We speak often about the importance of a connection with the other-than-human world, and this is it. Seeing, studying, witnessing another being. Recognizing that it, too, has intelligence and soul. Different than mine, but equally essential and worthy of awe and respect. This means, of course, that my existence (and yours) is also essential, and worthy of awe and respect.

When we come together in community, one that supports us in our wellness and in our wounding, we begin to question the narratives that have us feel less-than or in competition with each other. We become dangerous to the stories that have been handed to us by a culture that thrives on our disenchantment and cynicism. We begin to see that the world does, in fact, have a place for us – that we belong.

What we witness as we grow up, and the stories we inherit around food, emotional nourishment, what it means to nourish ourselves, and what is and isn’t acceptable nourishment shape our development and likely our current relationship with nourishment, including how we feel about nourishment and our ability to take it in.

This is an intense time to be in a human body. It requires a certain perspective and capacity to live vibrantly in a vessel that has been brilliantly designed to gather information through multiple avenues, all day and all night long, both consciously and below our mind’s awareness. It can be hard not to numb ourselves to certain embodied experiences, attempting to cherry pick the ones we feel capable of enduring, let alone actually enjoying. But in fact, when we (attempt to) select certain emotions, sensations and feelings and ignore others, we truncate our capacity to experience everything. If we wash out “negative” feelings, then the tremendous, pleasurable, and joyful experiences become washed out, too.

In industrialized cultures, we are often taught to focus on what our community is doing for us. What are we getting out of it?

And yet, perhaps paradoxically to some, we find our way into our belonging and embeddedness, the rich vein of our rightness-of-being, when we ask: What are we wanting, willing, and able to do for the others all around us? We find our belonging when we imagine we matter. We are defined as much – if not more – by the role we play in the ecosystems of which we are a part than we are by the things we get from those ecosystems.

We want to share another poem with you. This is one of our favorites by a rather well-known poet, Mary Oliver. May it inspire to spend some time with the trees, to remember your belonging and your light, and to slow down for a moment to appreciate the breath in your lungs and the sparkle in your eye.

Our belonging is unquestionable and inexorable. As much as we might try to separate ourselves from the other-than-human world, we are undeniably an intrinsic part of the Earth's ecosystem.

Every time the faculty of The Verdant Collective gets together to craft an offering, we find that no matter the specific content, our intention ultimately comes back to one thing.

BELONGING

One thing we have in common is that the four of us have parts that were painfully rejected by family, friends, institutions, and beyond. Oh my goodness how we’ve wanted to feel loved and held by those who simply couldn’t! We’ve shared stories with each other about moments of despair when we felt too broken or too weird to ever be really welcome in this world.

In the last two decades, I have come to understand that fundamental social change seeds and roots within the intimate and often uncharted terrain of our emotional and physical bodies. Terrain that has been devalued, colonized, and commercialized by the dominant culture just as it is often ignored by activists themselves.

In Western Culture, the word erotic has been conflated with sex, and sex has been reduced to what you do with your genitals with another person. It’s a rather limited understanding that gives us little if any room to actually exist and explore… We want to invite you into a very different understanding of the word erotic.

In the last few months, I’ve learned so much about the underbelly of my emotions, the uncomfortable stuff I’ve been able to breeze past and work around in busier times. Feelings of bitterness, frustration, insecurity, and a short temper have crept in from the periphery, and these days, I have to consciously scan for what’s good because so much of what’s going on feels like a threat.