This part was meaningful to me:
"When I consider one of the more mesmeric implications of this idea that we are in this together for all the questions we pose to the world, and all the claims we make about what feels fair and just, I realize that the asking itself—the mereness of a question—might be inexhaustible in its own right and may not require the redemptive intervention of an answer for it to be valuable or profound in its way.
Questions have a complete partialness. Another way to say this might be to say that the way to think about or think through our problems—how to ask this question of home, how to navigate dislocation, how to reconcile ourselves with the matterings of the world at large, and how to understand pain as the larger project of a community of others—may not be available yet. Let me elaborate.
It is often taken for granted that the opposite of a question is an answer; there is a cosmic, platonic double-step logic about it. Black is to white, as night is to day, as cats are to dogs, and questions are to answers. But what if questions are not free-floating formations that are summarily resolved with answers? What if questions are not made only of words? What if questions are material things, speciated and tactile, with body parts, particular histories of their own, affective accompaniments, genealogical ties, and burial grounds? What if questions are like guests to a home—to be welcomed, catered to, dusted up, considered affectionately, spoken with, and put to bed? And what if giving an answer is sometimes the ethical equivalent of slamming a door on the face of a guest as soon as you’ve said hello?"

This part was also meaningful to me:
"Only under the regime of Light—the Apollonian politics of permanence— would death and darkness be treated as enemies. Perhaps this is why it is extremely difficult for moderns not to think that the world is here for us, for our own enjoyment, our own movements and definitions and terms. But the world is not “designed,” put in place, or created for our well-being—at least not in the absolute sense that there is a universal harmony awaiting our awakening. The world dips in and out, retreats and proceeds, produces and eats up its own genius a mere gasp later.
Suffering needs a new onto-epistemology—not one that rules it out for eventual fixing, but one that recognizes its entanglement with well-being. Grieving must be part of the lives for happiness to become meaningful.
There aren’t enough places to grieve around, since every place is adhering to the imperatives of development, but I do pray that your world will have “soft places to yield”—where the generativity of grief can be met with in its troubling presence, where darkness can be known as a menstrual wound, and failure, a portal to wild worlds beyond our ken.
It often takes Lali to remind me that you have to move and have your own way in the world. To tell you the truth, I cannot bear to see you in pain. Just the memory of your tears brings water to my own eyes, not to mention actually watching you cry. And yet, if I embrace you too long, then I lose you. I must learn the slow process of letting go, of allowing you the privilege of sorrow without seeking to console you to numbness.
Perhaps this is why I have written this particularly long letter, taking a break from my hunt for hushes ... to invite you to consider that your discomfort is a holy ally, a redeeming interruption. Where you are most confused, exhausted, distressed, and compromised is where the wild things grow. Where crazy colors, beguiling angels’ trumpets, decadent air ferns, and wise old spruces sprout with festive abandon. Where the thrumming of frogs, the discourse of cricket limbs, the ambivalence of a nightly mist, and the audience of a delighted moon contrive an unheard score. It’s where your primal self, where the unthought, calls to you softly—reminding you that you are not to be easily resolved, reminding you that you are larger than you could ever imagine.
You will encounter troubles of your own. You will be “traveled” by things words cannot encircle. Find the others who can hold space with you. Then, when in the alchemical dynamics of things, the sun emerges again, don’t walk off rudely into his arms. Turn toward the smoldering darkness whence you came, and thank her for shaping you, for scaring you, for wounding you, and defeating you, and shaking you, because in her womb you were thoroughly purged, and made fresh for new glimpses of wonder. And as you walk farther into the domineering light, the dark will bless you with a gift to remind you that you are not as contained or as limited as you think, that there is more to you than what meets the educated eye, that whatever you do, the whole universe does the same along with you—imitating you with a childish keenness, and that you are never, ever alone."

Writing a review of Bayo seems like a foolish attempt to “understand” or simplify his words. I underlined passages and wrote in the margins. I will come back to this book again.

Your mileage will vary with this book. It is equal parts exquisitely written and pretentious/purple. It is profound and perfunctory, enlightening and overreaching, understated and grandiose. As with all of these types of books - ecocritical/ethical/existential pseudo-memoirs - a lot of it can come across as quite wishy-washy, for lack of a better term. No real, actionable solution is put forward, merely an agenda or manifesto that draws inspiration from literary/political theory and alternative belief systems which requires a lot of skill to be able to convey without sounding like a highlight reel of platitudes linked tangentially by some stretches of logic and overrationalisation to make it fit into a neater narrative.

What is not debatable, however, is the authors skill at descriptive writing. Parts of this book stand up there as some of the most poetic pieces of prose I have read in a good few years.