Touch Grass at Edge Esmeralda
Update: We are teaming up with Artizen! 🌻
We’re happy to share that Artizen is collaborating with us at Edge Esmeralda 2026. They back creators at the frontier of art, science, and culture through a community-curated funding model.
We have a beautiful hub for our residency activities: the Agartha & Artizen House, just 10 minutes from Healdsburg Plaza. This cozy country house is where we will share meals, discuss big ideas, and touch grass together 💚
From May 30 to June 27, 2026, Agartha is bringing a month-long immersive program Touch Grass to Edge Esmeralda in Healdsburg, California.
Edge Esmeralda is a the popup village where hundreds of curious and brilliant people gather to live and work together toward the frontiers of tech, governance, science, and community.
Touch Grass is designed to be a quiet parallel inside it. A month of playing with fire, food, rhythm, community, and the art of being alive.
Fill out the application form →
Hello!
I’m writing from the beautiful Fools Valley in Lisbon, at the last week of our month-long residency House of Games 🌿.
We’re having a great time here, lots of laughter, joy, deep work & deeper play. Nourishing food and fresh air. The community feels filled with love. And we can’t wait to come say hi at Edge Esmeralda!
The Magic of Presence ✨
We took a field trip to the Harmonia Festival at Traditional Dream Factory at the second weekend of our residency.
I decided to leave my phone for the whole day and went completely offline. Touched grass and walked bare feet on the land.
I set the intention to only go where the flow takes me. I ran when my body wanted to run. I stopped to have a conversation when an interesting situation presented itself. I sat down for a long conversation with someone I’d just met and forgot the time. I napped on a hill in the afternoon and woke up to a bunch of people standing in a circle practicing freestyling.
The whole day, I followed the small voice, a very fainty voice from my gut — go here, do this, run, rest, sing, dance, stay here, leave now — and whatever I ended up doing, is the right thing to do.
What if life could be more like this?
Not in a precious, irresponsible way. Not as a vacation from real life. As a quiet daily practice of converging pressure into presence. Trusting the body, touching some grass.
Ground, Presence, Warmth, and many HUGS! 🥰
Artist Shai Peri ⬆️ played at the closing ceremony of Harmonia. The tunes were so soft and gentle and it floated me away as a river, a great way to end the whole experience.
The Thesis of ‘Touch Grass’
We are stepping into an era where intelligence is cheap, data is prevalent, and information is overloading.
What’s scarce now is the capacity to be alive in a body — to create, feel, gather, connect, and make meaning. AI is here to help us build the future. It leaves spaces for humans to be grounded to ask important questions.
Wisdom is no longer about what you know. It’s about how you live.
So while we live in the inevitable rat race of a competitive world, while everyone is sprinting toward the next edge, we want to offer something different.
Why Join?
Slowing down at Edge Esmeralda is, on its face, a contradiction.
You are walking into a village engineered for sprint culture. You’re surrounded by hundreds of people racing toward the future, and your phone is constantly buzzing with activity, memes, ideas, and DMs.
Without intentional design around your day and how you manage your energy, it could be quite overstimulating for your nervous system.
We’ve been to enough big gatherings to know how it goes — you arrive full of intention, and three days in you’re already optimizing for who to meet next. You leave inspired yet easily overwhelmed. You meet two hundred people but might have not deeply connected with most of them, lonely on the deeper levels even as the room glitters.
That is what Touch Grass is designed for.
What does it mean to be part of Touch Grass?
We’ll intentionally curate a group of people of 20-30 friends in a private groupchat as the main coordination method.
Being a part of Touch Grass means that:
We’ll nudge each other to slow down, listen to the birds, and touch some grass.
You’ll get a cozy little home group to help you navigate the main event, a village within a village.
You’ll be invited to co-create something magical with a special group of high-agency, value aligned builders & thought leaders.
You’ll have access to private dinners with limited spots. You’ll be nourished with delicious home cooking, meaningful conversations, and nervous system relaxing ambient music.
By joining Touch Grass, you are committed to:
Being kind, curious, and compassionate about the world around you. Creating a home away from home.
Having a “yes, and” mentality. You bring what you have. You meet what others bring. You build on it together.
Embodying softness & presence. The willingness to put your phone away when having a deep conversation with someone.
Co-Creation: Being open to make things better with us. This is a core thesis of Edge Esmeralda, and we’re here to embrace it together.
Exploring Solarpunk values: making our world more sustainable, more connected, embracing frontier technology and ancient wisdom.
Living a Solarpunk lifestyle: let’s buy from local farms, let’s compost, up-cycle, and reduce, let’s cook and clean together, and take care of each other like a family.
The Programming
Touch Grass runs in two layers: a tighter inner rhythm for the residency crew, and a wider calendar of public workshops open to all of Edge.
Inside the residency
Weekly group gatherings — intention-setting and reflection. The texture of a closer-knit village inside the bigger one.
Connection games — small, surprising, effective. The fastest way past the freshman feeling.
Home dinners — 8 to 15 people. Home-cooked, nutritionally balanced healthy meals.
Public workshops
These are the events we as a group will offer to the Edge Esmeralda community:
Meaning & Direction
Ikigai Mapping with — A walk-through of the framework for finding the work you’re meant to do.
Philosophy Walks with Maria — Walk and talk philosophy in nature. Example topics: “How to be a human in 2050?”
Body & Rhythm
How to DJ with Nico — From technical transition to the art of reading the room with music.
Fire spinning with Emily Lam — learn to play with some basic flow art, dance with physics, and connect with the elements.
Somatic bodywork with Camille — a form of partner yoga, designed for healing and connection.
Community & Connections
Buying Land for Solarpunk Communities with Chris Morello — workshop and open discussion for anyone seriously thinking about co-buying land together.
Composting 101 with Josh W, founder of MakeSoil — the most useful hour of dirt education you’ll get this decade.
More to come…
Apply Here
We offer a 20% discount code on the Edge Esmeralda 2026 ticket to all our attendees.
If you’re interested in joining Touch Grass, apply HERE!
Apply here to join Touch Grass →
✨ Thanks for reading! Agartha is a creative studio on a mission to build a global network of solarpunk communities.💕
Join us as we chronicle our journey through residencies, co-living places, pop-up cities, regenerative villages, and solarpunk lifestyles. ☀️
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