When we gather to wonder and to sing and to pray and to hope, when we keep ourselves courageous and whole, we belong to ourselves. And when we embrace challenging discourse and push against exclusion, we belong to one another. And when we lean in to listen better, when we lean out to expand our networks, we belong to our communities. And when we recognize our privilege and live mercifully and do justice and walk humbly with the Divine, we belong. And when we gather to wonder, to sing, we belong to the Divine! We belong. You belong. I belong. Let it be so.

Reimagining belonging is not just about the changes that happen in the world but the changes that happen in you.

I think the main goal of the government when they started this deportation campaign was to tell us — those who do not belong to the white Christian nationalist ideology — that you don’t belong here. I think people in my community and all over the country said otherwise: You do belong here.

What I am seeing all across the country in such beautiful ways is religious people and spiritual people and people from all different backgrounds coming together in powerful ways to say ‘no’ and to continue to envision a way forward where sacred belonging is for everyone. And what that involves is a kind of courage. Courage is something we are leaning into heavily right now, because courage is required.

Radical acceptance of oneness, love and joy is a spiritual, revolutionary and transformative act of resistance to individual and systemic othering and violence.

Belonging — real belonging — has become the tension and fight of our time. America is more diverse, yet more divided than ever. It is a nation that’s still wrestling with who counts, who’s heard and who’s allowed to belong.

We are not born into the world putting people into hard categories of 𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦𝘳 or 𝘯𝘰𝘵… We’re born for connection, and we have been trained for disconnection. [It’s about] waking up and finding ways to reconnect to the sense that we are already radically interconnected. We are already family.

Perhaps ordinary places are simple experiences that pull us into a deep experience of felt belonging — that open a window to sensory relationship, that orient us to what is beyond ourselves. Orient us, even if briefly, to the particular small bit of cosmos where we have placed our feet.

If we are to build a compassionate life, a compassionate world, we need to see others as human beings.

If we do not believe that we matter, if we don’t think that we are valued, if we don’t think we belong, it makes it harder for us to connect to other people.