Ayana Young Hello For The Wild community, Ayana here. We are so grateful to you for sticking around as we make the transition to our Slow Media approach, and I'm thrilled to share that as part of this, we've just released our second slow study with Bayo Akomolafe.

These slow studies are a unique collaboration between The Emergence Network and For The Wild focused on making the We Will Dance with Mountains course accessible in an asynchronous, self paced manner, so you can embrace slowness and integration in your study. The segments featured in this Slow Study were recorded in 2023 as part of the We Will Dance with Mountains live sessions attended by over 1400 people around the world. We have edited the conversations and added supplementary materials so that you're able to go about this immersive, transformative course at your own pace. This course is profound, restful, and thought provoking. It gives you a chance to sit with Bayo's work and absorb not only what he says, but also the spirit of what it means to make uncertainty cracks and edges the thesis of thought.

Through it, you'll hear from bio and a cacophony of special guests including Sophie Strand or Ressma Menakem, Orland Bishop, and Erin Manning. The full package includes eight audio sessions with lectures, practices, music, poetry and a conversation from Bayo and his brilliant crew of co-conspirators. These are accompanied by recorded practice prompts from Jiordi Rosales and a text-based course book with details on each session and additional extrapolations.

For the Wild is deeply grateful to Bayo and our partners at The Emergence Network for this collaboration. We hope you enjoy this experience. To purchase the Slow Study, please visit our website at forthewild.world/slowstudy.

I'll let Jiordi introduce the course further…

Jiordi Rosales Hello everyone, and welcome to We Will Dance with Mountains the 2024 Slow Study with For The Wild. My name is Jiordi Rosales, also known as Janus, your loyal janitor. The journey you're about to go on, in fact, began a year ago when these recordings were originally taken as part of an online course with 1400 participants from around the world. The questions we asked then have only become more alive and relevant to the current moment that we find ourselves in.

This series is a distillation of Bayo's recent theoretical work, held within an environment of thinking and playing together among friends, of offering libation again and again, and embracing the musicality of demise. In fact, much of what you are about to hear, aside from lecture and story, is music. 

Before you begin, it is important that you understand that while you might be listening to this course alone or perhaps with a friend, you're actually joining a vast and ongoing learning community of wayward academics, hopeless activists, cranky elders, perpetual stragglers, awestruck librarians and many others who have given up justice to see what lies beneath. By listening, you are entering a crowded room full of noise and laughter. There are thousands of us here sharing these inquiries with you. We pray you can stay present to that abundance even when things feel silent in the immediate world around you. 

Lastly, a small note on listening. If you want to meet a beautiful bird, then it is unwise to go tromping loudly into the forest calling for one, they'll likely all fly far away. A more strategic mode of engagement would be to find a place, ideally at the very edge of a clearing, where you can blend in. Then to simply sit there long enough for the birds to eventually grow comfortable with you and to allow themselves to be seen and heard. It requires patience and discernment and perhaps even some boredom in order to witness the miraculous.

And so it goes with this Slow Study. Many of the teachings here take time to reveal themselves, rather than attempting to grasp from them the jewel of their meaning. Let it percolate or not entirely make sense, and just focus on camouflaging yourself into your surroundings, the rest will follow.

Jackson Kroopf  Thanks for listening to For The Wild. The music you heard today was by Ganavya. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Julia Jackson, and  Jackson Kroopf.