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I am taking more deep breaths these days, sometimes one right after the other, looking for a break from the worry, anxiety, heartbreak, and sorrow. I know I'm not alone in this. It is taking real work not to get sucked into the rabbit hole of despair. I'm reaching for my spiritual tools and practices like they are food and water because they are the nourishment I need to stay awake and alive to my wholly holy nature, to remember what is true even when the world seems to be telling me otherwise.

And one of the things I know to be true is that we belong to one another.

We belong to one another because there is only One Life, and that Life is the Divine expressing Itself as each and every one of us. This is not a metaphor. It is Reality. It is why our hearts break at all the ways we forget one another, dishonoring and even spitting in the face of our sacred connection and inherent belonging. My grief arises precisely because of our kinship, because I know how deeply we belong to one another and how often we betray that sacred truth.

Ram Dass once offered the extraordinary possibility that when we truly recognize the Divine manifesting as every person we meet, every interaction becomes an opportunity for service.

Every interaction!

Imagine that for a moment. The person in front of you at the grocery store. Your neighbor. The stranger asking for help. The person whose beliefs you find incomprehensible. The friend who needs more than you think you have to give. The person who gets on your last nerve.

What if every encounter is an opportunity to meet the Holy? 

What if service isn't first about what we do for someone, but how we see them? What if the most revolutionary thing we can offer one another is the recognition that there is no stranger here, only another expression of the same Divine Life that lives in me?

We live in a culture that has taught us to organize our lives around the illusion of separation. We are expected to be independent, self-sufficient, responsible for our own survival, our own needs, our own happiness. We build walls around our homes, our resources, our identities, and sometimes our hearts. We have learned to treat needing one another as a weakness rather than a fundamental truth of our existence. These lies and misbeliefs are what make all the harm we do possible.

And yet, look around.

In the midst of the overwhelming and overlapping crises of our time, people are finding their way back to one another. Friends are pooling resources to keep a roof over someone's head. Neighbors are sharing cars and meals. People of different generations are creating households together. Chosen families are organizing networks of care. Artists, healers, spiritual practitioners, and ordinary people are gathering to create spaces for belonging, beauty, healing, and joy.

Not because someone has all the answers or a grand plan for saving the world, but because someone recognizes a need, someone else has something to offer, and together they discover a possibility that didn't exist before.

I’m not here to romanticize the suffering and hardship that make some of these arrangements necessary. But let us not miss the incredible creativity and Love emerging in response.

What if, in the midst of so much unraveling, we are also witnessing a remembering?

A remembering that we were never meant to do this life alone. That our gifts were never meant to be ours alone. That our well-being has always been bound up with the well-being of others. That the Divine Life within us is not a private possession, but an infinite circulation of giving and receiving, of loving and being loved, of carrying and being carried.

This is what makes service a spiritual practice. Not the hours we volunteer or the good deeds we perform, but the ways we allow the truth of our Oneness to shape how we live.

Sometimes Love asks us to listen. Sometimes to share what we have. Sometimes it point us to speak up, to show up, to make room, to create something new. Sometimes Love asks us to receive, to let someone else carry us for a while, to trust that we too belong to the great web of care.

Service is not about being the hero. It is about being in relationship.

And maybe this is the spiritual rebellion our times are asking of us. To stop merely affirming that we are One and begin living as though it is true. To organize our relationships, our communities, and our daily lives around the sacred Reality of our interdependence.

What might our families, neighborhoods, and spiritual communities become if we stopped asking only, "What am I getting?" and began asking, "What are we creating together?"

What might become possible if we recognized that every person carries something the rest of us need, and that each of us also needs what others carry?

We do not have to save the whole world. We do not have to carry more than is ours to carry.

We can begin right here, with these people, in this community, in this moment.

We can look into each others eyes and remember who we are.

We can offer what is ours to give and receive what is ours to receive.

We can love as far as our arms can reach.

And together, we become the Love in action our world so desperately needs.