We All Need The Stories

Talking About What's Happening With Each Other Is Critical These Days - We Can Take That Seriously & Do It More

Connection. Two women talking & listening together on a sidewalk. Image by Mircea Iancu via Pixabay.

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We need all the stories.

🗨️ It’s a thing we can do, in the sea of all that’s happening. 🗯️ We can to talk to people. We can tell the stories.

It matters. We need this.

You need to tell your stories. Tell the stories from the other people you’re hearing stories from.

Tell the stories in ways that don’t violate people’s privacy. Tell the stories in ways that protect vulnerable people and don’t share their details.

Find ways to tell the stories that convey the heart stuff and the pain or the values or the love or the harm.

BUT FREAKING TELL THE STORIES.

Freaking tell the stories. Have the conversations.

Share the pain and the joy and the love and the incredible feats and the persistence and the trauma and the delight and the fear and the gratitude and the amazingness of the other humans dealing with all of the things right now.

All of the things. Seriously. All of the things. ALL OF THE THINGS. It’s a freaking lot.

We cannot just all hole up in our tiny little worlds and hide. I mean we need to do a certain amount of that and some people are doing it for real for survival; for risk mitigation.

But part of the thing that absolutely needs to happen in this moment is we have got to be connected with other people. Actively.

Telling the stories. Sharing concerns. Asking for help. Helping. Listening. Learning. Evolving. Supporting.

I could go on and on but is there more? I mean this is the stuff.

We need connection and community.

We do it in conversation and listening and sharing and telling the stories.

❤️ This is how we know each other.

This is how we see each other. ❤️

This is how we share what other people are dealing with. This is how we get word through social networks when other information is hard to move or when it’s difficult to tell what’s really going on based on what makes the news or what’s on social media.

Or what’s not on the news. Or what people are afraid to put in writing.

Share the stories. Hear the stories. Witness. Listen. Contribute. Pass it along. Giant games of telephone.

It matters. Our humanity moves through stories.

Our humanity evolves through stories. Our humanity shares our humanity with future generations through our stories.

🌀 This is not the end. What we’re in is not the end.

It’s a giant great big transformational evolution. One of many in the giant arc of the human timeline.

Woohoo! Everyone loves to be a part of interesting moments in history right?

Anyway part of how we pass all of that forward and how we navigate through the middle of it is with our stories.

Stories. Tell some. Hear some.

See what resonates. Think about why and then think about putting more focus on what resonates, in various ways.

✔️ This is the stuff. 🔦 We find ways through. We anchor to our humanity. We anchor to our stories.

We anchor to who we are.

Keep the faith. Try not to get ded. Love some humans. Actually just love. We can. We have tremendous capacity for it.

We know that because we hear each other’s stories.

Onward.

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Got a story for sharing here?

Help support our nonprofit work if you’re in a position to. Donations cover some of our monthly expenses & help us do free zooms & other engagement efforts. Options for donating include ActBlue, Patreon, and paid Fierce Community Substack subscriptions. Thank you to all who have helped us get this far.

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A Nonprofit Note & Volunteer Info (Posted Previously)

Fierce Community’s work is happening behind-the-scenes for now as we rework the nonprofit’s methodology and approach. Public work will resume once we’ve retooled.

Want to volunteer? Send a note with “volunteer” in the subject line to people@fiercecommunity.com. Here’s what we need the next few weeks —

• Evening availability in February at least two nights per month for a group Zoom meeting. We’ll work around time zones.

• Ability to do Zooms.

• Willingness to communicate with other volunteers via email & text — about the work, for coordinating schedules, & for any schedule changes.

• An ability to contribute & listen as part of a team.

• Patience, persistence, & thoughtfulness for finding ways through this moment, together.

• Flexibility, because we’re in the midst of rising instability. We’re going to need to be able to roll with some chaos & change. (Semper Gumby.)

👣

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Vanessa Burnett is the director at Fierce Community. Email people@fiercecommunity.com to set up a conversation.

Vanessa is a social entrepreneur, advisor, and empower-er with a systems-level understanding of the pieces and parts that modern society needs in order to survive. She has over 25 years experience in resilience-building, civic engagement, coalition-building, critical infrastructure, systems thinking, big disasters, catastrophes, wildland fire, emergency management, incident management, land management, park rangering, homeland security, continuity of operations (COOP), continuity of government (COG), technology innovation, public communication, and disaster information sharing. This Substack channel does not knowingly use AI.