064 Bayo Akomolafe – Getting Lost & Meeting the More-than-Human Vibrancy of the World

State of Emergence

Prophetic teacher, psychologist, author and poet, Bayo Akomolafe joins Terry to explore the “cracks in the world” that are opening to swallow everything we’ve been taught to believe and sense into the voices, adventures, and new worlds that are poised to emerge.

With vivid original imagination and a ruthless deep kindness, Bayo names the limits of modern Western “solutionism” and invites us to make “fugitive breaks” away from familiar ways of knowing — to become consciously “lost” or “exiled” from our patterns of “proliferating the old.”

He encourages us to meet our realities as if for the very first time and to embrace risks, strangeness, and unusual experimentation in our ways of being, relating, parenting, and creating. As we concluded our conversation, Bayo invited us to face our apocalyptic time as both a world-ending event and a world-creating event, mandating not just deep grief but also resilient curiosity and playfulness.

Bayo Akomolafe is a celebrated international speaker, teacher, public intellectual, and author, as well as (in his words) a “fugitive neo-materialist post-activist, and Yoruba poet.” Bayo was born into a Christian home and to Yoruba parents in western Nigeria. He was teaching at Covenant University, Nigeria before becoming Special Envoy of the International Alliance for Localization, a project of Ancient Futures (USA). He went on to teach throughout the U.S. at Middlebury College, Sonoma State University, Simon Fraser University, Schumacher College — among other universities around the world — on his own formulated concepts of ‘transraciality’ and postactivism. He currently lives between India and the United States lecturing at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California and University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont, sitting on the Board of many organizations including Science and Nonduality, and serves as Chief Curator of The Emergence Network. He is also the author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak.

For more information on Bayo Akomolafe and Terry Patten, check out the following resources:

• Bayo Akomolafe’s website
• The Emergence Network
• Bayo’s book, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letter to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home
• Bayo’s book, We Will Tell Our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak
• Terry’s nonprofit website A New Republic of the Heart
• Terry Patten’s website

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