As my new favourite writer, Erik Davis, writes, “Waking up is hard when we rush about like sleepwalkers on speed”. And indeed, digital spaces are specifically designed to hijack our nervous system, keeping us addicted and entranced. It’s up to us to reconnect with “this side” of things, the embodied side.
Perhaps, this desire to withdraw inward is a reaction to the madness I’m tuning into every time I pick up my phone or engage with mediated reality. Some could say it’s escapism. Yet, the fragmentation that results from constant stimulation is affecting me in alarming ways, and I am slightly ashamed at how much I struggle with going about the world without it (I am a podcast addict).
The antidote is to sit and do nothing more. And while the buzzing layers of accumulated tension feel vertiginous at first, a gentle sense of relief washes over me as the mind settles and the body begins to open.
I have arrived. I am home.
On July 22, Ozzy Osbourne died. I’m in Vík, land of the black sands, when I hear the news—a fitting place to mourn the passing of the Prince of Darkness. See, I am the daughter of a die-hard Ozzy fan/devotee. For as long as I can remember, Ozzy has been a sort of larger-than-life mythic figure, a god in the my dad’s metal pantheon. Ozzy is, in some way, part of the family. He and Sharon even signed my 16th birthday card.
In the following days, I catch myself tearing up on numerous occasions, which surprises me. I don’t typically care much about celebrity drama. Driving through the Eldhraun pillow lava field—on our way to the, I kid you not, Fjaðrárgljúfur Canyon near Kirkjubæjarklaustur—we listen to my favourite Black Sabbath and Ozzy songs. Childhood memories flicker: when my dad and I would sing (scream) along to “Crazy Train” in the car, the music as loud as it could be, speakers glitching. Or the few times we saw Ozzy live together, and he flashed his ass…
Anyway, I am moved by Ozzy’s stubbornness to say goodbye to his fans properly in one final concert, a display of gratitude and reciprocity that’s admirable in an industry full of entitled and narcissistic rock stars. Back to the Beginning in Birmingham closed the ritual circle cast 55 years earlier, when Black Sabbath struck the first heavy metal chord that would forever transform popular culture, and as author Jason Louv aptly noted, “turned the Satanic Panic into a multi-million dollar industry”. More than 40,000 followers gathered at Villa Park to hear the prophet’s final transmission. My father was among them and described the experience as the pilgrimage of a lifetime. Here’s a brief overview, in case you’ve been living under a rock:
Discussing the Ozzy phenomenon, it’s hard not to employ religious language. His music was a sort of mystical experience for many, his concerts bacchanals, cathartic for fringe dwellers who found a sense of belonging in his metal “church” of outcasts. He was funny, witty, and a real creative force. It strikes me how, sitting on his bat throne, cripled by Parkinson’s disease, rocking back and forth, with tremors in his knee, the Prince of Darkness still had the crowd entranced and hypnotized like a leader of an ecstatic cult.
Throughout his career, Ozzy’s music and persona satisfied the real devotional desire that immortal god-like icons once did, reminding us that these emotions run deep within the human psyche and generate authentic feelings of connection and transcendence that are hard to negate. The world needs heroes, and with his passing, we lost a massive one. RIP Ozzy.
What I’m Working on: I barely just landed, and I’m already getting ready to take off elsewhere. I still spent a little time in the studio, just to get reacquainted with my space. Here’s a sneak peek of a new cyborg piece I started. Trying something new with a neon green underpainting. It looks terrible at this point, but just wait…
What I’m Reading: I just finished the revelatory media studies cult classic, TechGnosis by Erik Davis, which I will need to process in a forthcoming essay. It’s hard to match such a stimulating read, but I hope Jason Louv’s biography, John Dee and the Empire of Angels, on Renaissance magus and advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, Dr. John Dee’s legacy, and the occult roots of the modern world, will fill the void.
What I’m Listening to: Lots of Black Sabbath.
Thanks for reading this month’s Studio Notes, which did not pertain much to my studio practice. But taking time off is necessary to refuel the creative fire, so it counts.
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