Finding Your Way Home Through Culture | Jennifer Jane Pickering | TEDxAsheville

Added: 2026-05-08

[00:00:07][cheering] [applause] >> For the last 30 years, I've lived inside something.

[00:00:18]Vibrant, loud, colorful.

[00:00:22]Musical, artful, and full of people, including many of you.

[00:00:29]The LEAF Festival.

[00:00:31]Originally, Lake Eden Arts Festival, but lovingly known as LEAF.

[00:00:37]Home base, Swannanoa, Black Mountain, North Carolina, founded 1995.

[00:00:46]Some of you danced in it, camped in it, fell in love, like myself.

[00:00:54]Maybe even conceived a child.

[00:00:58]Real.

[00:01:00]This beautiful festival wasn't just my work.

[00:01:03]It was my creative dreams.

[00:01:06]It was my purpose.

[00:01:09]It was my way of building home, not just for myself, but for thousands of friends and families.

[00:01:18]LEAF was how I connected to the world, to people, to artists, to my community, and the best of myself.

[00:01:29]Now that structure that held me for decades is gone for me.

[00:01:35]Not ceremoniously.

[00:01:37]It's just quiet.

[00:01:42]But the places LEAF took me.

[00:01:45]Tanzania, 2009. I was traveling down a bone-rattling, mine strip dirt road, heading beyond the end of the line to a refugee camp. You see, I once asked an elder, "Are your kids learning their local traditions?"

[00:02:03]That question sparked LEAF International and my work with culture keepers that has taken me across the world to many communities.

[00:02:12]The van we are in is packed full of drums.

[00:02:16]Chief Shaka Zulu is chanting, "Pick up the drum, come together." In his big voice. We join, "Pick up the drum, come together."

[00:02:27]The kids and leaders eagerly waiting for us to arrive at the refugee camp had fled their homes over the previous decade, escaping civil war, walking for days with hunger, terror, but no hope.

[00:02:46]We arrived to this remote reality a bit shaken. Drums are unloaded, and without introduction, music erupts.

[00:02:56]Surrounded by cultural rhythms, the beats, the sounds, and bonded community, I witnessed their bodies re-remembering something.

[00:03:09]They softened, they moved. They transported us back to the Congo.

[00:03:15]And they went there, too.

[00:03:18]The connection was both joyful and painful to see.

[00:03:24]Most of these young little drummers had never even been to the Congo. They had been born in the refugee camp.

[00:03:30]But watching the coming home unfold taught me something that I would witness repeatedly across borders and back home at the LEAF Festival with artists, especially those who had been displaced from their home countries.

[00:03:47]Ukraine, Cuba, Rwanda, Tibet, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Mexico, Iran, Haiti, Palestine.

[00:04:05]Culture is memory.

[00:04:08]Music transports.

[00:04:10]Dance reminds the body.

[00:04:14]Stories keep roots alive. Home can be carried. Home can be shared.

[00:04:22]Young voices, including many of those from the refugee camp, saying the exact same words in many different languages. I didn't know myself until I learned my culture.

[00:04:35]Confirms our culture is home.

[00:04:40]Hope in Tanzania now knows the dances of his grandfather that he watched as a kid in the fields.

[00:04:47]Annie in Haiti knows the songs of her ancestors and is passing them forward.

[00:04:53]Adama carries 33 generations of Ivory Coast drummers.

[00:04:59]I realized now I wasn't curating entertainment for the LEAF Festival. I was curating return and connection. The ability for others to go home and to take us with them.

[00:05:13]And now, it's time I find my way home, too.

[00:05:21]For 60 years, I've lived in the Swannanoa Valley by the same creek at my home place, Lake Eden.

[00:05:33]This is how I introduce myself now at community meetings. No title, no role, just place.

[00:05:41]For 30 years, I curated space for the world to remember and share its songs. I stood alongside culture keepers and lots of grandmas, people who know where they come from. They know the names of their ancestors. They carry their lineage in their bones and in their songs.

[00:06:05]So, most of us only know two, maybe three generations back.

[00:06:10]I know my mother, Janey, my grandmother, Grandma Kate, and from my 104-year-old Aunt Pat, I recently learned about next in line, Mammy, who apparently liked to drink peach moonshine and sit on the porch of the Williams Brothers Store.

[00:06:29]True. So, that's about as far back as I go.

[00:06:34]But knowing the names of these women, it makes me feel like I am one voice in a line of stories and songs. Those that came before me and those that will follow.

[00:06:51]It's this kind of grounding, connection, and core that I'm seeking.

[00:06:59]So, in this finding my way home, I'm learning to reorient myself.

[00:07:09]Lake Eden, that place, it's always held me.

[00:07:14]Place is part of my story, part of my identity, and for me, a rare lifetime mailing address.

[00:07:22]But if I truly believe that home can be carried and home can be shared, I needed to talk to the trees.

[00:07:32]So, I asked them, "How do I find my core?"

[00:07:38]The trees answered, "We stand tall because we have deep roots.

[00:07:43]So, girl, go find yours."

[00:07:46]So, I hit the road to my family roots in Mississippi to New Orleans.

[00:07:50]No funeral, no wedding, no family reunion at the fair.

[00:07:56]Just to listen, to connect, to feel, and to remember my roots.

[00:08:04]And I'm beginning to know a little bit about what takes me home.

[00:08:10]Bertha's biscuits and grits.

[00:08:13]Midnight sausage balls at the fair cabin.

[00:08:18]My mother singing this little light of mine.

[00:08:22]Uncle Snooky's stories.

[00:08:24]And my husband growling the blues late night on the piano in the barn.

[00:08:31]These aren't just memories. These are anchors. These are pieces of me that can travel wherever I go.

[00:08:39]I've always liked just the top layer of the cupcakes.

[00:08:45]But this journey has been asking me to go deeper. And that's not a 5-year plan made in a boardroom.

[00:08:52]I'm moving from strategic visioning to strategic being.

[00:08:57]I'm learning to anchor myself not in an event name, but in a living thread, culture, that travels with me and with you.

[00:09:10]The songs, the flavors, the people, the stories that live inside us.

[00:09:18]So, in this finding my way home, sometimes life gets messy.

[00:09:25]Like a New Orleans gumbo.

[00:09:29]And these are the things that bring us back.

[00:09:35]Back to ourselves.

[00:09:38]Back home.

[00:09:42]So, I'm still asking the trees.

[00:09:44]I'm still listening.

[00:09:46]And I'm still remembering.

[00:09:49]And I know for some of you, the word home may not feel warm.

[00:09:55]It may feel complicated, even dangerous, or gone.

[00:10:00]Maybe not worth revisiting at all.

[00:10:04]So, maybe it's not about going back.

[00:10:08]Maybe it's about noticing what's always carried us forward.

[00:10:12]Maybe coming home is a practice.

[00:10:17]Remembering what lights up that lightning rod inside us and choosing to say, yes.

[00:10:25]I've been asking friends, even strangers, what takes you home?

[00:10:30]I've learned about tamale recipes, lentils in Columbia, South America, and one girl answered, "Can I sing you the song that takes me home?"

[00:10:42]She sang and we both cried.

[00:10:47]So, I'm wondering, what takes you home?

[00:10:50]What are the songs that live inside you?

[00:10:54]What are the sounds, the smells, the sights that light up your spirit?

[00:11:00]Who are the people, living or gone, whose name steady you?

[00:11:08]I encourage you, go ask that question.

[00:11:11]Be curious.

[00:11:12]Be ready to listen.

[00:11:15]You are opening a door and for a moment, you get to go sit at someone else's kitchen table somewhere else in the world. Hear their music, taste their memories, and remember home is something that we carry and something that we can share.

[00:11:32]Go ask and let yourself be taken home, too.

[00:11:37]So, I'm still finding my way.

[00:11:39]I'm staying curious and I'm saying yes a lot.

[00:11:45]But, this I know, the roots we tend, the culture we carry, the stories we choose to keep alive, they steady me and maybe you, too.

[00:12:02]And wherever we are, we can begin again.

[00:12:08]My motto is, live life like a festival.

[00:12:12]I'm discovering festival is not a place.

[00:12:17]It's not an organization.

[00:12:19]It's not a weekend.

[00:12:21]Festival is how we come together when things fall apart, how we sing when words fail, or we can't return to our home country, how we root ourselves in land, culture, and care when certainty disappears.

[00:12:43]Some people pray.

[00:12:45]Some people sing.

[00:12:47]Some people dance.

[00:12:49]Some people pick up a drum.

[00:12:52]Some people sit quietly by the same lake they've always known.

[00:12:58]And some people sing together.

[00:13:04]This little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine.

[00:13:09]This little light of [singing] mine, I'm going to let it shine. This little light of mine, I'm going to let [singing] it shine. Let it shine. Let it shine. Let [singing] it shine.

[00:13:27]>> [cheering] [applause]