Living at the Edge
What I learned attending a techno-conscious permaculture pop-up village
Imagine all of the universe as a colossal infinite mirror, shattered into an endless sea of shards. Each human soul a tiny glass fractal, floating through life, reflecting others, in search of matching puzzle pieces. We collide with other shards from time to time, fumbling to force a fit. We scrape ourselves on jagged edges, get trapped in incompatible entanglements, and break away when the friction becomes unbearable. Then, in some divinely orchestrated dance, we connect with those matching pieces, it clicks, and boom… absolute magic.
There’s nothing quite like finding your tribe.
Earlier this month, Julie, the kids and I spent a week at
—a month-long pop-up village in Healdsburg, California. It’s impossible to describe the event in a simple phrase. The experience felt like a blend of crowd-sourced conference, multi-generational family summer camp, college campus, music festival, startup accelerator, co-working space & co-living experiment. All taking place in the middle of a classy yet laid back, culinary wine-country town. It’s an event where you can serendipitously meet your next tennis partner, lead vocalist, reiki healer, or company co-founder.Unlike many business conferences I’ve attended in the past, what was perhaps most refreshing about Edge Esmeralda was the vibe: open and friendly, comfortably weird, structurally unstructured, experimental, communal, anti-corporate, builder-oriented, adventurous, and fun.
Themes that resonated with me
Regenerative agriculture - growing, consuming, and replenishing natural resources with minimal / zero waste in an infinite lifecycle
Re-imagining cities for human scale - functional, efficient, healthy, beautiful
Re-thinking governance, rules, regulations - as a more functional substrate on which communities and cities can organically build infrastructure, services, and businesses
Tech - open source, open data, collaborative tooling, blockchain, AI, robotics
Community - Emphasizing joy, play, spontaneity, friendship, connection, sharing, co-living
Education - home schooling, co-parenting in community, remote learning and custom curriculums
Health - connecting with the land, natural food, exercise, dance, sauna, cold plunge, hiking, running, sports.
Consciousness - meditation, energy healing, psychedelics, great awakening & transformation
Co-creating in a virtual village
Prior to arriving, joining the telegram group of 600+ people felt like drinking from a firehose. I was greeted by an endless stream of messages — people spontaneously organizing workshops, volleyball games, sauna sessions, and dance parties. Channels were buzzing with folks pitching ideas, offering services, asking for help with their kids, giving feedback, and sharing their personal projects.
It felt like a virtual village, progressively expanding and evolving through spontaneous connections. This is where the magic happens. Shared experiences form relationships. Relationships cultivate trust and cooperation. Play unlocks imagination, generating excitement and creating fertile ground for co-creation.
It was inspiring to see people helping each other out, creating and sharing opportunities, and shipping real deliverables: from vibe-coded scheduling apps, lab tests, shared health dashboards, to a solar-powered server array deployed on a farm.
Choose your own adventure
Given the range of activities and diversity of thought, one person’s experience could be wholly unique from everyone else’s. As an attendee, you had to self-select and curate your own agenda. The organizers did a great job of providing an app to manage all programming via a platform called Social Layer. The community was fairly disciplined about posting and updating activities, though it wasn’t uncommon for workshops & talks to be rescheduled or cancelled last minute.
The event was slightly chaotic and highly kinetic. I noticed how important it was to practice self-awareness and regulate emotions. Many people were reflecting on how they needed to take some time to rest and recuperate from the information overload and overstimulation. It was also an excellent environment to practice JOMO (Joy Of Missing Out). Overlapping schedules and separate locations meant you couldn’t possibly attend everything.
Since the kids were with me, I spent a bit more time with other parents and volunteering at the children’s camp. This was split between an art school on a flower farm and a play-space located near the wellness center. When B and M were busy at camp or done for the day, I’d attend talks & workshops, play volleyball, or strike up conversations with fascinating people.
Takeaways
I learned so much from this experience, more than I can fit in one post. But here are some insights I gleaned when it comes to building my own Solarpunk Village.
It is HARD WORK to build an intentional / permaculture community, exponentially increasing in difficulty the larger your population size. The range of challenges can be daunting. There’s a reason why so many of these experiments haven’t survived the test of time.
Funding
Business Model
Vision & Leadership
Talent & Labor
Values
Culture
Governance
Regulation (eg zoning, certification, approvals)
Politics (local, state, and national)
Execution
Construction / Infrastructure
Agriculture
People management
Project Management
Networking
Public opinion / press
Scaling
Community is the key. You need to have a critical mass of people that are aligned and passionate about this particular way of life in order to create some ‘stickiness’. It’s people who get things get done. It’s people who create culture, who make more connections, who bring new ideas and opportunities. As a group gains momentum, it transforms into a mini-society that draws in more interest, energy, and eventually — funding.
Diversity is essential (skills, perspectives, culture) to maintain a thriving environment, stay honest, innovate, and address the wide range of tasks required to maintain the land / facilities / activities.
Governance is probably one of the most important yet difficult aspects to get right. How do people stay informed, how do they make decisions, how are they held accountable to agreed upon rules? How do you manage conflict? How do you make sure people are contributing fairly and reciprocity stays balanced within the ecosystem? Who leads and facilities the conversations? How often does information need to be shared? When and where do people gather? What tools are you using? Many communities have failed trying to figure this out.
This absolutely cannot be done in isolation if you want to scale. Even the best permaculture communities (eg Occidental Arts and Ecology Center) that have their own gardens, skilled residents, and volunteers—need to rely on other local communities to provide food, services, materials, etc.
There are hundreds if not thousands of permaculture / intentional / decentralized communities around the world - with different approaches, flavors, and stages of maturity. Yet there isn’t a prevailing unifying protocol, platform, or network through which they’re all interconnected and cooperating.
There’s a lifetime of learning ahead of me.
I am not alone
What do you do when your values and passions make you seem like a lunatic around your friends and family? How do you handle the awkward silence and blank stares when you share your visions? Having your dreams fall on deaf ears can leave a hollow footprint on your soul.
I’ve made the mistake in the past of being overly enthusiastic about my ideas and ambitions—evangelizing them to people who weren’t aligned, ready, or interested. That wasn’t their fault. I’d want people to share in my excitement, not realizing that I was forcing my hopes upon them. It was its own form of violence. I wasn’t thoughtful or discerning enough to understand that people are at different stages of their own journeys. They deserve acceptance and respect no matter how different our paths are.
It took me to time to understand that it’s not a matter of being right or wrong, but rather are we interacting on the same frequency. When striking the right notes on a chord, it matters not how hard you strum the guitar strings. Music is made by finding the right resonance.
Edge Esmeralda was a wonderful, challenging, expansive experience. It was such a gift to interact with so many individuals who share a dream of a brighter world, a healthier way of living, and an abundant and peaceful global society. It was energizing to see people acknowledge problems in the world and then watch them actually do something about it. Witnessing the courage and grit of these entrepreneurs and seeing what they’ve been able to accomplish was as inspiring as it was intimidating.
I want to join them. I‘m going to gather my tribe. I see a future full of hope. I’m choosing to create it.
Next post, I’ll share my vision for the Solarpunk Village I’m going to build. See you there!
Thanks for reading! If you like my creations, you can sub for free, upgrade, comment, or click the ❤️ or 🔄 button. It goes a long way. I appreciate you. 🙏
What I’m Doing This Week
Gratitude
I’m grateful for the love of family and to see it grow.
Lesson Learned
Living life on autopilot is a betrayal to the body.
Listening to
We Are All Connected by Trilucid
Watching
Despite each season escalating to borderline gratuitous violence, this show is an exceptional showcase of imagination, style, mind-bending reality, and breath-taking beauty.
Reading
Meeting
at Edge was synchronistic, silly, and felt like the puzzle pieces clicking into place. Her vision of a beautiful protopian future so closely matched mine that it just made sense to connect and co-create. Check it out!
Self-care
Meditation, pushups, hot baths, deep tissue work, cupping, meridian clearing, stretching, naps