There are moments when storytelling feels like a luxury. And there are moments when it feels like a lifeline.

This is one of those moments.

Our team made the decision to delay the launch of MOVD as our first episode was scheduled to launch just two weeks after Renee Good was murdered in Minneapolis and days before the murder of Alex Pretti. 

We are now recording this after I have spent some time back in my hometown of Minneapolis… walking and driving streets I know by muscle memory, sitting with organizers and community members, listening to and seeing what’s unfolding in real time. There is grief there. There is exhaustion. There is courage. There is rage. There is love. Fierce, fierce love and care. There are people showing up again and again for each other in ways that don’t and won’t always make national headlines.

We are living inside overlapping crises. The constant barrage of headlines barely gives us a moment to breathe, and certainly doesn’t give our bodies and nervous systems a chance to catch up and find the ground again. Many of us are carrying grief that doesn’t have a single source. It’s grief for what has happened, grief for what is happening and grief for what is likely to come.

So I’ve been asking myself, what is the role of a storytelling podcast in a moment like this?

What does MOVD mean right now?

MOVD was created to explore the connective power of story. And if that’s true, then this is precisely the moment these conversations matter.

Because authoritarianism thrives on isolation, and despair feeds on silence. Because disconnection is a strategy that we must reject.

And storytelling is a counter-strategy and a form of resistance.

So alongside our long-form conversations with incredible artists, somatics practitioners, activists, musicians, poets and spiritual leaders….we’re introducing something new to meet this moment and amplify more voices that need and deserve to be heard.

We will be bringing into the mix a short series we’re calling the Minne-Series/minne-stories…brief conversations with organizers, activists, mutual aid workers, carers, and community leaders in Minnesota. The place that is becoming the blueprint for resistance and revolution.

These conversations won’t be polished and shiny, they will be raw and real. They’ll be rooted in the lived and living experience of incredible people doing incredible things. 

What are people seeing?
What are they feeling?
What is keeping them steady?
What is breaking their hearts?
What is helping them carry on?

These Minne stories will honor the people who are doing the daily work of tending to each other, who are fighting for democracy, to ensure safety for their communities, and to dream into a new and more liberated future together.

———

So here is our invitation:

 to remember that 

We tell stories not to escape reality but to metabolize it and make meaning of it
Not to bypass grief, but to move with it and increase our capacity to feel it
Not to promise easy access to hope, but to practice staying in it when it gets hard.

Thank you for being here.
Thank you for listening.
And thank you to the people of Minneapolis and Minnesota who continue to show what it looks like to care fiercely for one another.