Healings FAQ, No. 6: Angelica Olstad
A Q&A about death and god. "I think that death is what connects us to life. It shapes how we live our lives, how we connect with others."
Hello everyone and greetings from Los Angeles, where it’s overcast and a bit chilly here at way-too-early-o’clock on a Saturday (unlike the rest of us, the baby did not feel like sleeping in today). This here is the latest installment of the Healings FAQ, né “questionnaire” — I’m gonna try this shorter appellation cuz, well, it’s shorter and I’m sick of typing out “quesionnaire” all the time because I’m always misspelling it like so.
If you’re just joining us, this is a weekly series where I ask people the same questions that friends and strangers asked me in the wake of my cancer diagnosis. Why did they ask me these things? I guess the thinking was I’d have some unique insights after receiving such a scary diagnosis and going through treatment and what not, but I personally don’t think my answers are any more or less insightful than anyone else’s. It’s just that in our hyper-secularized modern lives, we are rarely given the opportunity to think and talk about this stuff—hence the idea for this series.
Today’s contestant is multi-disciplinary artist Angelica Olstad, who is just wrapping up—as in today, June 2, if you feel like rushing out to see it—a month-long installation at Culture Lab LIC in Queens. That installation, the aptly titled “Music for Healing,” is a collaboration between Olstad and a team of scientists, musicians, and other artists, who worked together to create an immersive audio/visual experience, the specific goal of which was to promote mental and physical wellbeing. Says Olstad, “This project is a culmination of my experiences as a community wellness teacher, classically trained pianist, and cultural producer. As a mixed-race artist, I am committed to making wellness and arts experiences more accessible to a wider audience, specifically BIPOC audiences who might not have access to traditional arts and wellness opportunities. My dream is for people to come to this space, find a comforting place to heal and to want to come back over and over again.”
Damn, sounds amazing. Sadly, I wasn’t able to experience Olstad’s installation in person, but lucky for the rest of us she just released the composition she wrote and performed to accompany it on Friday. Personally, I’ll be filing this one-track, 55-minute album alongside Brian Eno’s Music for Airports and the works of Arvo Pärt and cueing it up whenever I need to turn the volume down on the ol’ thought merry-go-round (here’s a Spotify link).
For all the fairly obvious reasons, Olstad’s work and vision intrigued the hell out of me, so I was thrilled when she agreed to share her perspectives for this series. In her answers below, she shines a light on how much our families and upbringing shape our spiritual worldview, among other insights. Enjoy!
What happens when we die?
I honestly really don’t know but deep down I hope that when we die, that’s truly it, finished. I like to think that our spirit withers away with our last breath and our memory lives on in the folks that we loved and that loved us back.
On a scale of 1-10, with 10 being terrified and 1 being it’s never crossed your mind, how afraid are you of dying? Explain.
I would say that I’m both a 1 and a 10 on this spectrum. On one side of things, I feel that overall, I’ve lived a pretty good life and if I were to die tomorrow I would be proud of the person I became, the people I loved and cultivated relationships with, and the things I accomplished. I’m so grateful for all the lessons I’ve learned in this life I’ve lived.
However, there’s another part of me that is absolutely terrified of dying and that’s because I was a born and raised “fire and brimstone” Christian growing up. Ever since I could remember, I was taught about Heaven and Hell (yes, capitalized). To be honest, the idea of living in eternity in a fiery furnace with burning rivers and all of history’s most horrific people sounds pretty awful. So awful in fact that in 2016 I had my first (and I’m hoping my last) panic attack in the shower thinking about this. I’ve since managed that fear by trying not to think about it. Death is going to happen. It’s something I can’t control.
Fundamentally, it’s tough for me to accept that the construct of eternity exists in such a binary framework. I am actually drawn to Judaism’s focus on life on earth versus the afterlife being a central belief. And while I think that the concept of Jesus Christ absolving all your sins (as long you accept he did indeed die for our sins) is beautiful, it also can feel like a bit of a cop-out if I’m being honest. Some of the most unpleasant people I’ve met in this life have been Christians and as someone who grew up mixed-race in a predominantly white religious environment, I’ve always felt uncomfortable in Christian spaces. I also can’t help but think that the concept of heaven and hell feels colonizing by nature. What about the people who die without ever hearing about Jesus Christ? Or who are born into a different culture and religion? They have to go to hell because they were born at the wrong palace at the wrong time? It seems unfair. But with all that said, it’s hard to untrain the mind into believing something that you have been told since birth. It would be like telling someone, “Oh, the sky is actually green, you were just told it was blue your whole life.” Would that person be able to truly believe the sky is green? Or would they just continue to believe the sky is blue because that’s what they were told growing up?
I will say, all of this has been a huge reason why I got into meditation, yoga, and eastern philosophy. I feel much more culturally, intellectually, and personally aligned with the thinking behind Eastern philosophy and find it less oppressive to me as a non-white person (even though both my parents are Christian). I hope that when my time comes, I will feel strong in my actions in life and the character I built. Fingers crossed.
What’s the closest you’ve come to death? What did you learn, if anything?
Strangely, death has surrounded me in different ways throughout my life. Both my parents lost a parent when they were children so I was always aware that death had the power to take people away prematurely which, was in some ways a blessing. My parents raised us with a focus on independence because they knew the struggles of losing a parent early in life. It taught me that nothing is guaranteed. I’ve also had the unfortunate experience of knowing a few folks who either took their lives or made an attempt on it. I would say that I was exposed to death in some form or another at a pretty early age.
My closest experience with death was when my grandpa passed when I was 14 and it was quite simply, devastating. He was a big part of my life, he was the patriarch of our nucleus family and the glue that held it together. I learned that death can break people, like quite literally break the heart and that lives too can also fall apart after someone dies. My parents divorced shortly after. I learned that learning to grieve is a lifelong process, learning to live with death and the cycles of grief is a part of life.
I remember when I was cleaning out my family’s storage unit back in 2019. My dad was downsizing and it was time to clear out the space. I found all these photos and mementos of my grandpa that I hadn’t seen before or had forgotten about. It was a long grueling process of 10 hour days packing and moving out, or in a lot of cases, having to throw out a lot of these family mementos. I think, it was something on the third day I was looking at another photo of my grandpa and I just broke down, collapsed, and wept by myself in the middle of all my family’s belongings from my childhood days. It came unexpected, fast, and took over my whole body. I can’t remember the last time I cried that hard and I was glad no one saw me just on my knees, weeping uncontrollably trying to soothe myself. It had been over 20 years since he had passed but the flood of emotions came back so viscerally, so intensely that it felt like I was transported back to that 14 year old version of myself full of hurt, pain, so confused and experiencing utter loss.
Of course, it was painful but the experience wasn’t necessarily a bad one. It reminded me of how much I loved my grandpa, the great impact he had on my life, and how lucky I was that he was in my life for as long as he was. It was also nice to know that I could still feel that intensely even after all these years. It showed me the power of love and how it carries on even in death. I am the sum of all my parts but I also believe that I am the person I am today because of him. I carry him through my own spirit through my interest in other people, my efforts to always make jokes and connect with people - no matter what walk of life they come from. These were the things that my grandpa taught me just through existing and being the person he was. I hope that someday, I too, will have such an impact on someone else.
I think that death is what connects us to life. It shapes how we live our lives, how we connect with others, how we wake up every day and learn to take accountability for ourselves. Death gives us meaning in the life we live.
Do you believe in God? Explain.
Woof. That’s a tough one. I have a hard time with the Judeo Christian God I grew up with. For example, I never understood why the Old Testament God could be so angry and so vengeful and I was always really disturbed by the story of God telling Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. (Like, whoa dude, where did that come from and was that totally necessary?) However, I unfortunately do believe that there is evil and quite possibly a real Satan (I’m not sure what else can explain so much evil in this world) which makes me believe that there very much could be a God and I do hope that if this God exists in the way that I was taught, he does have a divine plan to counteract evil through the goodness of people. With that said, I think it’s up to people to find it within themselves to believe in good and do good.
Human beings are undeniably complicated creatures who must make choices to be good or bad on a daily basis. I think that by seeing evil being expressed, there has to be a God or a force of good to fight it because I do believe that human beings in general are designed to create good and beauty in this world. When we deny this within ourselves as individuals and within our societies, I think we’ve gone against the natural order of things.
I am becoming more open to accepting the idea of Spirit and generally wanting to believe in something larger than myself. I do think it’s something that we’re lacking in a modern society. We cannot live life only serving or thinking of ourselves — we are connected to all people, to the land we live on, the natural resources we use, to the animals, and we have a responsibility of care and good to this world that we are stewards of.
I think the concept of God is something I will continue to explore as I get into my older years. I’m hoping that with more research I’ll come to a more final conclusion, a way of thinking, or a philosophy that resonates with me that feels logically sound, energetically beautiful, and provides a framework to surrender to when death finds its way to me again. To quote Yeats, “Things fall apart.” I hope to find something I believe in if life were to end with no notice or when it naturally inevitably falls apart right up to the very end.
Do you have a spiritual practice? If so, what is it? If not, why not?
I meditate, I practice yoga, I’m a musician, an artist, and a creator. All of these practices are incredibly spiritual to me in some way. I strongly believe that the arts and music is one of the clear markers of proof that we have a human soul and if we have a soul, there most likely is a greater power that created it and connects us to ourselves and to others.
Being a musician is probably the closest practice I have that I would call spiritual. It’s a dedication to keep up with my practice but it’s also a practice of surrender and acceptance - I will never be the perfect musician I want to be and I am always learning to accept my flaws and shortcomings in trying to achieve perfection in the beauty of music - to find the truest expression of whatever I’m working on be it phrasing, technique, execution, detail or structure it’s all bigger than me and my ego and my individual self. I have to surrender my ego to create something bigger than me. Honestly, I think if anyone really wants to know God, they should just listen to Bach, that’s a pretty good start :).
Give me an example of a sacred text, for you personally—a work of some kind (book, album, song, painting) that’s essential to the formation of your spiritual worldview. Explain.
For me, this is The Law of Success by Paramahansa Yogananda. I find this text particularly fascinating because he refers to a Judeo Christian sounding God quite regularly, but this God sounds pretty cool honestly. He argues that in order to live our life’s purpose, we have to go deep into the recesses of our mind away from the ego and within our heart, and connect to God to discover our life’s inner purpose. It’s been incredibly helpful for me through many challenging periods of my life and it played a large role of me accepting that even though I’m a reluctant artist, I am an artist nonetheless and I will work the rest of my days to see this purpose and work through. It’s been an invaluable resource for me throughout the years and I highly recommend it to anyone who might be interested in finding more sustainable ways to think about their life’s purpose and reframing what ‘success’ looks like in this life.
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Healings is written by Garrett Kamps and edited by Tommy Craggs. Ayana H. Muwwakkil provides art direction.
Healings is about illness, recovery, spirituality, and related topics, and began in the summer of 2023 as a chronicle of Garrett’s battle with cancer. We make no guarantees that it will hold together, thematically speaking, now or ever.
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