We Find Our Belonging When We Imagine We Matter

Something magical happens every time the four of us (Christiane, Chris, Johanna, and I) sit down for a meeting. 

I’m not talking fairy dust and bippity-boppity-boo (not that there's anything wrong with fairy dust and bippity-boppity-boo!!). The magic we make is gritty and hard-won. 

It’s the kind of magic that arises from working collectively. We listen to ourselves and one another. We pause. We interrupt. We get frustrated. We wrestle with calendars and concepts – and sometimes, energetically, with one another. There are tears and there is laughter. And more love and trust than is typical for professional partnerships. When we come together, we create content, programs, and solutions that none of us could come up with on our own. 

It might not be the most efficient way of working, but efficiency is not the point here. We are actively creating a culture that prioritizes collaboration, belonging, sustainability, accountability, and responsibility because those are the foundations for a thriving ecosystem.

I look at the tree outside my window and consider how it partners with the earth. It’s roots spread, reaching for nutrients, water, and stability. In turn, its roots hold the Earth in place. Then I consider how it partners with the sun, taking in its much-needed light to synthesize its food. In turn, it converts carbon dioxide into much-needed oxygen. The squirrels partner with the tree, using it as a home and as a pathway to food. The tree uses the squirrels to help spread its seeds... 

I could keep going, but you get the point. Without the earth, the sun, the air, the water, or the squirrels, the tree wouldn’t be. Its very existence is dependent on its embeddedness in a complex, collaborative ecosystem; one that it both takes from and supports. As much as we humans think of ourselves as independent and self-contained, we are not. We need one another, and we feed one another.

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. 

The four of us working together are acutely aware of how important we each are to the overall wellness of what we are creating, and to each other's wellness. We dare to imagine our importance, we call one another back into it, and we hold ourselves accountable for taking up our right-sized space and responsibility.

It is the recognition that our full participation is required that settles us into our embeddedness and belonging, and that allows for the magic to arise between the four of us. It’s an ordinary, practical, and absolutely essential magic. One that you can connect with right here.

Consider for a moment the ways that you are completely necessary in this world. What is the nourishment and support that you feed back into the web of existence? What are the ways in which your existence is as essential as the sun is to the tree? What do you have to give to your community – the human and the other than human? Live your life from there.