Pilgrimage — No. 1

Radicals (A Series)

I’m delighted to begin this series with something that might feel like an incongruancy.

I am using artificial intelligence to help me write this series. And this series is, in part, a critique of the role artificial intelligence—and other tools create through a dominant world lense—are playing in keeping us looping as a society.

I share this not to resolve the tension, but to sit inside it. Because the tension itself is instructive. About what tools are for. About who they serve. About what gets lost—and what occasionally gets found—when we reach for them.

Something does get lost. I can feel it even as I write this. A subtle flattening. A translation from something lived and relational into something shaped for comprehension. Sometimes that shaping helps a truth land. Sometimes it extracts the very thing that made the truth worth sharing.

For now, just know this: I am trying to be honest about the tools in my hands, even the ones I hold with ambivalence.

---

I came to Costa Rica in 2001 as a pilgrim of sorts.

In the decade before that, I had been working in San Francisco at the intersection of social justice and system reform—the kind of work that convinces you that if you can just craft the right legislation, build the right coalition, elect the right candidates…something will shift.

And then one day, something did.

A piece of legislation I had helped write passed through the state legislature. It was designed to ease our collective dependence on the prison industrial complex. It was meant to create space for communities to care for their own people in ways the system could not.

We won. The legislation passed.

And from inside the district attorney’s office, I watched it mean nothing.

The language was there. The permission was there. But the incentives, the habits, the unspoken agreements that actually govern behavior—none of that had shifted. The system absorbed the change without changing itself. Cases moved forward as they always had. Decisions were made through the same lens. The words on paper had no physicality in the ecosystem they were meant to impact.

That was when I understood something that has never left me:

Change designed from outside the ecosystems it seeks to impact is mostly destined to fail.

If you are not in relationship with—and in some way accountable to—the people whose behavior must shift for change to take hold, then the architecture of that change is hollow. It may look real. It may even pass. But it will not live.

I could no longer stay inside a system that required that kind of dissonance to function. So I left.

I became, in my own private way, a pilgrim—seeking a life where my agency could be exercised and could be felt.

---

Costa Rica received me like a balm.

Specifically, the Brunca region—from the peaks of Chirripó down to the Osa Peninsula. I arrived in March of 2001, raw and unraveling, and this place did something I hadn’t expected:

It taught me.

Not abstractly. Not ideologically. It taught me through contact.

Through the farmer who could read the soil with his hands and tell you what it needed before a seed was ever planted. Through neighbors who understood the rains—not as data points, but as patterns you feel in your bones. Through the rhythm of days shaped not by urgency, but by relationship: to land, to weather, to one another.

This was empirical knowledge in its oldest sense—not something observed from a distance, but something learned through the body.

Slowly, I allowed my WEIRD orientation—Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic—to step out of the center. In its place, something quieter began to guide me. Something slower. Something more attuned to place.

That has been my twenty-five year apprenticeship.

---

Now, in 2026, I am leaving again.

And I find myself becoming a pilgrim for the second time.

But this departure is different.

The first time, I left because something was broken. Because I could no longer reconcile what I was participating in with what I knew to be true.

This time, I am leaving something that is not broken.

I am leaving the most magical place I have ever known. The most intact community I have ever had the honor to be part of. I am not departing in rejection. I am departing in recognition.

In living systems, everything is cyclical. What is born must grow. What grows must mature. And what matures must, at some point, be released—so that it can transform into what comes next.

The work I have been stewarding in this bioregion has entered a new season. Something is ripening. Something is composting. And what wants to happen next does not require me at the center of it.

It requires me to step aside.

---

Six years ago, I helped birth a community hub on the Osa Peninsula called Los Higuerones. www.higueronescoop.org

Over those six years, I poured into it everything I know about how humans can organize themselves in genuine service to life: social capital, cultural capital, spiritual capital, time, money, love, conflict, repair, celebration, grief.

All of it.

What exists there now is imperfect and alive. It is no longer something I am building. It is something that is learning how to belong—to the community that grew up around it and through it.

The question of what it actually is—and what it is actually worth—comes later in this series.

I think it might surprise you, I hope it will delight you.

---

This series is called Radicals.

Not in the sense that is often used—loud, oppositional, defined by resistance—but in the older sense of the word: rooted.

Those of us who have chosen to root our lives in place, in relationship, in the slow accumulation of trust and knowing that comes from decades of being with rather than doing to—we exist largely outside the frame of what the dominant system knows how to recognize.

We are invisible to the spreadsheet.

We are inscrutable to the impact report.

We are incoherent to the pitch deck.

And we are not particularly interested in fixing that.

What we are interested in is telling the truth.

About what we have built.

About what it cost.

About what it is worth.

And about what it would actually take for those observing from the margins to accompany us—not as capacity builders, not as translators, not as intermediaries between us and “the real world”—but as companions.

As people willing to be changed by what they encounter here in the illegible real.

---

Before I go further, I want to be clear about something.

I do not believe I am the only one feeling this. Nor do I believe I am feeling it most clearly.

There is an old teaching about a group of people, each touching a different part of an elephant in the dark—each describing something true, and each describing something incomplete.

What I am increasingly convinced of is that the crisis we are living through—ecological, social, spiritual, economic—cannot be fully perceived from any single vantage point.

The person in the field feels things the person in the boardroom cannot.

The elder who has never left her bioregion feels things the well-traveled consultant cannot.

The child feels things the strategist cannot.

This series is not a declaration.

It is an offering into a larger field of listening.

My particular hands on my particular part of the elephant—shared in the hope that, when placed alongside the hands and knowing of others, especially those rendered invisible by the systems that have done the most harm, we might begin to feel the whole creature more clearly.

---

This is where AI comes back in.

I am not primarily interested in AI as a technology.

I am interested in the system of logic that makes it seem not only valuable, but necessary—the invisible architecture that tells us: if we can just make your story legible enough, the resources will flow.

What that logic cannot see—what it is structurally prevented from seeing—is that legibility is not neutral.

The act of translation always alters the thing being translated.

And in many cases, what gets lost is precisely what made the work meaningful to begin with.

Systems that require legibility in order to value something will reliably strip away the very qualities that made that thing worth valuing.

That is the tension I am writing inside of.

Yes, I am using AI to help me find the words for this. I hold it with clear eyes—aware of what it is and what it isn’t. It cannot know what I know. It cannot feel what this land has given me, or what it cost to build something real here, or what it means to leave it.

But it can, at times, help me find the shape of a sentence that was already forming.

And for that—provisionally, carefully—I am grateful.

---

The pieces that follow will move between the personal and the structural, between story and analysis, between grief and provocation.

I write from thirty-five years of organizing within and alongside communities that the dominant system consistently renders invisible, illegible, and insignificant.

I write as someone who has spent the last six years building an alternative—and watching, with growing clarity, how even the infrastructures that imagine themselves in support of these alternatives can reproduce the very logic that erodes their center.

I am not writing to shame anyone.

I am writing because unless we are willing to name the systems we are embedded in clearly enough to actually feel them, we cannot compost what needs composting.  And I am in a season of composting.

---

This is not a success story.

It is not a failure story either.

It is an invitation—

to feel together, in the dark,

the shape of the thing

we are all touching.

Pilgrimage — No. 1

Radicals (A Series)

I’m delighted to begin this series with something that might feel like an incongruancy.

I am using artificial intelligence to help me write this series. And this series is, in part, a critique of the role artificial intelligence—and other tools create through a dominant world lense—are playing in keeping us looping as a society.

I share this not to resolve the tension, but to sit inside it. Because the tension itself is instructive. About what tools are for. About who they serve. About what gets lost—and what occasionally gets found—when we reach for them.

Something does get lost. I can feel it even as I write this. A subtle flattening. A translation from something lived and relational into something shaped for comprehension. Sometimes that shaping helps a truth land. Sometimes it extracts the very thing that made the truth worth sharing.

For now, just know this: I am trying to be honest about the tools in my hands, even the ones I hold with ambivalence.

---

I came to Costa Rica in 2001 as a pilgrim of sorts.

In the decade before that, I had been working in San Francisco at the intersection of social justice and system reform—the kind of work that convinces you that if you can just craft the right legislation, build the right coalition, elect the right candidates…something will shift.

And then one day, something did.

A piece of legislation I had helped write passed through the state legislature. It was designed to ease our collective dependence on the prison industrial complex. It was meant to create space for communities to care for their own people in ways the system could not.

We won. The legislation passed.

And from inside the district attorney’s office, I watched it mean nothing.

The language was there. The permission was there. But the incentives, the habits, the unspoken agreements that actually govern behavior—none of that had shifted. The system absorbed the change without changing itself. Cases moved forward as they always had. Decisions were made through the same lens. The words on paper had no physicality in the ecosystem they were meant to impact.

That was when I understood something that has never left me:

Change designed from outside the ecosystems it seeks to impact is mostly destined to fail.

If you are not in relationship with—and in some way accountable to—the people whose behavior must shift for change to take hold, then the architecture of that change is hollow. It may look real. It may even pass. But it will not live.

I could no longer stay inside a system that required that kind of dissonance to function. So I left.

I became, in my own private way, a pilgrim—seeking a life where my agency could be exercised and could be felt.

---

Costa Rica received me like a balm.

Specifically, the Brunca region—from the peaks of Chirripó down to the Osa Peninsula. I arrived in March of 2001, raw and unraveling, and this place did something I hadn’t expected:

It taught me.

Not abstractly. Not ideologically. It taught me through contact.

Through the farmer who could read the soil with his hands and tell you what it needed before a seed was ever planted. Through neighbors who understood the rains—not as data points, but as patterns you feel in your bones. Through the rhythm of days shaped not by urgency, but by relationship: to land, to weather, to one another.

This was empirical knowledge in its oldest sense—not something observed from a distance, but something learned through the body.

Slowly, I allowed my WEIRD orientation—Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic—to step out of the center. In its place, something quieter began to guide me. Something slower. Something more attuned to place.

That has been my twenty-five year apprenticeship.

---

Now, in 2026, I am leaving again.

And I find myself becoming a pilgrim for the second time.

But this departure is different.

The first time, I left because something was broken. Because I could no longer reconcile what I was participating in with what I knew to be true.

This time, I am leaving something that is not broken.

I am leaving the most magical place I have ever known. The most intact community I have ever had the honor to be part of. I am not departing in rejection. I am departing in recognition.

In living systems, everything is cyclical. What is born must grow. What grows must mature. And what matures must, at some point, be released—so that it can transform into what comes next.

The work I have been stewarding in this bioregion has entered a new season. Something is ripening. Something is composting. And what wants to happen next does not require me at the center of it.

It requires me to step aside.

---

Six years ago, I helped birth a community hub on the Osa Peninsula called Los Higuerones. www.higueronescoop.org

Over those six years, I poured into it everything I know about how humans can organize themselves in genuine service to life: social capital, cultural capital, spiritual capital, time, money, love, conflict, repair, celebration, grief.

All of it.

What exists there now is imperfect and alive. It is no longer something I am building. It is something that is learning how to belong—to the community that grew up around it and through it.

The question of what it actually is—and what it is actually worth—comes later in this series.

I think it might surprise you, I hope it will delight you.

---

This series is called Radicals.

Not in the sense that is often used—loud, oppositional, defined by resistance—but in the older sense of the word: rooted.

Those of us who have chosen to root our lives in place, in relationship, in the slow accumulation of trust and knowing that comes from decades of being with rather than doing to—we exist largely outside the frame of what the dominant system knows how to recognize.

We are invisible to the spreadsheet.

We are inscrutable to the impact report.

We are incoherent to the pitch deck.

And we are not particularly interested in fixing that.

What we are interested in is telling the truth.

About what we have built.

About what it cost.

About what it is worth.

And about what it would actually take for those observing from the margins to accompany us—not as capacity builders, not as translators, not as intermediaries between us and “the real world”—but as companions.

As people willing to be changed by what they encounter here in the illegible real.

---

Before I go further, I want to be clear about something.

I do not believe I am the only one feeling this. Nor do I believe I am feeling it most clearly.

There is an old teaching about a group of people, each touching a different part of an elephant in the dark—each describing something true, and each describing something incomplete.

What I am increasingly convinced of is that the crisis we are living through—ecological, social, spiritual, economic—cannot be fully perceived from any single vantage point.

The person in the field feels things the person in the boardroom cannot.

The elder who has never left her bioregion feels things the well-traveled consultant cannot.

The child feels things the strategist cannot.

This series is not a declaration.

It is an offering into a larger field of listening.

My particular hands on my particular part of the elephant—shared in the hope that, when placed alongside the hands and knowing of others, especially those rendered invisible by the systems that have done the most harm, we might begin to feel the whole creature more clearly.

---

This is where AI comes back in.

I am not primarily interested in AI as a technology.

I am interested in the system of logic that makes it seem not only valuable, but necessary—the invisible architecture that tells us: if we can just make your story legible enough, the resources will flow.

What that logic cannot see—what it is structurally prevented from seeing—is that legibility is not neutral.

The act of translation always alters the thing being translated.

And in many cases, what gets lost is precisely what made the work meaningful to begin with.

Systems that require legibility in order to value something will reliably strip away the very qualities that made that thing worth valuing.

That is the tension I am writing inside of.

Yes, I am using AI to help me find the words for this. I hold it with clear eyes—aware of what it is and what it isn’t. It cannot know what I know. It cannot feel what this land has given me, or what it cost to build something real here, or what it means to leave it.

But it can, at times, help me find the shape of a sentence that was already forming.

And for that—provisionally, carefully—I am grateful.

---

The pieces that follow will move between the personal and the structural, between story and analysis, between grief and provocation.

I write from thirty-five years of organizing within and alongside communities that the dominant system consistently renders invisible, illegible, and insignificant.

I write as someone who has spent the last six years building an alternative—and watching, with growing clarity, how even the infrastructures that imagine themselves in support of these alternatives can reproduce the very logic that erodes their center.

I am not writing to shame anyone.

I am writing because unless we are willing to name the systems we are embedded in clearly enough to actually feel them, we cannot compost what needs composting.  And I am in a season of composting.

---

This is not a success story.

It is not a failure story either.

It is an invitation—

to feel together, in the dark,

the shape of the thing

we are all touching.