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.

—-———-

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.

—-———-

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.

—-———-

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.