Beautifully Flawed Becoming: Bayo Akomolafe on The Co-Creation of New Worlds, Investigating Our Lostness, The Driving Motivation of Wonder, and The One Who Is Never Not Broken
Manage episode 444519449 series 3606971
[BEAUTIFULLY FLAWED] BECOMING
The process of coming to be something or of passing into a state.
[Oxford English Dictionary]
Dr. Bayo Akomolafe is one of the prominent visionaries of our time.
Rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, Akomolafe is Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden Abayomi's father, the grateful life partner to Ije, and a son and brother. A widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, public intellectual, essayist, and 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.
Our debut conversation explores Bayo's perspective on the vital role of our individual and collective untold stories, our current position at the end of the world as we know it, the emerging co-creation of new worlds, our exploration of lostness, and, in the spirit of a true poet, the profound role of wonder as a driving motivation.
Bayo shares otherworldly examples illustrating our interconnectedness, the significance of queer spaces, the crucial necessity of navigating "cracks" within systems, the beauty of the unknowable, and the potential for co-creating life-affirming realities amidst chaos.
The episode culminates in reflections on the journey of becoming, inviting anyone interested to embrace their innate wildness on the path to reclamation and liberation. Thanks for opening to new ways of being - enjoy!
About Bayo:
Bayo Akomolafe is the Founder of The Emergence Network, a planet-wide initiative that seeks to convene communities in new ways in response to the critical, civilizational challenges we face as a species. He is host of the postactivist course/festival/event, ‘We Will Dance with Mountains’. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California. He sits on the Board of many organizations including Science and Non-Duality (US) and Ancient Futures (Australia).
In July 2022, Dr. Akomolafe was appointed the inaugural Global Senior Fellow of University of California’s (Berkeley) Othering and Belonging Institute. He is also the inaugural Special Fellow of the Schumacher Centre for New Economics, the Inaugural Scholar in Residence for the Aspen Institute, the inaugural Special Fellow for the Council of an Uncertain Human Future, as well as Visiting Scholar to Clark University, Massachusetts, USA (2024). He has been Fellow for The New Institute in Hamburg, Germany, and Visiting Critic-in-Residence for the Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles (2023).
He is the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) and has been Commencement Speaker in two universities convocation events. He is also the recipient of the New Thought Leadership Award 2021 and the Excellence in Ethnocultural Psychotherapy Award by the African Mental Health Summit 2022. In a ceremony in July 2023, the City of Portland (Maine, USA) awarded Dr. Akomolafe with the symbolic ‘Key to the City’ in recognition of his planet-wide work and achievements.
Dr. Akomolafe is a Member of the Club of Rome, a Fellow for the Royal Society of Arts in the UK, and an Ambassador for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance.
Connect with Bayo and The Emergence Network (including joining the five-day festival, Becoming Monster, from 10/30/24-11/5/24)
Watch on Youtube
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