16/06/2025
The pillars that held up the usual are trembling under its weight.
As the fires rage, we will not just need to fetch water, we will have to become water. We will not merely claim sanctuary, we will make sanctuary. We will braid with the threads of temporalities that do not travel forward; we will tell stories in the Dionysian spaces between mushroom clouds.
We will host grief as an ally, our tears as regal emissaries of a world that exceeds clarity, and our falling to the ground as an invitation to listen to its forlorn music.
Our raft-making won't stop the fires from flaring up, but it may teach us how to sit with the heat without burning away. Only then, at the threshold that Esu and Osun nourish with their cosmic intimacy, will we realize that the world was never ours to fix, only to feel. That the trembling was not a sign of failure, but of fermentation. That the end of the usual is not catastrophe, but a stranger choreography where every collapse composes a new rhythm, a fugitive score for those willing to dance offbeat.
At that threshold, where Esu laughs and Osun weeps honey, we might re-member how to dwell in undoing. How to speak without anchoring in mastery. How to love without arriving. And how to co-compose with the broken, the spored, the singed, and the strange.
There, we won’t rebuild what was lost. We’ll compost it. We'll make meals with the confetti once reserved to decorate the victories we imagined were exclusively important.
We won’t find the future. We’ll feel for it, barefoot, with stories for soles.
And maybe, just maybe, in the midst of smoke and myth, we’ll learn that sanctuary is not a place, but a practice, a way to become-with a world that is never not broken.
Báyò Akomolafe
