Why Bother Touching Grass? 🌿

Hello, beautiful souls!

Here’s a little song to show how much we care for you:

One year ago at Edge Esmeralda 2025, Nico Shi and I met serendipitously as we shared Ignite Talks about our Solarpunk visions. It’s remarkable to see how much our lives have changed in these 12 lightning-quick months. We’re back again this year, and I have the deepest gratitude to Nico for bringing me into her beautiful world and for being such an incredible teammate. Special thanks to julie nguyen for arranging a special little Agartha Birthday celebration during one of our family dinners. Here’s to many more!

We’re finishing up the third week of our residency ‘Touch Grass’ and it’s been a whirlwind of creativity, connection, inspiration, love, laughter, and expansion. Having done these gatherings a number of times now, I’m reflecting on how much energy it takes to hold space, set containers, and harmonize interpersonal dynamics. It can be exhausting if you’re not being mindful, intentionally resting, and setting firm boundaries.

Next time you run into a community builder, party host, or space holder… please do give them some gratitude and help out when you can. They are doing tremendous (often hidden) work making the world a more loving place!

Some cool things we’ve done at Edge Esmeralda so far:

• A Solarpunk Soiree with Immersive Theater Improv Challenges

• ‘Align Your Ikigai’ Workshop

• Flow Art Jam on the Grass

• Grass Volleyball training and casual games

• Co-buying Properties with Friends from Gillian Morris

• Creative Spark Talk over Dinner

• Creator Showcase with René Pinnell from Artizen

• 6 Dinner Parties with over 150 Guests

• 463 attendees to all of our events

This was our residency’s Opening Speech.

Read here to get more context about how the Touch Grass residency came about!

It starts with a practice called Earthing, also known as Grounding, and it’s exactly what it sounds like: making direct skin contact with the Earth. Bare feet in the grass. Hands in the soil. Your body against the ground.

Here’s the part that tends to surprise people: the Earth is electric. ⚡ Since the early 1900s, geoscientists and atmospheric physicists have understood that the planet’s surface carries a negative charge.1 When we touch it directly, that charge can transfer into us, helping neutralize free radicals at the cellular level.

Guess what? Our bodies are electric too! Our cells talk to each other in bioelectrical signals. Our hearts beat on electrical currents (that’s literally what an EKG reads). Our brains fire in electrical impulses (that’s the EEG). Even the minerals in us - sodium, magnesium, potassium, calcium - carry a charge.2 We are walking, humming electrical systems.

So Earthing isn’t some woo metaphor. It’s two electric systems, one ancient and planet-sized, one warm and alive, finally touching.

Then there’s the Schumann Resonance3, sometimes called the Earth’s heartbeat. It’s a frequency born from the electromagnetic waves pulsing through our atmosphere, humming along at a steady 7.83 Hz. And some researchers believe that all life here, our own brainwaves included, is quietly tuned to it.

Which is less far-fetched than it sounds. EEG studies4 show that Earthing can shift our brainwave patterns almost immediately, and over time the research suggests it may:

• Ease stress and anxiety

• Support deeper, more restorative sleep

• Improve overall sleep quality

• Strengthen the nervous system

This is just the beginning of what opens up when we start living in harmony with nature. 🌱

Intelligence has gotten cheap. Machines are getting smarter and smarter every day. What’s becoming rare, what’s becoming precious, is the capacity to be fully alive in a body. To taste your food. To feel something move through you when the music hits. To sit across from another human being and actually be there.

Wisdom used to mean what you know. It doesn’t anymore. Now it means how you live.

And somewhere along the way, we split it all apart. We put the wisdom in the libraries, the joy at the parties, the work behind the screens… and we forgot they were ever one thing. The old traditions never made that split. There was always family. Always food. Always music. Always play.

This month, we’re putting it all back together.

So here’s the thing about values: you can post them on social media, you can put them in a deck, or you can live them. This month, we are going to embody our values. We’ll be composting our food, relating with vulnerability and compassion, embracing stillness, and building solutions for a better world.

We are Agartha, a Solarpunk creative studio. Our mission is to cultivate a global network of solarpunk communities. We see a future world that is loving, abundant, healthy, peaceful, and we want to meme it into reality. We believe that integrating the core pillars of Solarpunk is the path to get there: Ethical Technology, Planetary Regeneration, Loving Community, Spiritual Growth.

For this residency, we’re joining forces with Artizen, a game-changing platform designed to unleash economic empowerment for artists and and conscious builders. René, its founder, has already helped creators raise more then $50M and they’re just getting started.

Here’s what we’d like to co-create with you:

Our nervous systems have been sprinting for years, let it breathe. There’s nothing to optimize here. Go outside. Get your feet on the grass. Let your shoulders drop; you’ll be amazed what your body’s been holding.

Not network. Connect. The whole reason we put 20+ humans in one container in Healdsburg is that the magic isn’t in any one of us. It’s in what happens between us. In the kitchen. In the dinner that runs three hours past dessert. In the conversation you didn’t plan.

That’s where flow lives. That’s where the best things come from - not from grinding, but from play, from safety, from finally being in a room with people who get it.

We didn’t gather you here to consume a month. We gathered you to co-create one. Cook the meal. Lead the thing you’ve always wanted to lead. Make the weird art. Say the true thing in an intimate conversation. You didn’t come this far to play small.

Because I think that’s what our highest potential actually is. Not some peak you climb alone — it’s what becomes possible when you feel safe enough, alive enough, and connected enough to fully show up. And then we build with each other.

Let’s touch some grass. Let’s eat well, laugh loud, and make something none of us could make alone.