Embracing the Cracks and Creating Sanctuary With Bayo…
Listening to Bayo Akomolafe felt like poetry...
This October, we welcome Bayo Akomolafe, who joined us in the studio this summer and later for a home-cooked Nigerian dinner in Brooklyn, courtesy of Travis Reece and Kayodé’s Restaurant Mirage. I hope he returns, because this conversation has really stayed with me.
Bayo’s These Wilds Beyond Our Fences is a fascinating read, but hearing him speak surpassed even that. He speaks like a poem sounds with words layered, alive and imagistically evocative. Sometimes it took a beat for the meaning to land, and when it did… I felt more awake, more aware.
Bayo draws our attention to the cracks, to the things we’d rather smooth over. As a psychologist, I couldn’t help but think of the return of the repressed. As the French say: chassez le naturel, il revient au galop (drive out the natural, and it returns at a gallop). And here we are, mid-gallop in our global dysfunction. Bayo doesn’t fix the cracks with platitudes; he welcomes us to stay with them. He takes us deeper with stories and paradox: justice becoming reincarceration, civil rights as entry into a burning house, even his own name invoking death as growth.
He weaves in dazzling turns of phrase like sensorial apostasy, ontological fugitivity, and then drops reminders like this: categories aren’t truths; they’re rituals we repeat to make the world seem stable, even when it isn’t. He invites us to notice how the field of perception shifts, not because we control it, but because it moves. And he leaves us with a metaphor that felt spot on: The spider doesn’t make the web. The web makes the web. It’s not about us at the center, spinning control, but about webs of relation weaving themselves. Consciousness has us; we do not have it.
Bayo is playful, funny, and warm. He is like a prophet, a jester, and a sage. You’ll hear his American car metaphor, his mischievous phrasing, and his humor that wakes you up. He makes us wonder: What are we capable of perceiving that we can’t yet see?
For me, this conversation was full, heavy, hopeful, bewildering and beautiful. A dialogue that tilts the world just enough that you can’t see it the same way again.
- Elizabeth
In this episode of Wonderstruck®, we explore:
✦ How physics becomes philosophy… and poetry offers a new way of seeing.
✦ How AI unsettles our ideas of consciousness and what it means to be human.
✦ His vision of an “autistic politics,” shaped by those who move differently through the world.
✦ The role of sanctuary and sacred spaces in times of upheaval.
This is less a conversation of answers than of reimagining; an invitation to pause, to listen otherwise, and to encounter the mystery shimmering inside the fractures of our time.
We’d love to hear from you. Listen in and let us know what you think!
If you’re moved by how Bayo Akomolafe speaks in the episode, you’ll find the same depth in his book These Wilds Beyond Our Fences. Written as letters to his daughter, it reflects on the world she will inherit and offers wisdom for living in uncertain times.
To learn more, visit The Emergence Network (TEN), the organization he founded where artists, activists, and thinkers collaborate on experimental courses and creative projects that explore new ways of being in the cracks of our current systems.
On another note, this month we passed 100,000 subscribers on YouTube. To me, this milestone is less about numbers and more about what it represents: a collective of people around the world leaning into mystery, choosing curiosity over certainty, wonder over apathy.
Thank you for being part of this unfolding. I’m humbled, astonished, and so grateful to share this journey with you.
