Let me tell you about a place.

It is a small peninsula in one of the youngest corners of Earth, risen from the ocean floor as continental plates reached toward each other millions of years ago. Today it is one of the most biodiverse places left on the planet. Scarlet macaws cross the sky in pairs. At dusk, monkey crossings form something akin to rush hour for the jungle's residents, and the forest presses in on daily life with an aliveness that refuses to be background.

The human communities here are just as layered. Tico families whose grandparents arrived by foot or barge. Ngäbe people whose relationship to this land runs pulsing through their veins. And a growing constellation of people from elsewhere who arrived, as I did, because something in them called for their presence here.

Six years ago — just weeks before the world shut down — a community space called Los Higuerones Cooperativa opened its doors on the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica.

I was at its center then, responsive to a personal inquiry: how do you evoke community coherence in a frayed social fabric?

Over these six years, I have witnessed this site evolve from something shaped by this single founding question into something that responds to it with beauty.   A cooperativa in the truest sense, and a commons-in-practice.

Not an entity created by legal structure or formalization — but one earned through daily use. Through the repeated act of showing up, contributing, maintaining, and belonging.

Governance here does not come from mandates. It emerges from agreements. From conversation. From consent. From trust built slowly enough that it can actually hold weight.

And so, as we engage in harvesting and composting from Higuerones' first cycle of life, it seems only fitting to make more evident what we are processing — to share clearly what we built here, and what it is actually made of.

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Los Higuerones began the way many things begin in this place: with a need, a handful of willing hearts, and a grit that includes the willingness to follow the breadcrumbs of synchronicity that appear when you're attuned.

The need was simple. A space for connection. Somewhere between home and commerce, between private and institutional, between cultures. A place where people could gather — not just to consume or transact, but to learn, to grieve, to celebrate, to imagine, to offer what they carry.

A hub, if you're speaking the language of regenerative development.

A heart, if you're speaking the language of the people who actually use it.

Over time, people from around the community and then from around the world came to contribute their hands, their skills, their questions. In exchange, they received something harder to name: a lived experience of another way of organizing life — one rooted in place, in mutual aid, in the daily practice of asking, how can I be of service today with what I have?

Some of those exchanges were beautiful. Some were messy. All of them revealed something I've come to see as central to what we are holding as a species right now: the ever-present gap between what we say we value and what we actually support with the agency we possess. My deepest inquiry has now become how we might close that gap — with love, patience, and compassion.

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If you were to account for Los Higuerones in purely financial and material terms, you could make a tidy list.

A property valued at roughly $600,000. A truck. A couple of kitchens. Tools. Furniture. Infrastructure accumulated through six years of making do and making it work. Personally, I have contributed around $60,000 over those years, and I am now flowing an additional $25,000 — received through a family inheritance — into a fund that will allow for a limited degree of operations moving forward.

These things are real. They matter.

But they are not what created this space, and not what holds it together.

What holds it together is far less legible and much harder to put in a spreadsheet.

It is experiential capital — hard-won knowledge of how mutual aid actually functions when resources are scarce, of what a solidarity economy looks like in practice rather than in theory, of how complementary currencies and commitment pooling behave in a community where most people are operating at the economic margins. Years of showing up for what was emergent — navigating crises, misunderstandings, cultural distances, and the particular friction of trying to build something genuinely shared between people with very different relationships to power and land — has produced something that cannot be summarized in a resume. It lives in the people who have learned not just how to do things here, but how to be here, in the full complexity of what this place is. The embodied wisdom of Doña Eida. The mastery that Don Simón displays without any certificates. This is what the place runs on, more than anything else.

It is natural capital — the two higuerone trees that anchor this land and gave the space its name, the edible fruits, vegetables, herbs, and spices planted from the outset of the space's becoming, the rainwater gardens, the compost systems, the simple act of catching water from the sky and offering a dry toilet option for its human occupants. It is the living systems that regenerate when you tend them and mend the broken linkages.

It is social capital — six years of showing up for one another in this community, in good times and in crisis, building a reputation not based on branding or metrics or status but on the far slower and more reliable currency of trust. Active social media presence, yes — Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, an extensive WhatsApp network that pulses daily with the small and large exchanges of community life. But underneath the digital layer, the real thing: relationships with neighbors, with local institutions, with the families who have come to see themselves as part of this place and this place as part of their family. It is Felicia knowing just how to move through the community. Iris knowing how to hold conflict without breaking it. Isabella making room for the people who are not sure they belong yet.

It is cultural capital — the songs, the shared meals, the rituals developed over six years, the ceremonies that have marked births and deaths and transitions, the stories of this place and its people that we have gathered and elevated and refused to let be flattened into talking points. A culture, slowly woven through belonging. It is Don Manuel's tribute to the Mercado Verde in his song of the same name. Doña Cecilia's traditional fiber art. The chicha that Carmen makes from a recipe nobody taught her from a book. The macramés woven by Fu. It lives in the open mics and the cooking competitions and the song we sing before each meal. Culture is not programming. It is not content. It is the living story we create each day that tells us who we are — and when you tend it carefully, it creates a sense of belonging that no membership fee can manufacture.

It is spiritual capital — forged in the fires of collective struggle, of shadow work done together, of conflicts weathered and sometimes repaired, of grief held in community and prayers offered without apology. Of showing up for each other in the full spectrum of what being human in a place, and at this time, actually requires. Spiritual capital is the one most likely to get an eye-roll from people trained in conventional economics. But six years in, I can tell you that without it — without Spencer's quality of patient presence, without Roy's willingness to walk toward difficulty rather than away from it, without the team's shared practice of asking what does this place need from me today? — none of the rest would have survived the hardest moments.

It is intellectual capital — the frameworks and ideas brought through years of collaboration with networks like Earth Regenerators, Bloom, ReFi, and BioFi, working at the edges of economic and ecological thought, bringing their thinking into contact with our ground-level reality and allowing each to be changed by the encounter. Increasingly, this place is not just a hub for those who pass through it but a node within a wider global bioregional network — a partner in a living landscape of relationships that extend far beyond any single community, country, or continent.

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What makes Los Higuerones function as a hub is not any single activity or any single capital, but the way multiple roles feed each other simultaneously.

A farmers market generates relationships. Those relationships make work parties possible. Those work parties maintain the space. That space allows for learning, gathering, celebration, governance.

Nothing stands alone. Each function feeds the others.

Care is not a byproduct of this system. It is the labor itself. The repairs, the gardening, the coordination, the quiet acts of tending — this is the commons. Much of it remains invisible precisely because it works. It forms the backbone without announcing itself.

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What a diagram cannot show is the texture of any single day — the morning a volunteer arrives carrying exactly the skill the work party needs, the Saturday market conversation that somehow becomes a governance decision, the quiet hour sitting in the higuerone tree that repairs something a meeting couldn't. These are the moments when the capitals cross-pollinate, when a community starts to feel less like a project and more like a portal.

That is what we have been building. That is how we have learned to measure value.

The money has kept the lights on. Everything else has kept it alive.

—-———-

As we travel through this time of profound transition, maybe this juvenile corner of our planet has something to offer its older, more developed siblings — something about enoughness, surrender, trust, and the beauty that can emerge when we travel from me to we.

I will not be at the center of what comes next here at Higuerones.

And that feels exactly right.

What I carry forward from my time at this experimentation station — what I harvest — is simpler yet more profound than any material return I could seek. It is invested in a deep knowing of what is valuable, multiplied by knowing how to identify that value and help it flow. It forms the endowment of understanding what true wealth is actually made of.

In a time when millions — perhaps billions — around the world are searching for safe havens for excess financial resources, I have been gifted with the lived understanding of what the phrase "I store my meat in the belly of my brother"actually means.

I leave this place with most of my financial capital gone. And with a sense of true wealth that is beyond measure.