The First Language

Here's a secret nobody tells you about mountain towns: they run on two currencies, powder days and small talk, and neither one changes the world, but boy are they fun on the way down. Words like "sustainability" get passed around Vail like a fondue pot at a dinner party where everyone's terrified of being the one who double-dips. Everyone nods. Everyone means it, mostly, the way you mean it when you say you'll definitely call your mother back. And then, once a year, a bunch of artists and students show up and ruin the whole comfortable arrangement by actually showing everyone what the words meant the whole time. Rude. Magnificent. Ruthlessly authentic.

I did not see this coming. I thought I was producing TEDx events. Turns out I was smuggling a jailbreak into my own nervous system disguised as a nonprofit tax filing. Next up: Living Brightly 7, "The Circle Has No Sides," a three-day online event that picks up exactly where you left me dangling from my own conscience like a rock climber who forgot to check the harness. I am the woo-hoo ski girl who somehow ended up teaching people to say something true in ten minutes, and honestly, so is everyone in this story, and none of us saw it coming either.

Ryan arrived first in my memory, or maybe she just occupies rooms before her body technically checks in, a landlord move, spiritually speaking. She never explained what triggered the work. She didn't need to. It just sat there being true until the rest of us, wheezing, caught up.

JP showed up with the energy of a man who had personally discovered fire, freedom, and glass in the same afternoon and was only mildly smug about it. Judge for yourself, he says. I have judged. I award him a gold medal and a fire extinguisher, just in case.

Doron painted a red line of chaos that, on second glance, revealed itself as the actual floor plan chaos is using to build its dream house. I have never recovered. I've stopped trying. I've made peace with living unrecovered.

Basia and John arrived like two competing weather systems who'd somehow read each other's minds — one building landscapes, one dismantling the noise around climate grief, one working in bodies, one in bodies of water, both apparently constructing the same cathedral without a blueprint or a group text.

Asher made something so quietly devastating out of black trash bags, TRASH BAGS, that the tech crew, who have seen a literal llama backstage, went dead silent. And the other Asher, swings glass bottles like Earth-care wind chimes and I have genuinely reconsidered my recycling bin's emotional capacity.

Drummers, we've got your beat and are humming along with you. Each year for the youth the drumline shows up and bangs off the beginning and the end of the ideafest.

Sabine made showing up artfully herself an art in itself.

Margo and Zara moved like they'd negotiated a peace treaty with gravity and won. Sadie's work had the specific gift of making adults remember they used to be curious before rent was invented.

Cat's piece made me laugh and then, four seconds later, cry, which I believe is the only appropriate response to being alive with her music. Meadow Mountain you helped us celebrate our nearby Meadow Mountain. While Tenth Mountain celebrated the bravery of snow warriors named after the 10th Mountain Division which fought in the Italian Alps during WWII.

Cinzia and britten built something so tender it should legally require a permit britten with her Xtraordinally beautiful paintings and Cinzia with her animations.

Amy, who knew pink was so strong an instigator?

Angelica, Finn, Ushi, Dominique, Lissa, and Flatline. And comedians Camryn & Garvyn ravenously stole the laughter right out of our chests, which I assume is a felony somewhere but I'm pressing no charges. walked in like a very specific, very good problem. Bethany, her iconic monkey slide to this day, a TED fan favorite, which tells you everything about how seriously we take ourselves and how correctly we don't.

Allesandra made the room hold its breath collectively, like we'd all agreed underwater, arranging the graphic artists during "pause, COUNTDOWN: COVID Clues, Climate Acts, Local Impacts." More than a thousand joined our conversations over the 14 weeks. And Amy, Amy didn't just guide the transition of an entire organization, she guided me, gently, the way you'd walk someone off a ledge while complimenting their shoes so they don't notice they're safe now.

Here's the part I actually want to tell you, though, because impressive resumes have never once made me a better human: knowing these artists rewired something behind my sternum. I used to see a mountain and think "beauty." Now I see a mountain and think about the seventeen ways this collective would turn it into a question about belonging, or grief, or the sheer audacity of joy. I used to hear "climate crisis" and brace for a lecture. Now I wonder which of them would turn it into five minutes that makes grown adults in fleece vests weep without knowing why, and then go plant something, or yell at their city council, or vote like they mean it.

I think that's why I keep insisting to funders, to Rotarians, to anyone who'll sit still, that artists aren't the garnish on the change-making plate, they're the whole recipe. Before policy, before protest, before the twelve-point plan, there was somebody standing very still with an idea too big for language, until they found a shape for it. Paint. Movement. A heart-rendering tune. A ten-minute talk that rearranges your ribcage. That's not decoration. That's the first draft of every future we haven't built yet.

That's the trick artists pull that policy briefs never will. A spreadsheet tells you the ice is melting. An artist makes you feel the specific loneliness of Grewingk Glacier, Theo's and Finn's grandmother's landmark, receding 98 feet a year while nobody's watching closely enough. A spreadsheet gets forwarded. A felt thing gets carried, unpacked emotional baggage and all, for the rest of your life.

So no, artists, I haven't stopped being shamelessly proud of you. Yes, I understand comparing you to prophets is a heavy lift for people who mostly survive on greenroom snacks and sheer predictivity. But you've made me a fundamentally more dangerous person, dangerous in the specific way of someone who now refuses to accept that the end of the world has to look like an ending, because you've shown me it could look like the most gorgeous beginning, dressed for the Met Gala, wildly creative, riotously colorful, abundantly original.

Send me your napkin scribbles. I mean it. Somewhere in that napkin is the next glacier's grandmother, waiting for someone brave enough, funny enough, or heartbroken enough to give her a shape.

I dedicate this story to Lily Demuth, who left us far too soon. And for the generous, ferociously talented artists who've given their big ideas to 65 TEDxVail stages over 17 years, thank you for teaching this ski girl that a mountain is never just scenery.

Plugged IN, Charged UP,

Kat