A quick note — this Substack went on accidental hiatus this past fall as I was trying to ramp up the Fierce Community work yet once again, but then took a quick turn in a different direction. Instead I got what I thought would be a temporary job (still there) helping a friend out at a neat organization through the holidays and also getting more financial resilience to help support the Fierce Community work I keep trying to do (which is also on temporary hiatus but more because we’re rearranging the work). Anyway, I’ve been away from this Substack doing exactly what I say in this post — getting my own oxygen mask on.
Hey y’all what’s happening? I don’t even know what to say here online anymore.
Where I live the community looks normal.
Yet we’re erasing the laws of the land. We’ve started very active current wars for religion and oil that delusional people thought would be over fast. 🛢️⛽
It’s planting season here in the Midwest. What’s going to happen with all that when critical resources for that are stuck in critical shipping points? ⛔🚢
Vulnerable groups of people seem to be getting increasingly vulnerable and targeted and not the other direction.
Talking heads have long since stopped hiding blatantly bigoted wording and just openly use it now. Including on political ads.
I don’t think the political or public reaction to all the happenings is... well I don’t even know what to say about all that.
I can tell you on May 1st it looked like a normal day around here in central Iowa. And I went to Ankeny, a suburb of Des Moines, and it looked pretty normal around there too.
In the midst of all this and whatever’s coming I remain convinced that where we’re going to need to be acting is at the community level to take care of each other. I have been rearranging my own life lately in that paradigm.
It’s been quiet and so far it’s sort of pulled back like people get in a crisis.
Your circles get small when you’re in an emergency.
Plus I’ve been dealing with some actual emergencies so there’s that.
So my circles have gotten small but they are circles.
I talk a lot about connection and community. I don’t get to do as much of that as I want to be doing but I do do it. It’s quiet. You can’t share other people’s stories out here it doesn’t work.
The people who are in your life everyday and that you’re working to strengthen connection with... they know who you are and what you’re doing. You know who they are and what they’re doing. You look after each other.
Lately that’s all I’ve had the bandwidth for. Which is okay. Sometimes that’s what you have to do. Sometimes that’s all we’re ever able to do.
I have some friends I haven’t talked to as much and some newer friends that have sort of fallen away a bit. I’d like to get back to some of that when I have the capacity.
But I think we’re all all navigating this sort of thing.
Everything is changing at very deep structural levels up in this country.
It’s not safe for lots of people for whom it used to be at least a little bit safer for. It’s even less safe for people who it wasn’t safe for for decades. Or ever.
I can’t fix it all. Neither can you.
We can do what we can for the people around us. Sometimes it’s a smaller group than what we might like it to be. Yet your impacts even on a small group or one or two people can be huge. That stuff matters. It’s life.
But even with that you have to have your own resilience. You just do.
Everyone always uses the metaphor of putting your own oxygen mask on first like in an airplane if you lose cabin pressure. Because you can’t help anyone else if you can’t breathe.
So I’ve been pulled back working on having my own oxygen and dealing with my very small circles right now of people in my life. Supporting the people that I am in touch with day today. Doing what I can.
I hope you are able to do the same or even something broader if you have the capacity.
I hope you are able to find your own resilience in the midst of all of this big melee and mishegoss and rising instability.
We have to be able to breathe.
We also have to make our own choices about how we find our own resilience and what we choose to do here in this moment.
There are lots of folks who think that they know what you and I should be doing. I don’t always agree with those folks and it’s not their decision.
Big shocks are coming and we all need to get ready in our own way.
Yes bigger shocks than what we’ve had.
Because as I say all the time you can’t disrupt this many interconnected interdependent systems and think you won’t have effects. It’s just that sometimes those effects take a while to show up in everyday life.
Anyway good luck with your own resilience and supporting yourself and others through all of this. We are going to have some real messes but we’re going to have some amazingness too.
People love fiercely. It’s going to help us to do that as we go.
Onward and forward. Take very good care.
-Vanessa Burnett
🪻❤️⚡
Vanessa Burnett is the director at Fierce Community, a nonprofit that is currently rearranging to better help people and communities in a fast-changing world. She is a social entrepreneur, advisor, and empower-er with a systems-oriented perspective to help people, groups, and communities navigate change, risk, crises, and disruption together. Vanessa has over 25 years experience in fostering connection, growing community, volunteer engagement, resilience-building, coalition-building, consensus-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, disaster information sharing, and evolving processes/systems. This Substack channel does not knowingly use AI.
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