It has been said that belonging matters after the basics are satisfied: food, water, shelter and material well-being.

This is not exactly true. Air, not water, food, or any other material thing, is of primary importance. Second of all, air, IS an actual aspect of belonging because air is internal, external, gives speech, allows blood flow, creates organisms, and to many is God.

Spirit, is the root word of air, soul, atmosphere, word, wind and almost everything else related to air and belonging. People are motivated to belong, and there is an easy test to see if one does. 

Take a breath. If the earth meets your need for belonging, the earth, the trees, the plants and the systems that drive them will claim you as “belonging.” Human beings, who are not as old and wise as nature, or god, may exclude, dismiss, or even discard you, but nature never will. Even when we return to the stars, we will take air, or generate it with us, because it is us.

Belonging matters because humans belong to a universe made of matter (plus energy and space). There is also a sense of energy motivating all organisms and all matter materializing toward and away from life to be, and to belong to those systems. One can choose to claim belonging by being loving, grateful, protective and sharing of life.

People are motivated to belong, and to unite, however. Thus, a confusing modernity arose that even as it moved people away from one another and the earth, it promised them more and more exclusive entitlement, salvation, and exclusivity. And that is the how motivation got earth where it is today.

Now people have connective technology and some use it to unite. Others use it for false support of false belonging, in place of family bonding, they “like” one another, and products on social networks. Anonymity and no trusting risks are taken, so true intimacy and connection are lost. They often do not know neighbors, co-workers, and even family!

Even in the age of the global village, belonging is threatened daily as some organisms are deemed of less value than others, and are destroyed, hence destroying the sustaining mental, emotional and physical health of the planet and earth’s organisms.

Many people today wish to know how to recapture, to reconnect to the “US” that is belonging to earth People know there is a “natural” world, but it is seen as rightly a commodity rather than a miracle of regeneration and sustaining life. They are motivated, now, by fear, alienation, isolation, and even desperation in the case of those already starving, murdering, polluting and plundering.

A sense of entitlement is an abstraction and not one that supports nature’s laws. When the industrial revolution decided that cheap and easy resources, fuels, manpower and more were the entitlement of an empire, and/or to the west, at the cost of the exploited.

But belonging just requires that intelligent, thinking, or even selfish people realize abundance is for all. Then they will naturally protect, co-create, and defend it. Belonging to the cosmos is the natural co-creation of the universe.