If I heard him correctly Bayo Akomalafe spoke of the world we’re striving to awaken in as “a transformative heap of rubbish.” I love his instincts and I like this phrasing of it. It helps me today with the too rigid categories I woke up in this morning, like waking up in a jail. My little brain like a lego set in a dysfunctional world!
We like to have a neat and tidy narrative, our plan for awakening and self-improvement and saving the world. Or at least saving ourselves.
Beyond that is the world we share, vast, messy, the world of gods and demons, the ages with all their grandeur and gore. We make our hopeful structures in the midst of that, little sandcastles in the face of the sea and the tides.
I like the insecurity of that! I want to be that child on the beach, or the father looking after him.
Because the sea and the tides are smarter. They keep on bringing us back to the greater wisdom or at least the simplicity of the child playing on the beach or the integrity of how adults serve.
This transformative heap is composting, tearing down the stuff of the world and recombining it into something new that the individual can’t understand or see. It’s too big for individual us even though the narrative around being a human is that you’re supposed to and you can control the outcome, figure it out. Succeed.
Getting loose of all that isn’t something that can be done on one’s own I don’t think, because the very problem is that we think it’s something we can do on our own. It’s our illusion of control and mastery – the ego’s quest for success as an isolated atom – that is the problem.
No matter because the transformative heap of rubbish, which is to say everything we’ve cast aside as unimportant in our endeavour, will do its magic. We’ll be abetted – I don’t want to say saved with its binary overtones – by factors beyond our control, by each other, by a fly in the room, an ancestor, a trickster.