Letter from the Benevolent Trickster and Agent of Epiphany: Spring 23’

Is it too late?” Asks the newest collection of essays in which Rebecca Solnit collects writings from friends and colleagues. She posits hope – hope as the work. Rebecca Solnit opens the collection of essays from others with her own piece, titled, Difficult is Not the Same as Impossible and oh reader, did it resonate. At Thrivable Society we want to revel in such invitations and let them proliferate in our mouths. Let us be with ‘what is’ without resigning ourselves to some forecasted fate. Rebecca calls forth a quote from the playwright Vaclav Havel, and we bring it here to you: “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out.” Solnit writes, “To hope is to accept despair as an emotion but not as an analysis. To recognize that what is unlikely is possible, just as what is likely is not inevitable.”

Let’s together set aside forecasts of gloom doom that tells us that we are not up to the task. Instead, let’s sit with being enough as we are, trusting that together we can do more than we can imagine alone. To do so, we have to let go of the hubris of thinking we know… well, anything. We want to befriend our monsters to sit with the trouble, the unknown, and the not-yet-imagined with some energy of playful possibility. This is thrivability, the playful possible. Drink up, this song of life, poured from the hands of your favorite tricksters.

On that line of thinking we recently caught a talk by Bayo Akomolafe arguing for a post-activist life. Bayo definitely gives off trickster vibes while invoking intellectuals like Donna Hawaway, who invites us to Stay with the Trouble or Catherine Keller who opens us to apophatic discourse.

Bayo dances in the corners of the map where it says: Here be dragons. He says to be with the monsters in the liminal spaces and edges where the known world becomes unintelligible and unknown. Like many of this ilk, he asks us to remain bewildered, move even beyond hope into surrender to the unknown. And there, practice sitting uncomfortably with the trouble while continuously disrupting ourselves. Bewilder our senses to queer time itself.

Bewilderment is not about singular, linear, and causal futures projected from the known now. It is the speculation of a plethora of possibilities. Stay with those desires that break away from capitalism and whiteness. Bayo argues that wisdom breaks things and goes the other way, stands in the face of. Wisdom is not static… wisdom is transversal… it acts on/through rather than having static knowing.

As such, we have a few projects we are working on across the journal issues we are sharing with you in hopes of your collaboration and your transversal wisdom. This issue more directly focuses on the State of the Field and why we want to act as if it is not too late while engaging our bewilderment. What have we missed? What more can be included? We invite you to wrestle with these mysterious dragons of the unknown and unknowable.

We offer this journal to you, our thrivable family, to highlight your work to foster aliveness in the world.

Bayo Akomolafe slide, Schumacher Center for New Economics