Belonging Without Community

In You Already Belong, I wrote about animism as connection to the world we already inhabit. This piece explores what that kind of belonging changes — especially our assumptions about community.

If I say ‘community’, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? I bet it’s ‘other people’.

Community is often about a group, shared language, purpose, and beliefs. When we feel adrift, the advice is almost always the same: join something, show up, find your people.

Sometimes that works. But belonging doesn’t automatically begin with community. It begins with place.

I’m not saying community is unimportant, because it is. Humans need connection with other humans. I value my friendships, my family, the connections I’ve built over time. I live in a multitude of other communities that have their own purpose, common ideas, vision and goals, and shared experience. But it often comes with expectations, dynamics, and forms of participation that make belonging feel like an effort rather than restful or nurturing.

What animist practice has shown me is that this isn’t a personal quirk or preference. It’s a recognition of something more fundamental:

Belonging is relational, not social. And relationship does not require another human being to witness it.

You are already in relationship

Right now, wherever you are, you are in relationship with weather, light, shadow, time, the materials around you, and the ground beneath your feet.

If you’re inside, you’re in relationship with the building that shelters you, the infrastructure that keeps you warm or cool, the window framing your view. If you’re outside, you’re in relationship with wind, birdsong, the particular quality of afternoon light on concrete, the trees filtering the air you breathe.

You don’t have to believe anything for this to be true. You don’t have to join anything, agree with anyone, or perform the right version of yourself at the right time. You are already participating simply by being here, breathing, occupying space, moving through time.

Animist belonging arises from always being embedded in a web of relationship with the more-than-human world. It is situational and place-based rather than defined by social structures.

You can stand on a quiet verge, sit beside a culvert, watch a magpie, feel heat radiating from sun-warmed brick, and be entirely held within relationship that doesn’t require you to be anything other than present.

There is nothing to prove. Nothing to maintain. Nothing to negotiate.

You are already here.

This changes what community means

I’d like you to sit with this for a moment, feel this statement in your bones:

We have mistaken community for the source of belonging, when it is actually one expression of a deeper, place-based belonging that already exists.

When belonging doesn’t depend on finding the right group of people, community itself becomes something you can enter more freely, more gently, and with greater honesty.

You’re not looking to community to provide your entire sense of place in the world, or validate your existence or hold you together. There’s no forcing or faking to fit in, to mush your entire being into a predefined slot to ‘belong’. Instead, you already have ground beneath you that’s solid.

Community can and should grow from that, slowly, optionally, and without pressure. It becomes a sharing of place rather than a prerequisite for fulfilling the human need to connect meaningfully.

A different kind of participation

For me, this realisation has been a profound relief.

Animist belonging asks for attention, rather than staging what sometimes feels like fraud, or at best, an exhausting stage performance. And attention is something you can give in whatever measure you have available at the time.

Sometimes that’s a long walk with deliberate noticing. Sometimes it’s a passing glance out a window, or a short greeting to the local birdlife. Sometimes it’s nothing more than realising, briefly, that you are not separate from the place you occupy.

This kind of belonging is intimate and specific. It doesn’t transfer from person to person, and it doesn’t depend on how many people share it. It exists where you are, not where people gather.

It means belonging isn’t dependent on finding the right group, the right moment in history, or the right convergence of compatible personalities. It’s available in the middle of nowhere, on a quiet suburban street, in a flat, in a hospital room, in a backyard, in the in-between spaces of everyday life.

You don’t have to go anywhere to access it. You just have to notice you’re already there.

The quiet gift

This has been one of the unexpected gifts of animist practice.

I still value connection with others and seek it out. I still want meaningful relationships. But they sit on top of something steadier now — a sense that I am already located, already in relationship, already part of something larger than myself, even when I am completely alone.

Belonging, in animist terms, is about being in reciprocal relationship with a world that is already holding you. It turns our accepted idea of belonging and connection as only relatable between humans onto a more sustainable path. I’m already witnessed and situated in the world - everything else is an additional blessing.

Community matters. Human connection matters. But it is not the only foundation of belonging. It is one expression of it.

And that distinction makes all the difference.