Elder as Threshold - Bayo Akomolafe

In this episode we depart from elder as a physical being and look at the energy of elder can do in a world that is collapsing.

BIO

Bayo Akomolafe is the descendant of Yoruba fields of archetypal becomings and mythopoeic landscapes. He is an author, celebrated speaker, teacher, and self-styled trans-public intellectual (a concept imagined together with and inspired by the shamanic priesthood of the Yoruba healer-trickster)- whose vocation goes beyond justice and speaking truth to power to opening up other spaces of power-with, and queering fond formulations and configurations of hope.

The convener of the concepts of ‘postactivism’, ‘transraciality’ and ‘ontofugitivity’, Dr. Bayo Akomolafe is a widely celebrated international speaker, teacher, public intellectual, essayist and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books), and Selah: A Báyò Akómoláfé Reader

Bayo considers his most sacred work to be learning how to be with his daughter and son, Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden – and their mother, his wife and “life-nectar”, Ijeoma. “To learn the importance of insignificance” is the way he frames a desire to reacquaint himself with a world that is irretrievably entangled, preposterously alive and completely partial.

As Visionary Founder and Elder of The Emergence Network and Chief Host of the widely popular online-offline course/festival series, We Will Dance with Mountains, Bayo curates an earth-wide project for the re-calibration of our ability to respond to civilizational crisis – a project framed within a material feminist/posthumanist/postactivist ethos and inspired by Yoruba indigenous cosmologies. He considers this a shared art – exploring the edges of the intelligible, dancing with posthumanist ideas, dabbling in the mysteries of quantum mechanics and the liberating sermon of an ecofeminism text, and talking with others about how to host a festival of radical silence on a street in London – and part of his inner struggle to regain a sense of rootedness to his community.

Bayo Akomolafe is a recipient of the 2021 New Thought Walden Award, meant to honor those who use empowering spiritual ideas and philosophies to change lives and make our planet a better place.

Bayo has given up his longing for the “end-time” and is learning to live in the “meantime”...in the middle, where we must live with confusion and make do with partial answers. His greatest vocation is however learning to be a satellite orbiting his greatest gift, his goddess Ijeoma, and knowing the blessings of her gravity - as well as co-researching into magic and the utter unspeakability of the world in its ongoingness along with his children. He speaks and teaches about his experiences around the world, and then returns to his adopted home in Chennai, India – “where the occasional whiff of cow dung dancing in the air is another invitation to explore the vitality of a world that is never still and always surprising.”

Come to the Elder by Bayo Akomolafe