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Light Up The Chaos · Oct 7, 2025

Connection At The Core

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Vanessa Burnett · Light Up The Chaos

The heart is the core. Photo is a heart-shaped hole in a wooden wall, in front of a black painted wall. Photo by Bernd 📷 Dittrich via Unsplash.

I don’t know how you’re doing today, but I have had a rough one. A good friend helped me get back to a little more grounded. I’m grateful.

It’s about connection. That’s a lot of why I had a rough day; I lost a few connections. But other connections with humans are also how I found some grounding again.

I keep talking about the power of connection.

I think some people think I’m full of malarkey about this whole connection thing. Maybe they think I’m not living it as deeply as I’m talking about it; because I’m not as connected to them perhaps as I could be... or because I can’t spend as much time connecting to all the people I want to be connected to. Or to all the people I intend and hope to spend more time with.

But of course it’s all more complicated than that. We are all in this new era and everybody’s got their own way to get through it.

It’s not all going to align.

Lots of folks are going all in on protesting and signs and postcards and all the phone calls and things that have become a sort of standardized resistance. Which we need all of that. It’s good lots of people are doing all of that.

I’m opting to pick a different path and I’m finding that it doesn’t resonate with everyone.

Which... that’s okay.

I bring a unique way of looking at things in this moment. 🧿 Which ties to connection and why I’m writing about it here.

I see that society is changing and changing fast.

I’m working to help people deal with disruption.

🔦 Strategically, there are lots of ways to go about dealing with that, but the most important most fundamental is connection. ❤️

It’s right where we live. And by that I mean our hearts and souls.

Connection is the most basic human thing that we need to have in order to find our way forward and through all of this.

We are tribal beings. We are not lone wolves.

There’s a saying that it takes a village to raise a child but it also just takes a village to have a village.

We’ve kind of lost that. Which is part of how we ended up in this moment in the US.

It takes connection to have a village.

It takes connection to solve problems when everything is changing fast.

It takes connection to find ways through when you need to do things differently than they’ve been done for decades.

It takes connection to have the wherewithal and strength and resilience to keep moving forward even when everything is overwhelming and intimidating and unsettling and all of the other words.

Anyway. There are other words that are important to help us get through this moment.

❤️ But connection is the most basic. It’s the core stuff for how we’re going to deal with big fast change.

With that, I’m losing some of the connections I’ve had. People I thought I would remain connected to.

But here we are. Every time big huge stuff changes, our connections change as well.

👣 We have to find what resonates and who resonates with our own paths.

And so we will and so we do. Well hopefully we do anyway.

And then we spend time connecting with people as much as we can in the moments that we have with those people.

Maybe it never seems like enough. I’m trying to make my own peace with that.

But there’s like many billions of people on this planet and we just can’t connect with everyone. So there’s a balance in there somewhere and we have to be realistic.

But when we do connect with people, we can be present. We can be authentic. We can love each other in the moment. Or something like that.

We can have empathy and we can care about each other and we can be kind and decent and respectful.

All of that stuff helps us build connection.

🖤 Anyway I’m sort of writing all of this to process losing some connections. But also I lost a friend recently to illness and I didn’t get to spend as much time with them as I wanted to. There’s a lot to think about there.

Which brings me to the pain of when we lose connection for some reason.

We wouldn’t feel that loss if we didn’t feel something in the connection in the first place.

All of this seems like it’s been written by a thousand poets over millions of years. It’s very human.

But we are in this fast evolving time where we’re focused on so many things. 🏎️🏇🏽🌀

I think sometimes we’re forgetting about this very very very very basic thing.

It’s connection.

It’s worth having and building and growing and investing in even though it doesn’t last forever. Even though at some point sometimes we have to deal with the loss of the connection.

But it can be so very much when we have it. Connection can be so rich and deep and beautiful.

Connection can help with what we’re dealing with now.

We’re not doing enough of it — connecting. I know that. I’m going to keep talking about it. Maybe you can too. We all can.

Getting through this isn’t all as easy as some would have us believe. There are some formidable and hard challenges. Having good connections as we go through it will help us deal with all that.

Keep the faith. In us. In humans. In our connections. In our ability to have connection.

We are pretty amazing. Even when we are also very challenging.

Forward and through.

🔦⚡❤️

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Vanessa Burnett is the director at Fierce Community. This nonprofit work promotes civic engagement through connection, community, creativity, leadership, empowerment, alliances, and resilience in an era of rising instability and societal disruption. It’s through-finding by countering fear. 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.

Email people@fiercecommunity.com to set up a conversation. This Substack channel does not knowingly use AI.

Read the original on lightupthechaos.substack.com

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