This presentation was given at Harvard Divinity School as part of the PES Conference, Belonging: Practices of Inclusion in Spiritual Communities, the Academy, and Society, in September 2026. Abstract: Contemporary crises—climate disruption, biodiversity collapse, and post-pandemic disorientation—are often met with technical fixes, yet many feel a deeper loss of grounding and belonging. Drawing on my book Chanting Spring: Indigenous Wisdom for Ancestral Futures, I explore belonging as an embodied ecological condition: being held by a living world. Departing from an Indigenous-led Amazonian ceremony experience, I share how chanting quiets the noise of the world, re-attunes perception, and counters a modern “starvation of being”. Read alongside COVID-19 as a threshold, chanting becomes a transferable pedagogy of re-enchantment, renewing ancestral ethics of reciprocity, humility, and responsibility for the spaces seeking lived inclusion.
