by Lyn Tally, Sustainability Educator @ A New Earth Project & Atlantic Packaging
@ The Ecology Center, San Juan Capistrano, CA
Have you ever experienced something and wished everyone you knew could have been there too? That was this evening.
Attending any event, I always wonder who will attend and what will we experience together. This evening was no different, and my curious anticipation was present while I was capturing a few shots of the sun setting over the regenerative farm before the show began.
The whole area has an energy that welcomes you the moment you walk on the grounds. The Peace Dome was no different. Calming, minimal, warm, and cozy. The kind of place you kick off your shoes at the door, step in, and immediately feel right at home. There's a settling that happens the moment you walk in. Not because of anything dramatic, but because The Ecology Center is seasoned at this. Welcoming people is woven into the roots of its creation. Everything here is nourishment. It feeds you, holds you, and keeps you wanting to come back for more.
The Ecology Center is a nonprofit farm in San Juan Capistrano built around a simple but radical idea: Grow Eat Make Peace. They are, in their own words, in business to shift culture, curating ecological experiences that offer real, achievable solutions for thriving on this planet.
The Peace Dome is one of the ways they do that. It exists to reconnect people to the land, to each other, and to the thousands of years of interconnectedness that most of us have quietly drifted away from. The Good Medicine Series brings live music into that space, and what happens when you pair the right artist with the right room is exactly what it sounds like.
Before the show, people were finding each other. Laughs, smiles, warm embraces. The particular energy of a crowd that doesn't yet know what they're walking into together.
Ron Artis II was performing, and boy did he perform. But even more than that, he took us all on a journey.
From the first song, he had the room. His music is storytelling, and through his stories he took us back to ourselves and each other. Reminding us that we are not machines. That we are nature, with seasons. That pain and grief are not obstacles, they are gifts. That the highest form of beauty is honesty. And he lived every word of that on stage.
At some point he shared something his 80-year-old fencing partner had whispered to him: you'll never have it all figured out. The room exhaled. Because everyone in that dome knew it was true, and maybe hadn't given ourselves permission to own this truth.
Ron proved that while you may never have it all figured out, love, connection, and being open to making peace with the hardest emotions are always worth trying.
When his daughters each came up to perform a song with him, you felt even more the embodiment of his words. His ease, his patience, his care, his delight. Ron Artis II doesn't perform what he believes. He is it.
By the end of the show, my arm sleeve was soaked with many happy tears.
Inside the Peace Dome that night, Ron Artis II, singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and A New Earth Project Advocate, did what only a few artists can: made a room full of strangers feel like family.
That's good medicine.
And that's exactly what A New Earth Project is proud to support: moments where people, land, story, and the radical simplicity of being present to something beautiful all land in the same room at the same time.
If you find yourself near San Juan Capistrano, the Good Medicine Series is exactly what it sounds like. What a gift.
A New Earth Project is the presenting sponsor of The Good Medicine Series in partnership with The Ecology Center in San Juan Capistrano, California. Learn more at theecologycenter.org.