Sounds of SAND
#6 New Gods at the End of the World: Bayo Akomolafe and Sophie Strand
Podcast summary created with Snipd AI
Quick takeaways
- Mispronunciation disrupts order, creating new gods and challenging distant entities.
- Invasive species and glitches spark creativity, emphasizing the importance of discomfort for growth.
Deep dives
The Power of Mispronunciation and New Gods
Mispronunciation acts as a crack that disrupts established order, leading to the creation of new gods, challenging the concept of gods as distant entities. The conversation delves into the idea that trauma is not just about external events but a disconnection from oneself, fostering a deeper understanding of energy and matter. The podcast explores how mispronunciation offers a unique perspective beyond language into a cosmic act, inviting a playful approach to serious topics.
The Role of Invasive Species and Glitches in Evolution
Invasive species and glitches in evolution are discussed as essential elements in shaping ecosystems and species adaptation. The narrative highlights how challenges like injuries can lead to unconventional movements, sparking new creative ideas and perspectives. The importance of embracing discomfort and unconventional paths for growth and survival is emphasized, mirroring the necessity for mispronunciations and disruptions in traditional norms.
Sanctuary-Making and Embracing Unconventional Paths
The concept of sanctuary-making is redefined as not just about safety but protecting fragility and novel expressions. The conversation delves into hosting gods in unconventional ways, such as perceiving nonverbal children as wild altars. An exploration of nonverbal communication and disabled individuals as integral to community building and relationality offers a profound shift in understanding collective communication and interconnectedness.
Disability as Invitation to Relationality and Community Building
Disability is portrayed as an invitation to embrace relationality and community building, illustrating how interdependence fosters communication and ecosystem creation. The narration underlines the significance of glitches and imperfections in forging communities and ecosystems, emphasizing the beauty and necessity of shared responsibilities and interconnectedness. The interplay between disability, interdependence, and community building unveils the richness of diversity and the power of collective spirits in shaping narratives and relationships.
Today, we present wild and flowering conversation between two poets, writers, philosophers, and theobiologians Bayo Akomalofe and Sophie Strand.
This conversation is from a 2022 SAND Community Gathering. To hear the full conversation with Q&A from the live webinar you can view it here.
In Greek Mythology, the Titan Kronos eats an indigestible stone and vomits up the new Olympic pantheon of gods. In our current time, people planted in stratigraphic layers of shared trauma find themselves uniquely ill – physically and mentally. We are unable to digest food and unable to digest violence. What if indigestion – practical and mythical – was a sign that a new world was threatening to be born? The very basis of our nucleated cells is an ancient botched bacterial cannibalism. What if our inability to digest certain injustices was an invitation to vomit up a new pantheon? And in an age when we are all threaded through with microplastics and blood pressure stabilizers, what does it mean to start to physically grow into new shapes around incursions we cannot properly assimilate or expel?
Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.), rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is the father to Alethea and Kyah, the grateful life-partner to Ije, 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 (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak, Bayo Akomolafe is the Founder of The Emergence Network and host of the online postactivist course, ‘We Will Dance with Mountains’. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California and University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont. 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 has also been appointed Senior Fellow for The New Institute in Hamburg, Germany. He is the recipient of the New Thought Leadership Award 2021 and the Excellence in Ethnocultural Psychotherapy Award by the African Mental Health Summit 2022.
Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. Yet it would probably be more authentic to call her a neo-troubadour animist with a propensity to spin yarns that inevitably turn into love stories. Give her a salamander and a stone and she’ll write you a love story. Sophie was raised by house cats, puff balls, possums, raccoons, and an opinionated, crippled goose. She believes strongly that all thinking happens interstitially – between beings, ideas, differences, mythical gradients.
She is the author of The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine and The Madonna Secret. She is also finishing a collection of essays about navigating an incurable genetic disease and early trauma through ecological storytelling.
You can subscribe to her newsletter at sophiestrand.substack.com, and follow her work on Instagram: @cosmogyny and at www.sophiestrand.com.
Topics
- 00:00 Introduction and Welcome
- 01:35 Introducing Dr. Bayo Akomolafe
- 04:11 Introducing Sophie Strand
- 06:35 Starting the Conversation: New Gods in Challenging Times
- 13:54 Exploring Mispronunciation and Evolution
- 27:27 Animist Perspectives on Trauma
- 28:17 Healing in Yoruba Culture
- 30:29 Bioelectric Signals and Embryogenesis
- 35:40 The Role of Trickster Gods
- 38:26 Invasive Species and Ecosystem Dynamics
- 47:25 Disability as an Invitation to Community
- 55:32 Concluding Thoughts on New Gods
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