“And I was thinking that, at least in my own situated experience, my approach to the sacred would be to flip the paradigm and to ask, what if the sacred researches you?” Sophie Strand
E225 – TIMELESS// ‘How to Reimagine Power and Presence in Search of the Sacred’ with Sophie Strand and Bayo Akomolafe
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About this interview: 
“And I was thinking that, at least in my own situated experience, my approach to the sacred would be to flip the paradigm and to ask, what if the sacred researches you?” Sophie Strand
In this TIMELESS episode we hear from Sophie Strand and Bayo Akomolafe. Together we dive into the complex, layered nature of the sacred—not as something to be captured or defined, but as something elusive and in between. This conversation explores how the sacred isn’t found in mastery or control, but in embracing rupture, incompleteness, and humility. We unpack what it means to let ourselves be researched by the sacred, to approach our bodies and minds as collaborative spaces, and to seek meaning in moments of uncertainty and fragility.
Sophie is a writer, who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. She believes strongly that all thinking happens interstitially between beings, ideas, differences, and mythical gradients. Bayo is a poet, philosopher, psychologist, professor, and chief-curator of the Emergence Network. He curates this earth-wide project for the re-calibration of our ability to respond to civilisational crisis.
This is part of a playful conversation we had with Sophie and Bayo in April 2022 titled E147 – Re-imagined Education, Cybernetic Flow and Bewilderment with Sophie Strand and Bayo Akomolafe // Researching The Sacred.
We hope this little piece invites you to pause and reflect on the sacred in new and unexpected ways.
“Our practise must be to unlearn mastery. Our practise must be to tell stories, to rejuvenate archives, pedagogies that help us sit here, not pedagogies that rush us into blueprints of the future, that teach us to haughtily pronounce what the next might look like, but that we cannot summarily, on our own accord, summon the sense of humility.” Bayo Akomolafe
Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. But 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. In every neighborhood she’s ever lived in she has been known as “the walker”. She believes strongly that all thinking happens interstitially – between beings, ideas, differences, mythical gradients. Her first book of essays The Flowering Wand: Lunar Kings, Lichenized Lovers, Transpecies Magicians, and Rhizomatic Harpists Heal the Masculine is forthcoming in 2022 from Inner Traditions. Her eco-feminist historical fiction reimagining of the gospels The Madonna Secret will also be published by Inner Traditions. Her books of poetry include Love Song to a Blue God (Oread Press) and Those Other Flowers to Come (Dancing Girl Press) and The Approach (The Swan). Her poems and essays have been published by Art PAPERS, The Dark Mountain Project, Poetry.org, Unearthed, Braided Way, Creatrix, Your Impossible Voice, The Doris, Persephone’s Daughters, and Entropy. She has recently finished a work of historical fiction, The Madonna Secret, that offers an eco-feminist revision of the gospels. She is currently researching her next epic, a mythopoetic exploration of ecology and queerness in the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde.
Bayo Akomolafe is a poet, philosopher, psychologist, professor and chief-curator of the Emergence Network. He curates this earth-wide project for the re-calibration of our ability to respond to civilisational crisis – a project framed within a feminist ethos and inspired by indigenous cosmologies. Bayo has authored books such as ‘These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home’ and co-authored ‘We Will Tell Our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak!’. Bayo hopes to inspire 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 discrete or separate from the problems that we seek to nullify. He is currently hosting a course ‘We Will Dance with Mountains: Let us Make Sanctuary’, a ceremonial inquiry, collective sense-making, and prophetic exile where we might unlearn mastery, become fugitive, and slow down in times of urgency.
To connect or work with Sopie, visit sophiestrand.com
To connect or work with Bayo, visit bayoakomolafe.net
To connect or work with Amisha, visit amisha.co.uk
artwork video: picture by Hannah Tornhill Resources and links from this episode:
- Sophie Strand’s Instagram
- Bayo Akomolafe’s Instagram
- E147 – Re-imagined Education, Cybernetic Flow and Bewilderment with Sophie Strand and Bayo Akomolafe // Researching The Sacred
- Re-imagining education
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