From Living the New Story – Series 4

Bayo Akomolafe is a teacher, public intellectual, author and facilitator. He is globally recognised for his poetic, unconventional, counterintuitive, and indigenous take on global crisis, civic action and social change. As Executive Director of The Emergence Network, Bayo inspires a diffractive network of sharing – a slowing down, an ethics of entanglement, an activism of inquiry, a ‘politics of surprise’…one that does not treat the crises of our times as exterior to ‘us’ or the ‘solutions’ that conventional activism offers as separate from the problems we seek to nullify. Bayo is host of the online course, We will dance with Mountains, author of We will tell our own story! and These Wilds Beyond our Fences.

Questions for ongoing reflection and dialogue

Between now and our final session, we invite you to look back at your answers to all the Study Guide questions to harvest the learning and wisdom, and to see how much you have grown and expanded. So do take the time and care to respond deeply and be sure to record your insights in your ‘Myth, Magic & Miracles’ Journal.

1-What doesn’t seem to be working in your story – our story – of progress, of modernity? Where is the story of our times failing or softening for you; where are you being invited to slow down – to increase and expand your awareness?

 2-Bayo speaks to that moment, that wound, that gap, that crack, that metabolic rift, where it is impossible to exert our agency as if we were the only ones in the room. And that is the place of magic. Recall a time in your life when you experienced such a wound, gap, a crack or a rift. What did you experience when you surrendered to that place of magic that was greater than yourself and consciously chose to live outside the architectural spaces of the familiar?

 3-What are the monsters or gargoyles or tricksters that you don’t talk about often that are rummaging and dancing around the playground of your life? Open to and describe the gifts in these experiences.

 4-Bayo suggests that these moments, such as those we are experiencing through the global pandemic, are also moments for which we have arguably, and in secret, and maybe quite unconsciously, been calling. We have been calling for something different to happen – something entirely different out of the exhaustion of the ordinary, the exhaustion of the latest technological innovations. We have been calling for this in ways beyond words. We have been asking for a way out. Do you agree? What have you been calling for perhaps secretly?

What effect, if any, does this have on your personal myth as it has unfolded throughout the journey? What changes are needed now to really meet that moment where magic is possible?