Stillness Speaks Book Previews

What If We Never Left Belonging? Joanna Macy Wild Love

by Sanjiv Manifest | Jan 29, 2026

belonging: “We are already home” ~ Joanna Macy

There is a way life moves that does not wait for our consent … or understanding. We are already – and always – part of this movement … through breath … through love … through loss … through the courage of staying present … and with the deep belonging that does not have to be earned. Nothing here needs to be achieved. It is already happening, and the only question is whether we are willing to notice where we stand.

We do not stand outside the world deciding how to respond. We are already woven into life’s suffering … its resilience … its joy … shaped by what we long for and lean toward. From this place, care is not a strategy and action is not a choice as an afterthought … but as the natural movement of belonging … a belonging with awareness. It is from within this lived belonging—not as an idea, but as a felt turning—that Joanna Macy begins to speak:

“… When we turn and open our heart-mind to Earth, she is always there. This is the great reciprocity at the heart of the universe …”

So, the question is no longer how to help or what to fix, but how we listen and respond from within what is already holding us. Our love, our grief, our care, even our exhaustion begin to look different when they are seen as signs of relationship … evidence that we are already participating in a larger human-community … a life we are already living — and learning how to listen to.

Joanna Macy(and editor Stephanie Kaza)’s A Wild Love for the World: Joanna Macy and the Work of Our Time listens for what becomes possible when we stop trying to fix the world from the outside and let ourselves feel how deeply we already belong to it.

The excerpt below is from the Afterword … that distills a single, steady invitation: to meet what is with depth of acceptance … and to remember we are already – and always – home.

So, today, we explore this invitation through the belonging we never left …

This post is part of our ongoing Shambhala Publications series that offers substantive previews of selections from Shambhala Publications new and classic titles …

All italicized text here is adapted from A Wild Love for the World: Joanna Macy and the Work of Our Time by Joanna Macy, Stephanie Kaza (Editor), © 2020 by Stephanie Kaza. Reprinted in arrangement with the publisher Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO.

You can purchase the book at Shambhala Publications or Amazon.

Afterword: Did We Ever Leave Belonging?

Just fall in love with what is—a clear call for acceptance.

Carl Jung once said that at the core of each life’s journey is one question that we are born to pursue. For me, that question has been: How can I be fully present to my world—present enough to rejoice and be useful—when we as a species are destroying it? …

[…]

Ever since, this question keeps surfacing in my heart-mind, and the responses keep coming. The most resounding have come through the four decades of group work. … I continue to be stunned by the strength of community that springs up when people, through their anguish and their tears, open to the immensity of their caring. Courage flowers, and a team spirit so spunky that hilarity flowers too. …

In the 1990s a name emerged for the purposeful and Earth-based solidarity we were experiencing and for the promise it carried—the Great Turning. The term soon came to signify the transition underway to a life-sustaining society—a transition as real and pervasive as the unraveling caused by the industrial growth society. While the Great Turning does take form in specific actions and achievements, it essentially lives within us as vision and commitment.

[…]

The solidarity we grow in our work together will help us meet and move through the bardo of the breakdown of our globalized political economy. Bardo states are phases of transition from one form of existence to another, often described as changes in consciousness. In the Tibetan tradition, Akshobhya is the first Buddha you meet in the bardo. He is known for his mirror wisdom, which reflects everything just as it is. This is the bardo invitation: to not look away, to not turn aside, but to be fully present to what confronts us. The mirror wisdom is a radical teaching, calling for total attention, for depth of acceptance—a call to “just fall in love with what is.”

[…]

Being fully present to fear, to gratitude, to all that is—this is the practice of mutual belonging. As living members of the living body of Earth, we are grounded in that kind of belonging. We will find more ways to remember, celebrate, and affirm this deep knowing: we belong to each other, we belong to Earth. Even when faced with cataclysmic changes, nothing can ever separate us from her. We are already home. The practice of mutual belonging is the medicine for the sickness of the small self and can accompany us through the bardo, through the hard times ahead.

Our belonging is rooted in the living body of Earth, woven of the flows of time and relationship that form our bodies, our communities, our climate. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke expressed this sense of belonging in the closing lines of his “Ninth Duino Elegy”:

Earth, isn’t this what you want? To arise in us, invisible?
Is it not your dream, to enter us so wholly
there’s nothing left outside us to see?
What, if not transformation,
is your deepest purpose? Earth, my love,
I want that too. Believe me,
no more of your springtimes are needed
to win me over—even one flower
is more than enough. Before I was named
I belonged to you. I seek no other law
but yours, and know I can trust
the death you will bring.

See, I live. On what?
Childhood and future are equally present.
Sheer abundance of being
floods my heart.

When we turn and open our heart-mind to Earth, she is always there. This is the great reciprocity at the heart of the universe.

My gratitude to all—may we experience “sheer abundance of being” and know that we truly belong here.

~ Joanna Macy

So, the invitation is to feel … where we are already participating … already responding … already held.

Perhaps Joanna’s invitation encourages us toward: the courage to let ourselves belong … and to act from that belonging … one breath at a time … and realize the reciprocity we are already living.

Stay tuned for … the next post in this series exploring Wild Love … part of our Shambhala Publications series.

All italicized text here is adapted from A Wild Love for the World: Joanna Macy and the Work of Our Time by Joanna Macy, Stephanie Kaza (Editor), © 2020 by Stephanie Kaza. Reprinted in arrangement with the publisher Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO.

You can purchase the book at Shambhala Publications or Amazon.