Mid-winter
Sunrise from our east window and Moon-setting from our west window
Winter of the Soul?
I was recently paging through the website of Báyò Akómoláfé... It is easy in our cold, wet, mid-winter days, where the daily news is constantly met with a knot in my stomach, for a winter of the soul to set in. Báyò offers a fresh approach... something to ponder on:
‘I am quite confident that even as the oceans boil, and the hurricanes beat violently against our once safe shores, and the air sweats with the heat of impending doom, and our fists protest the denial of climate justice, that there is a path to take that has nothing to do with victory or defeat: a place we do not yet know the coordinates to; a question we do not yet know how to ask. The point of the departed arrow is not merely to pierce the bullseye and carry the trophy: the point of the arrow is to sing the wind and remake the world in the brevity of flight. There are things we must do, sayings we must say, thoughts we must think, that look nothing like the images of success that have so thoroughly possessed our visions of justice. May this new decade be remembered as the decade of the strange path, of the third way, of the broken binary, of the traversal disruption, the kairotic moment, the posthuman movement for emancipation, the gift of disorientation that opened up new places of power, and of slow limbs.
May this decade bring more than just solutions, more than just a future - may it bring words we don't know yet, and temporalities we have not yet inhabited. May we be slower than speed could calculate, and swifter than the pull of the gravity of words can incarcerate. And may we be visited so thoroughly, and met in wild places so overwhelmingly, that we are left undone. Ready for composting. Ready for the impossible. Welcome to the decade of the fugitive.
And from his Course page … These offerings are an embodiment of what I sense is some of my deepest work – to open up new places of power and responsivity; to make space for the otherwise; to help in the partial recuperation of our vital connections with land, place and people; and, to live a small, intimate life.
May these words bring you inspiration and nourishment at this mid-winter time... even if you live in the mid-summer of the north...
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