Core Message - The speech emphasizes the importance of creation, connection, and community engagement, urging individuals to embrace their creative potential and contribute to the world around them [4][11][24] - It highlights the cyclical nature of growth and creativity, emphasizing the significance of the "in-between" phases of rest, reflection, and preparation [14][18][19] - The speech encourages individuals to find where they are needed and to lend their skills and talents in service to others, emphasizing the art of belonging through collaboration and contribution [12][13] Creative Process - The creative process begins in stillness, with a spark or impulse responding to the world [2] - Art is born from reaction, whether it be light, sound, pain, or joy, and it serves as a reminder of our aliveness [5][6] - Real creativity is born in the unseen, before the bloom, and it requires daily discipline, tending, weeding, watering, pruning, and learning from failure [14][15] Community & Environment - Individuals are part of a vast living root system, their communities, and must plant themselves in the heart of those communities to foster growth and stability [12] - The world needs care, and planting oneself in risky soil might be where one is needed most [22][23] - Growth feeds others, roots stabilize the soil, shade gives rest, and oxygen gives life, highlighting the interconnectedness of individuals and their environment [21]

Let's all get grounded and present in this moment together. When I was younger, I was encouraged to stand out. There's this one time in middle school I thought it would be a great idea to take my already permed blonde hair and dye it manic panic green.Who remembers manic panic. I wasn't trying to rebellious. I just thought it looked cool and I liked showing up in that way.Expressive and in the moment. And then I showed up to school and not only did I get sent immediately home, I actually got suspended for t ...

Us humans fight a lot. You think you're fighting about this, but you're not. Maybe it's toilet paper. Maybe it's dishes. Maybe it's politics. Maybe it's who let the dog on the couch or who's to blame for the entire economy. Small fights, big emotions. We get caught up fighting about all these things when really something much deeper, much older is happening inside us. Every one of us carries two powerful opposing drives. One is the survival drive. Protect yourself. Stay safe. Stay right. Stay alive. The oth ...

Something feels off in our bodies, in our neighborhoods, in the way we live our days. It's not just that we're tired. It's that we're disconnected. disconnected from stillness, from each other, from ourselves, and from the natural world that once gave our lives rhythm. But this didn't just happen to us. We designed it. We built technologies that connect us in an instant, but takes us out of the places that mean more than words or memes. where you can meet a gaze, smell the air, have a warm embrace under the ...

There I was, laying on the floor of a drug den, confused, and there's a knock at the door. Normally, I'd panic. But I know who it is.I open the door and without judgment or a shred of disappointment in walks my grandmother. She potters around cleaning where she can and making sure that there's food in the cupboards that she so caringly bought me. She reminds me not to forget to come and see her sometime this week.I love you, Daniel. And the door shuts behind. Now, it's not that she doesn't care about how I' ...

Good morning. Before I start, I have to confess something. For many years, I have been a believer in the myth of the lone wolf. We all know that character, right? The entrepreneur or the business person who is chasing the win at all costs with sheer willpower. mostly living on ambition and caffeine, right? We're chasing wins. We're chasing metrics. We're celebrating chasing that little last client like it's the last slice of pizza. But being the lone wolf is not sustainable. It doesn't work. You get burnt o ...

Picture a town um west coast of Wales. It's the middle of winter. Um everyone wants to retreat. Everyone wants to hibernate naturally and keep warm.But what if there was a way to take that isolation and bring it into connection and create something to bring people together through community. That's where we come in. um we thought what how about um creating a festival festival of love uh and that was a really important idea in terms of using a universal theme.So a way to to relate for everyone to relate for ...

The story of volunteers on crisis lines starts in the 1960s with some of the first programs of its kind here in the Bay Area. In San Francisco, we had a gay British priest who started a crisis line in the back of a tattoo parlor. A few years later, there was a reverend who wanted to bring the same kind of community support to the people of the East Bay, and he started the crisis line in a barber shop.There are stories about him picking up the phone while cutting people's hair. This was not an institutional ...

Good afternoon everyone. My name is Vincent Toad and welcome to my TEDex talk. I never thought I'd be up here, not as a military spouse giving a TEDex talk.I mean, when I first arrived to Okinawa, I was the new guy, the plus one, the tag along. My husband, he is a Marine, and like many military spouses, I move from base to base, picking up and starting all over again. But being a male military spouse in a female predominant space, I often felt like I was wearing the wrong uniform at the wrong event.I used t ...

This is how my story began. Not in a laboratory, not in a boardroom, but with a paintbrush in my hand in a group of children in Zanzibar who had forgotten how to smile. We didn't share a language, but we shared something deeper.The need to heal. As colors began to fill in the room, I saw something extraordinary. Children who had been quiet started to laugh.Tears turned into pictures. and the pain turned into a possibility. And I learned something that day I'll never forget.Healing isn't only about medicine. ...