The powerfully woven personal story of Findhorn New Story summiteer and clinical psychologist, Bayo Akomolafe, told with vulnerability, humour and eloquence….
“Home holds many meanings for us. It is a place of warmth, a sense of being rooted and known and accepted. Our mooring spot in an ultimately unmappable and threatening universe. As such, being without a home can be understandably tragic.
“In this Earth Talk, Bayo frames historical tensions, colonial incursions and the evolution of ecological-economic-political configurations in terms of our collective quests for a place in the universe. He considers how our modern culture is rupturing, and how our fundamental assumptions about the universe – agency and intentionality as a function of human intelligence, causality, matter as independent inertia, the subject-object duality, the theo-clinical primacy of the ego, or even the givenness of time – are being reimagined. We no longer live in ‘reserved areas’ on the earth; we are part of its wildness, one with the shadows, produced by the monstrous. And yet, as Bayo surmises, this ‘tragedy’ of homelessness is our one most singular source of new hope, an occasion for turning to each other in small queer ways, and an acknowledgement that we are being reborn and reframed and reconfigured – even though not in the neat ways we anticipated.”
Adebayo Akomolafe (PhD) is a young clinical psychologist, lecturer and author from Covenant University in Nigeria. Author, poet, international speaker, Bayo is the Special Envoy of the International Alliance for Localization, a project of Local Futures. Bayo is globally recognized for his poetic, unconventional, counterintuitive, and indigenous take on global crisis, civic action and social change, and was recently enlisted as the recipient of the Global Excellence Award (Civil Society) 2014 by FutureShapers (California). He is the Coordinating Curator for The Emergence Network, a post-activist project seeking to trouble the discourse on change and contemporary activism, as well as the facilitator of ‘We will dance with Mountains: Writing as a tool for Emergence‘, an online course.
Disenchanted with the single story about wellness and being he had received via his Eurocentric clinical training, Bayo has embarked on a quest to seek out the less-than-obvious stories his own people have told for hundreds of years. He has met with Yoruba shaman-priests who speak glowingly about the vibrancy of the nonhuman world, the limitations of human agency and identity, and a more holistic notion of prosperity and abundance. They have taught him the limitations of ‘the white man’s pills’ and urged a collective shift from the hubris of modernity to a deepened alliance with the web of life, saying: ‘In order to find your way, you must lose it’. Bayo has learned to recognise that the powerful experiences associated with mental disorders have deeper significance, and could be our strongest allies in our quest to live in a more beautiful world.”
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