🚨A Note to the Reader🚨

Before proceeding, I owe an apology to a portion of humanity.

This essay assumes familiarity with a particular odor commonly associated with human semen. If you have never encountered this smell, cannot recall it, or belong to the substantial minority of people whose olfactory receptors do not readily detect it, parts of this article may seem oddly specific or entirely fictional.

Please be assured that neither the title nor the central premise is metaphorical.

Many plants, fungi, and biological materials genuinely produce scents that numerous people describe as remarkably similar to the smell of semen. This observation has generated confusion, embarrassment, horticultural debates, and countless awkward walks beneath flowering trees.

Should this be your first exposure to the phenomenon, I apologize in advance.

Should you already know exactly what I am talking about, I apologize for reminding you.

… end note…

….ehem…..

As a physicist, I confess that I have often looked down from the lofty peaks of equations upon the valleys of biology and chemistry.

Physics seemed clean. Elegant. Universal.

Biology seemed like stamp collecting with extra Latin.

Chemistry appeared to be an endless catalog of substances named after either German cities or unfortunate graduate students.

Yet with age comes humility. Or perhaps merely exhaustion.

Recently I began to suspect that biology and chemistry are not primitive sciences at all. They are languages.

Physics studies the grammar of reality.

Chemistry studies its vocabulary.

Biology studies the stories that vocabulary tells.

And today I was reminded of this by one of the oldest words in the biochemical dictionary:

The smell of semen.

Now, before anyone closes this article in alarm, consider the following.

Biologists tell us that spermine and spermidine, two compounds associated with the characteristic smell of semen, are not unique to humans. They are not even unique to animals.

They are found throughout life.

• Plants have them.

• Fungi have them.

• Bacteria have them.

• Trees quietly contain them.

• Mosses contain them.

• Microbes floating through the ocean contain them.

The same molecular family has been participating in cellular life for billions of years.

This realization creates an awkward but profound possibility for me. When we smell semen, we are not smelling something uniquely human…. Perhaps we are smelling an ancient dialect of life itself.

A biochemical accent spoken long before mammals existed.

Long before flowers bloomed. Long before fish invented the concept of being fish. Somewhere in the primordial soup, ancient cells were already passing around these molecular phrases. Billions of years later, a flowering pear tree releases a bouquet of amines.

Humans walk by. “That smells suspiciously like semen,” they say.

The tree, if it could speak, might reply:

“Actually, my friend, you smell like me.”

This is where chemistry begins to resemble linguistics.

...

….. so … semen, seen this way, is not merely a substance. It is a signal.

A signal of readiness. A signal of fertility. A signal of possibility.

But signals alone are not enough. The world is full of signaling.

Flowers signal to bees. Fungi signal to trees.

People signal virtue, need, desire, wealth, danger, belonging, competence, and sometimes complete nonsense.

Everywhere, life is broadcasting.

The question (that turned me away from currencies and toward commitment pooling) is:

… what holds the signals together?

What turns noise into relationship? What turns expression into trust? What turns a promise into something others can safely build upon?

For me, this is where commitment pooling entered the picture.

If signaling is the Yang (bright, outward, expressive), then commitment pooling is the Yin (holding, limiting, remembering, settling).

It gives signals somewhere to land. It asks: Who made the promise? What can be redeemed? How much can safely flow? What happens if it fails?

Without this, signaling becomes performance. With it, signaling becomes coordination.

….

And so life keeps reusing the same words.

• Amines.

• Alcohols.

• Esters.

• Sulfur compounds.

• Indoles.

The vocabulary is finite, but the poetry is endless.

• A rose writes a sonnet.

• A mushroom writes a mystery novel.

• A skunk produces performance art.

And somewhere a pear tree is composing a deeply controversial haiku.

The same principle appears throughout economics.

In the Commitment Pooling Protocol, we often talk about commitments as if they are the fundamental vocabulary of coordination.

• A voucher is a word.

• A commitment is a sentence.

• A pool is a conversation.

• A route between pools is a translation.

• Stewards become librarians, lexicographers, and occasionally grammar police.

• What enters the registry?

• What value does it carry?

• How much may flow?

• How shall it settle?

The four pooling functions are less like financial machinery and more like linguistic rules that allow communities to speak coherently to one another.

Seen this way, ecosystems and economies begin to look remarkably similar.

Forests are commitment pools. Mycorrhizal fungi route nutrients much as routers move commitments across pools. Flowers issue promises to pollinators. Pollinators redeem them. Trees maintain long-term reciprocal credit arrangements with fungi. Nobody sends an invoice. Nobody hires a derivatives lawyer.

Yet the accounting somehow works.

Even the smell of semen starts to fit the pattern. Not because everything smells like semen. …. Fortunately.

But because the same biochemical commitments keep appearing across life. Ancient molecular vouchers circulate from bacteria to oak trees to humans. The issuers change. The redemption conditions change. The stewardship changes. The vocabulary remains surprisingly stable.

Life seems to continually reuses, recombines, and reroutes old commitments.

The universe feels less like a machine manufacturing novelty and more like a vast commitment pool routing ancient promises through new forms.

Sometimes those promises become forests. Sometimes they become civilizations. And sometimes, to the embarrassment / shagrin of botanists everywhere, they become a flowering tree that smells vaguely like gizz.

In the end, perhaps biology is the study of an ongoing conversation that began billions of years ago.

And every now and then, if the wind is blowing just right, you can smell a very old word.

To subscribe originally meant to write one’s name underneath something, to assent, to bind oneself, to promise a contribution. A subscription is a name placed beneath the work so it can keep standing.

When someone subscribes here, especially when someone becomes a paid subscriber, something happens. A little trust enters the room. A person somewhere says, in effect: I have received something from this work. I want it to continue. I am willing to help carry it.

That means a lot to me.

It says: I trust that this work has value, and I trust you to keep tending it.

To hold a subscription is also to hold me to my own commitment: to keep sharing, keep listening, keep learning in public, and keep making the work useful. You are helping keep a promise alive, and gently holding me accountable to it.

That trust matters because much of what I make is shared openly. Books, software, games, field notes, protocols, papers, tools, experiments, mistakes, revisions, metaphors that got slightly out of hand, and the occasional sentence that should probably have been a diagram. I share as much as I can open-source because I believe knowledge wants to circulate. I believe communities need tools they can inspect, adapt, translate, fork, repair, and make their own.

But open does not mean weightless.

Open work still needs food, rent, servers, time, legal care, community visits, translation, listening, software maintenance, writing, debugging, and the strange courage required to publish unfinished thoughts in public while hoping the internet does not immediately turn into a swarm of hungry goats.

To make work open is to trust.

Out of the thousands of people who subscribe, read the books, play the games, and use the materials, only a handful become paid subscribers (roughly 0.5%). That is okay. Truly. I want the work to stay open enough that people can use it even when money is scarce. Comments, field stories, translations, testing, careful disagreement, and quiet practice also feed the work. And, because paid subscriptions are few, each one carries a lot. They help keep the door open for many others.

It is to trust that someone, somewhere, who has benefited from the work, or who sees how others might benefit from it, will notice: this needs support. It is to trust that generosity can become reciprocal without becoming coercive. It is to trust that the basket can go out full and, in some living way, come back full too.

So to everyone who already subscribes here: Thank you!

When you subscribe, comment, restack, send a personal message, challenge an idea with care, test a tool, share a story from your community, or tell me exactly where this work touched your life, I feel nourished, steadied, and often surprised into joy. My needs for reciprocity, shared meaning, courage, companionship, and practical support are met. I remember that this is not just me writing into the glowing cave of the internet. There is a community of practice here.

One subscription recently touched my heart in that way.

It was the feeling of being met. Someone had received the work, connected it to their own life, and sent back a signal of care. The subscription felt like a small voucher of trust. It said: keep going. Not cuz’ the work is perfect…. Not because every sentence is finished….. But because something living is moving here, and it deserves tending.

That is what I want more of!

Not subscribers as consumers. Not fans. Not followers in some shallow sense. A community of practice. People who read, try, question, adapt, repair, laugh, disagree honestly, and tell stories of what happens when these ideas touch soil, kitchens, code, classrooms, forests, savings groups, families, villages, and hearts.

I especially love comments and personal messages that are specific. Tell me what sentence stayed with you. Tell me which tool you tried. Tell me where the work helped, where it confused you, where it failed, where it opened a conversation, where it gave language to something your community already knew. That kind of message is not “feedback” …. in some thin sense. It is the relational memory that helps the work know itself.

And yes, please subscribe if you can!

If you have the means, a paid subscription is one way to help this open work keep breathing. It supports the writing, the research, the software, the games, the field practice, and the many small invisible tasks that hold the visible work together.

My prayer is that one day we can all subscribe to each other more beautifully.

Not only through platforms. Not only one writer and many readers. I imagine a future where subscriptions become commitments that communities can pool, route, and redeem (where promises of support can move through communities and meet real needs). A future where we can support the people whose work supports life, and where that support can circulate rather than pile up. A future where artists, farmers, coders, caregivers, teachers, healers, stewards, and communities can say clearly:

…. here is what I am offering, here is what I need, here is what I can promise, here is what we can hold together.

Until then, this little Substack subscription is already a beginning.

A small promise. A small basket.

A small flash of mutual recognition.

When I see your names, comments, messages, and subscriptions arrive, the basket comes back full.

P.S. Please also consider subscribing to these other perspectives on our shared work:

and

I love Braiding Sweetgrass. I loved rereading The Serviceberry. Bud Finds Her Gift has become a favorite in our home. Kimmerer has given many of us language for something we badly need: gratitude, reciprocity, and attention to a living world.

And still, the word gift has always bothered me.

When I hear “gift,” some part of me still sees a wrapped package under a tree. Santa has come. There is no invoice. There is no repayment schedule. There is no small print saying, “By opening this Lego set, you agree to weed the neighbor’s maize field in March.” Maybe there is a vague moral economy around being good and staying off the naughty list, but the gift itself feels free.

So when people say gift economy, part of me hears an economy of “free” things. I do not think free gifts are bad. I love free gifts. I am available for free gifts. My problem is that a free gift and a reciprocal gift are not the same creature, and English keeps putting them in the same basket.

That is not what I think Kimmerer means. It is also not what Marcel Mauss and many anthropologists were pointing toward when they wrote about gift economies. In those traditions, a gift is not just something dropped into your lap by a cheerful man with reindeer. A gift can carry obligation. It can carry memory. It can ask for reciprocity. It can pull a person into relationship. The gift is not “free stuff.” It is an opening in a relationship.

I’ve been wanting a better map around this word ‘gift’.

Let me start with this idea of a free gift … a donation with no expectation. A free gift and a spot cash (transactional) payment can be very different emotionally, but they can do the same thing structurally: they don’t, in themselves, continue a relationship.

If I give you a gift with no expectation of return, nothing remains owed. If I pay cash and you hand me tomatoes, nothing remains owed. If we barter eggs for bananas and both of us walk away satisfied, nothing remains owed. One may feel kind. One may feel commercial. One may involve a chicken. But in each case the exchange can settle right there.

That was uncomfortable for me because I have spent years trying to move away from transactional economies. I started with community currencies because I thought people mostly needed a better medium of exchange. If money was scarce, maybe a local token would help. If trade was stuck, maybe we needed something faster, cheaper, and more local.

But a medium of exchange is not the same as trust.

A token can help people trade and still leave them strangers. A payment can clear and leave nothing behind. A barter can be friendly and still be finished. I was not really looking for a better way to settle transactions. I was looking for a better way for exchange to leave relationship behind.

This is the diagram that helped me. The vertical axis asks where trust is held: in relationship, memory, kinship, and witness, or in systems like money, law, receipts, and immediate delivery. The horizontal axis asks what remains afterward: does the relationship settle, or does it continue?

N.B. Commitment pooling was inspired by the reciprocal commons quadrant. But it is a protocol, not a virtue. Depending on how it is implemented, it can land in any quadrant.

The point of the diagram is simple. A free gift, a one-off barter, and a spot cash payment can all settle the relationship. Nothing remains owed. They may be kind, fair, useful, or even beautiful, but by themselves they do not require another round. They do not make anyone show up again. The reciprocal gifting I am trying to understand does something else. It keeps the relationship open.

In the Mweria traditions I have learned from in Kenya, people gather to help a family farm, harvest, build, repair, or care for something too large to do alone. The family that receives help is then expected to help others in turn. If someone fails to reciprocate, the community may wait, clarify rules, ask for amends, or eventually stop showing up for that household. The system can include patience, forgiveness, exclusion, and return. It is not vague niceness. It is a protocol of reciprocity.

This is where I find myself leaning toward Elinor Ostrom as much as toward the poetry of gift. I need gratitude, but I also need the boring things that keep gratitude from getting eaten alive: boundaries, memory, monitoring, repair, and consequences.

That matters to me because “gift economy” can become mushy very quickly. It can make ancestral and living mutual aid systems sound like everyone wandered around being generous all day, sharing harvests and wisdom, while no one ever noticed that one uncle kept arriving only when food was ready.

Real reciprocal systems notice. They remember. They have rules, even when those rules are held in stories, reputation, elders, songs, shame, laughter, and the very practical question of who actually showed up.

Mweria is not the only Kenyan form that helps me see this. Among Luo communities, related rotating labor traditions are known as Nyoluoro. The names differ, but the pattern I am trying to notice is similar: receiving help places a person back into a remembered cycle of help.

recently gave me another word that helped. As she explained it to me, in Kikuyu a gift is kiheo. A kiheo is traditionally the food, grain, cloth, or other thing you bring in a basket, a kiondo, when visiting someone’s home. But when you leave, the host fills the kiondo with another kiheo. The basket does not go home empty. I am not offering this as a dictionary entry. I am sharing it as a teaching I received.

I love this because it refuses to separate gift from reciprocity. The kiondo is not a delivery box. It is a relationship with handles.

That is very different from the “free gift” I inherited from Christmas culture (also rampant in humanitarian donor culture). In that version, the gift is ‘clean’ because no return is expected. In the kiheo version, the gift is alive because return is already part of its form. The gift does not end the relationship. It renews it.

This also changes how I hear Kimmerer. When she says gift, I sometimes hear Santa. But I think she is often closer to kiheo. She is not talking about free stuff. She is talking about a living metabolism: berries, soil, sunlight, gratitude, restraint, return.

That helps me hear her gifts from nature more carefully too. A berry is not a wrapped package. It is sweetness inside a cycle of seed, eater, soil, restraint, and return. Sunlight is different. I cannot repay the Sun directly, and I am not going to Venmo the nearest star. But I can care for what sunlight becomes here: soil, food, forests, children, and futures.

I still think the word gift needs help (especially in the culture I grew up in). I need to ask: what kind of gift? A free gift? A gratitude gift? A reciprocal gift? A commons gift? A gift that ends with thank you, or a gift that begins a cycle?

That distinction matters for the economies I want to be part of and help grow. I am less interested now in exchange systems that simply clear faster. I am more interested in systems that remember well. I want economies where people can receive without shame, give without being drained, and return without needing the original giver to become their creditor forever.

Rotating Labor traditions like Mweria in Kenya and Latsab in Bhutan teach me that the return does not always go back to the person who gave first. Sometimes I receive from the circle, and later I give to someone else in the circle. The relationship is not bilateral (one on one) debt. It is shared metabolism.

So my question is no longer only, “What is a gift economy?”

My question is simpler now:

When does the basket come back full?

What happens when a cell has something to give, something it needs, and only a few neighbors it can trust?

That is the little world inside Cellular, a new open-source puzzle and arcade game from Grassroots Economics.

• I made a short walkthrough video here: Watch the video on YouTube

• You can also play the game here: Play Cellular

• And the code is open source: grassrootseconomics/cellular

Cellular is a game about arranging cells into living circuits of resource flow. Each cell produces one resource and needs others. Your job is to place cells near neighbors that can help them. When the arrangement works, resources begin to move, needs are met, cells glow, and the circuit comes alive.

When the arrangement is brittle, some cells starve (glowing red needs), pressure builds, and the network fails to sustain itself.

At the surface, this is a puzzle game.

Underneath, it is also a tiny playable model of economic coordination.

Each cell is like a bounded pool. It has something it can offer, things it needs, and limits on what it can hold. The challenge is not simply to maximize movement. The challenge is to create trustworthy circulation: (settlement velocity) flows that actually meet needs, keep pressure from building up, and allow a wider network to stay alive.

From Social Soil to Cellular

Our previous game, Social Soil, explored community exchange through a garden. Players plant crops, grow fungal networks, harvest food, and see how living systems depend on connection. It is a warm, narrative, ecological game about food, fungi, and community resilience.

Cellular takes a related idea and exposes fundamentals.

• In Social Soil, the metaphor is a garden.

• In Cellular, the metaphor is a circuit.

• In Social Soil, players see how plants, fungi, nutrients, food, and village members form a living web.

• In Cellular, players see the bare mechanics of mutual need: each cell has offers, needs, limits, and neighbors.

Both games ask a similar question:

How do living systems stay healthy through exchange?

But they answer through different forms of play. Social Soil teaches through an ecosystem story. Cellular teaches through a stripped-down coordination puzzle. It removes most of the narrative and asks players to directly feel the structure of flow.

Games as Economic Thinking

Games are useful for economic thinking all of our work at Grassroots Economics is transmitted and iterated on through games.

C. Thi Nguyen, in Games: Agency as Art, argues that games are an art form where the medium is agency. A game lets us temporarily take on goals, constraints, and ways of acting that are different from ordinary life. We do not only look at a system. We inhabit it. We feel what it is like to pursue a goal under constraints.

Cellular uses that form directly.

Instead of explaining flow, scarcity, mutual dependence, and repair only through diagrams or equations, it lets you feel them.

You move a cell. A need is met. A circuit glows. Another part of the network starves.

You try again.

The system teaches through agency.

The hope is not just that players chase a score, but that they start noticing what kind of system the score is teaching them to build.

Commitment Pooling in Play

From a commitment pooling perspective, Cellular is a toy model of some very serious questions. A commitment pool asks four simple things:

What can enter? How is it valued? How much can safely move? How does exchange settle?

In Cellular, those questions become playful:

What does each cell offer? What does each cell need? What limits should each cell have? When does circulation become healthy rather than extractive?

How do we repair a network when one part is strained? What does it mean for commitments to become mutually fulfilling?

The game is a playable coordination model. It gives us a way to experiment with flow, limits, routing, fulfillment, and failure in a simple, visible system.

Puzzle mode gives handcrafted levels where the challenge is to discover a stable circuit. Arcade mode is more open-ended: place cells, build living groups, and see how long you can sustain healthy flow. Adaptive “myco” cells change based on their neighbors, making the network more flexible, surprising, and sometimes easier to repair.

Please Play, Break, and Improve It

This is still an early experiment, and that is part of the point.

I would love for people to play it, test it, break it, and suggest improvements.

Try the game: https://cell.grassecon.org/

Watch the walkthrough:

Explore or contribute to the code:

grassrootseconomics/cellular

And please also check out our other Grassroots Economics games:

https://grassrootseconomics.org/games/

Cellular is a small game, but I hope it opens a larger question:

What kinds of economic systems do we learn to build when we can play with flow, mutual need, limits, and repair directly?

There comes a time when I have to choose who gets the fish. Or who gets the medicine. Or who gets the last seat in the truck. Or who gets funding. Or who gets the next hour of my attention?

Or …. who gets taught how to fish ….. which is a much longer and slipperier fish than a fish!

The fish themselves are simple enough. They have scales. They have eyes. They are sitting in a basket looking more spiritually advanced than I am.

The trouble in my mind and heart arises when there are two fish left and five people want them.

That trouble grows whiskers when fifty people say: “I do not only want a fish. I want to learn how to fish!” And I, holding my little basket of time, realize that teaching someone to fish also takes some …. gosh-darn ….. fish!

Not the swimming kind. The attention kind. The patient kind…. (very patient)

The kind that listens without contempt when the knot is wrong for the seventh time. The kind that watches someone cast badly into a tree and does not turn them into a joke. “That was our last hook …… Oh shhhhhiiiiitttt……” .. etc.

The kind that knows the lake, the weather, the boat, the hook, the story of the place, and the trembling pride of the beginner. The kind that remember … “oh, right … I’ve been there before….”

“Give a person a fish, and perhaps they eat today. Teach a person to fish, and perhaps they eat tomorrow….”

The old proverb has become less fun for me. Darn ….

But teaching fifty people to fish requires time, nets, mistakes, safe water, someone to watch the children, someone to maintain the boat, someone to repair the hooks, and someone to decide who learns first without accidentally recreating the exact unfairness of scarcity I want to escape.

Let me take a moment for the wise fishing teacher who sits in abundance and dreams of teaching the whole world! Who ….. even after training trainers of trainers, training ten more to train ten more, in exponential catalytic orgasmic glory …. SOMEHOW forgot to protect the breeding grounds of the fish!! ….. oh with best intentions … and now there are no more fish.

Ohhh ….. there is a lot there in teaching how to fish. …..

I am not sure I know how to do that.

Right this moment I am remembering that hunger is not an abstraction…..
oh …. “Hunger is the worst illness.” and how can we forget it?

“Scarcity captures the mind.”

I think this is where the game begin.

Starting with the bad crappy little games

//Game 1.//

The first tempting game is auction.

Two fish. Five people. Highest price wins.

This has the charming brutality of a very sharp knife. It slices it dices! … It is quick. It is clear. It is easy to defend if one has already decided that price is the proper language of hunger and care. (…have we?)

But come on … it flattens the whole world. The child’s hunger becomes a bid. The elder’s slowness becomes weak demand. The caregiver’s burden becomes insufficient liquidity.

The person who helped everyone yesterday but has no cash today becomes, in the ledger’s tiny glass eye, simply …. unable to pay.

(“come back when your hunger has become purchasing power.” … the auctioneer might feel justified to say …. in such a bad little game world.)

So yes in that world … the fish go to the highest purchasing power, and then someone may announce that the market has spoken, as though the market were a wise grandmother rather than a rule we chose.

//Game 2.//

The second tempting game is first come, first served.

This one wears a cleaner shirt. Very clear white-collar.

It says: no favoritism, no arguing, no complicated judgment. The first two people in line get the fish.

But first come, first served has its own hidden gods: speed, proximity, free time, transport, inside information, and the ability to wait without being needed somewhere else. (the clean shirt has some very smelly armpits)

Spending a day in my shoes and you will know people show up late …. ! Karibu.

A mother nursing a baby arrives late. An elder arrives late. A worker arrives late. Someone ashamed to push forward arrives late. Someone who is washing their hair …..eh-hem... arrives late.

And the rule says: so bad so sad …. but fair.

I am beginning to distrust rules that sound fair before they have looked at the people standing in front of them.

….. first-mover advantage is a real structural effect!

also … “There is no fire like greed!”

The fish are teaching me about attention

At some point I notice the fish have become my inbox.

Two fish.

Five to Fifty requests each day.

Some are beautiful requests. Some are confusing. Some are urgent. Some are disguised as urgent because the sender has also been captured by someone else’s urgency machine.

A funder asks for a report. A neighbor asks for help. A child asks me to look. A friend asks for care.

oh … A student asks to learn! A protocol needs documentation. A game needs testing. A community needs follow-up.

My body asks to sleep, which I often treat as an unreasonable stakeholder…..

If I auction my attention, it goes to whoever pays. (Crap, if this is all I can do...)

If I use first come, first served, it goes to whoever entered the inbox first. (Sorry for the late reply!)

//Game 3 and onward.//

If I use loudest voice wins, it goes to the most dramatic notification. (You know who you are!)

If I use guilt, it goes to whoever can make me feel most responsible for their suffering. (ooof)

If I use excitement, it goes to the shiny thing, which often arrives wearing a little hat and carrying a drum. (Ohhhhhhhhhh shinny!)

I have NOT solved it folks. (is it solvable really?)
I am frequently outwitted by the drum. (while I do my best to dance.)

I think attention is not just a private resource. It is a commons inside the body (and between many bodies). When I spend it badly, others feel the consequences. When I hoard it, things wither. When I scatter it, nothing is watered long enough.

“Heedfulness is the path to the Nirvana,” says one old translation. I receive that, today, mostly as a gentle embarrassment while remembering that … “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

(a full mind is not mindful)

so .. teaching someone to fish is not a magic escape hatch

I was taught …. “The gift of Dharma surpasses all gifts.” and that “what a learner can do with help today, they may do independently tomorrow. “

Oh … I used to love the teaching-to-fish proverb so much more than I do now…. (I am nostalgic of my righteous bliss)

Well … I still love it a little. It has a good vibe anyway. But I trust it less when it is used to avoid feeding someone today. Teaching (and delegation in general) takes time. Teaching takes attention.

This is where “teaching to fish” starts landing in a pool of commitments. I begin to relax where I can see the commitments, limits, roles, capacities, time windows, evidence of learning, and repair when someone is left out.

I keep coming back to these other games: pools …. stewarded agreement surfaces.

Fifty students and one small boat

Now I imagine the scene more clearly. I am at the lake in the morning and there is a beautiful sunrise. I can see and hear sparrows in murmuration hunting for insects on the surface of the water.

I expected five … yet there are fifty people who want to learn.…. and there is one small boat.

The boat looks at me with the exhausted expression of a nonprofit operations manager.

I could take the richest first.

ohh…. Bad game Will!

I could take the loudest first.

Lame …..

I could take whoever signed up first.

Maybe useful, but very suspicious.

I could take the people I like most.

Very human. I know them right? Dangerous.

I could take the people who already know enough that teaching them will be easy, and then claim success.

This is a very common trick in education and development. Choose the almost-ready, teach them a little, celebrate impact, and quietly avoid those who needed the most careful attention.

I have tricked myself into version of this too many times without noticing. … Now noticing …. oush…..

Ode to the allocation mechanism!

So then … I try to imagine a gentler allocation.

Maybe the first boat holds: … lets count. . . .

one person with urgent household need, one person likely to teach others, one quiet person who has been excluded, one person who maintains the nets, one young person who will bring joy to the whole thing, and one elder on shore who refuses to get in the boat but knows when the weather is lying.

Is that enough .. is it an ecosystem of glorious diversity now…. !?

And has the the teacher become - no longer the heroic fisherman … but a steward of healthy conditions?

This feels closer to the games I want to play. …. yet …. it’s not about allocation is it?

…. it is being connected to a pathway that can move the right resource to the right place at the right time. (Breathing)

Oh …. “May all beings be at ease.” ….. learning in communities of practice is not just allocation … or information transfer; it is “a process of social participation.” (Breathing some more….. whoosh)

The terrible comedy of scoring needs

It is so tempting to make hard, very intelligent scores.

1. Urgent hunger: +10.

2. Has children: +6.

3. Can teach others: +4.

4. Recently received fish: -3.

5. Has beans at home: -2.

6. Made me feel guilty: suspicious variable, currently unmodeled.

WOW! You got a score of 15!!!!
Look at my scoring method!

I feel clever! … .Lets add 1 Million more parameters! yaaaa!!! High-five you did it!

….. and slightly haunted.

The score can help me notice what I might forget. That is good.
…. But the score can also become a tiny bureaucrat with wet shoes. It may start ranking people faster than I can love them. It may reward visible suffering.

It may miss dignity. It may punish the person who has learned not to ask.

It may turn need into theater. (ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh that does happen )

It may turn teaching into stale meaningless certification.
It may turn community into queue management.

Did you hear that? (Oh that’s Nguyen tapping on my window)

A score begins as a tool. Then it becomes a target. Then it becomes a way of being.

Nguyen’s “value capture” names the danger of simplified versions of values coming to dominate practical reasoning.

I do not want to abandon scores. I am building scores all the time. Vouchers, receipts, value indexes, limits, fulfillment rates, trust signals, game points. I am not outside the scoring world, standing in robes on a hill. (well I do often wear robes on hills… yet scoring is still happening….)

… but generally … I am in the mud with a spreadsheet …. composting my own manure (for real folks, try it…).

So not to do away with scoring…. A smaller and harder hope is that the score stays humble …. here is one lantern, not the sun? And here clearly is my own finger pointing at the sun or moon…..

score check: Can it support discernment without replacing it? Can it help me explain my decision without pretending I have seen the whole?

Nguyen’s work warns that simplified values can come to dominate practical reasoning. ….this warns me against accepting something merely by tradition, inference, or authority; it asks me to examine what leads to welfare and happiness.

The fish seller is not a prop!

Just a moment here …. There is another person I keep almost always forgetting.

The seller. Who is sometimes me and sometimes not me.
Either way, but especially when it is not me …. forgetting them is embarrassing because they are literally holding the basket of fish.

If it is decided the fish should go to the hungriest people, but the seller is not settled, I have not solved the problem. I have moved the problem into her body, my body, someone’s body.

Perhaps she needs school fees. Perhaps she needs fuel. Perhaps she must repay someone for the boat. Perhaps she has her own hungry children.

Perhaps she is generous and tired of everyone turning her generosity into (#$*&$#@) policy!!!!!

A community can become very noble with someone else’s fish!

(Geeeez folks …. I am looking at you all right now! Ha!

… oh and …. I must include myself in that warning …. darn...)

So let’s separates two things that markets often collapse into one: Where should the fish go? And How should the fisher be honored?

Cash markets often answer both at once: whoever pays gets the fish, and the seller is settled. (Clap …. done with Game 1.). That is sometimes useful. But under real need, it can be horribly cruel and short sighted. (right?!)

/~/
My neighbors lets me imagine something else.

Today … the fish may go to the household with urgent need.

The seller may receive settlement through vouchers, pooled credit, future labor, a community kitchen, a food fund, or another accepted commitment.

This is not a fantasy of free fish. It is a core part of my search for better routing.

A Cosmo-Local credit framing says the shared goal is to increase settlement of real-world commitments while preserving care, fairness, and resilience across distance and time.

The seller’s settlement is part of care. The hungry person’s nourishment is part of fairness. The system’s ability to do this again tomorrow is part of resilience.

Generosity as I understand it is not only about giving things away; it is a training of relationship. How can I be “a person responsive to requests… who delights in giving alms.”?

Ostrom’s commons work is often read as a warning against one-size-fits-all rules; commons research notes that design principles are associated with

….. long-term survival of resource systems.

Not props….

Fish in Cellular networks

Now I bring the fish into a video game, because apparently I cannot leave fish alone today. (….EPA and DHA omega-3 fatty acids)

Imagine a little cellular puzzle world.

One cell has two fish units. Five neighboring cells request fish.

One cell is starving. One cell can feed three dependent cells. One cell has another food route.

One cell has received fish recently. One cell is hoarding fish behind a cheerful smile.

The simple arcade version says: move fish fast, get points.

The game I want says: move fish wisely, and then doubt yourself a little.

The player sees why the fish moved.

Fish went to Cell A because its need was urgent and it had no substitute.

Fish went to Cell C because it could nourish others.

Cell B moves higher in tomorrow’s queue.

Cell D already had fish or beans.

Cell E was hoarding and now needs repair, not reward.

But then the game does something important.

It shows the seller-cell. The seller-cell is now strained.

The player says: ohhhhhh.

The game says nothing … very smug.

The player must now route settlement back to the seller-cell (or the fish breeding grounds) before the whole circuit becomes brittle.

That is the little flash of learning I want. Not “I solved scarcity.”

More like: “I made one careful choice, and now I see the next.”

This is why I like games. They let me practice being wrong at small scale.

I have heard the Buddhist concept of dependent origination is often summarized as, “When this exists, that comes to be.” … commitment-pool routing similarly treats settlement as guarded movement (that comes to be) through curation, valuation, limits, and exchange, not just transfer.

When I do not know

Here is the part I do not know how to avoid. Seems un-avoid-able ….

At some point, the fish spoil. At some point, the lesson must start.

At some point, attention must land somewhere. (Here you are right now choosing to read this.) Humility does not remove the choosing.

If I say, (or tantrum) “I do not know enough to decide!!!!!” that may be honest. … but crap …. It may also be abandonment wearing a thoughtful scarf ….…

If I wait for perfect information, the fish rot, the boat leaves, the child goes hungry, the student loses courage, the seller walks home, and my inbox becomes compost of a less useful kind.

So I choose. Each moment ... (Oh in each breath - the prayer of patient abundance and sage advice from close friends).

I hope to choose slowly enough to see something. I hope to choose clearly enough that others can question me. I hope to leave a trace of why I chose. I hope to notice who was harmed. I hope to repair. I hope not to confuse my little rules with wisdom. I hope the people around me help me see what I missed! (Hey folks. I need you… so much!)

And I hope, when there are fifty people wanting to learn to fish, I find delight and joy and I remember to help form a practice: learners helping learners, elders watching weather, fishers being settled, children being fed, mistakes being forgiven, and the lake not being emptied by our enthusiasm. Help me get a fire going on the shore of the lake to cook the fish so that we can together, sing and dance!

Sometimes that feels like a lot to ask from the two fish in my basket.

But fish have always been suspiciously good teachers.

…. yes, let’s test what leads to welfare and happiness…. knowing that decision-makers in bounded rationality can’t optimize from total knowledge; they act under limits of information, attention, and time.

My current practice

I do not have a final rule. I have a basket with two fish and I have some questions.

Who is hungry now? Who has no substitute? Who can help others eat? Who brought the fish? Who has been waiting? Who is invisible to this rule? Who is learning? Who could teach soon? Who needs attention today so they are not lost tomorrow?

What can be pooled? What can be cooked into soup? What can be delayed without harm? What must not be delayed? What did I miss?

…no commandments or maxim today please!

…. more like small stones in my pocket or prayer beads on my wrist.
I touch them when the day becomes too loud and I repeat a simple mantra … “Om Tare Tuttare Ture Soha.” and breath.

Two fish. Five people. Fifty students. One lake. One tired teacher.

One seller with her own life. One community trying to see itself without flattening itself into price, speed, noise, or a clever score.

I-do-not-know the whole picture – I’m in the picture darn it!

Still, the two fish are here in this moment.

“Notice when your attention feels scarce Will!”

Still, someone is hungry. Still, someone wants to learn. I can hear my stomach now as I type … I have not eaten in some time…. So I listen as best I can.

/// another game.

I am holding two fish, fifty requests, one tired nervous system, and several incomplete theories.

And still, I am holding blessings.

The blessing of seeing choices in front of me.

The blessing of not choosing alone.

So I listen, choose, leave room for correction, and try again tomorrow.

And tomorrow…. when the storm has passed and the lake is kind , maybe we learn how to become the kind of people who can decide together

… what fish are for.

The global economy is not a game …. in the sense that I understand C. Thi Nguyen to be writing about games. It is not voluntary for most people. We do not all knowingly step into it, hold its goals lightly, play for a time, and then leave with our lives intact. People are born into currencies, debts, property systems, labor markets, school rankings, borders, credit scores, and platform metrics. For many people, the stakes are food, shelter, land, medicine, education, dignity, and safety. Calling that whole arrangement a game can hide coercion.

The economic world is full of scoring systems. Some function like games. Some are imposed institutions. Some are playful and chosen. Some are extractive and hard to exit. The task is not to pretend that all economy is play. The task is to ask where we can create bounded, visible, more voluntary spaces where communities can practice different ways of valuing, exchanging, limiting, repairing, and settling.

That is where I locate a particular game’s foundational mechanism.

A commitment pool can be such. A local economy can hold such games. A mutual aid circle, a basket, a savings group, a rotating labor practice, a watershed restoration group, or a village exchange network can become a local rule-world with its own accepted commitments, scores, limits, repair paths, and forms of stewardship. These local games can overlap and route into one another. They can aggregate into a wider economy without becoming one single global scoreboard.

In that, I’m feeling closer to Nguyen.

Instead of reading this essay - go read Nyugen’s books or listen to him talk.

Humans On The Loop

Games & Metrics: Agency as Art & Artifice with C. Thi Nguyen

✨ Become a founding member to access my online courses, including Jurassic Worlding and How To Live In The Future…

Listen now

21 days ago · 11 likes · Michael Garfield

Consider the rest my gratitude and notes.

With gratitude to Nguyen

I have been sitting with C. Thi Nguyen’s work on games, agency, metrics, and value, and I feel grateful. In his writing and talks, I hear a rare combination of clarity, humility, humor, and care.

Nguyen’s Games: Agency as Art argues, as I understand it, that games are not merely entertainment. They are a distinctive art form because they work in the medium of agency. A game gives us temporary goals, constraints, abilities, and ways of acting. It lets us inhabit a form of agency for a while.

His newer book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game, has helped me ask: what happens when scores leave the playful spaces where we can enter and exit, and begin to organize school, work, social media, finance, science, philanthropy, politics, and our sense of self?

…. In economics …. scoring can quickly become deadly. This essay is an appreciative reading from where I stand today, in Kenya, after many years of learning from communities, elders, farmers, coders, economists, organizers, failures, and my own mistakes.

I may be wrong in some of the connections I make. I expect to revise this thinking. But I feel that Nguyen’s work opens a doorway that matters deeply for community economics.

So … I am reading Nguyen as an invitation to design better scores

One thing I do not hear in Nguyen is a simple command to abolish scores.

Scores can help. A score in a game can focus attention, create tension, make feedback visible, and allow players to coordinate around a shared temporary goal. A value index inside a commitment pool can help people exchange unlike commitments. A receipt can help a community remember what moved. A limit can help prevent panic or extraction. A public measure can reveal a pattern that private judgment missed.

But a score can also recruit us.

A student begins by wanting to learn, then starts optimizing for grades. A writer begins by wanting to tell the truth, then starts optimizing for clicks. A nonprofit begins by wanting to serve communities, then starts optimizing for funder indicators. A university begins by wanting to educate, then starts optimizing for rankings. A protocol begins by wanting to support real settlement, then starts optimizing for volume.

The score begins as a tool. Then it becomes a target. Then it becomes a value. Then it becomes a way of being.

Nguyen calls one version of this value capture. Rich, subtle, developing values enter an environment that offers simplified versions of those values, often quantified. Over time, those simplified versions can dominate practical reasoning.

That phrase, value capture, hits me hard because I am so often trying to make value visible. Helping communities represent commitments, create vouchers, publish rules, set limits, track fulfillment, and coordinate exchange. In other words, I’m continuously making many kinds of scores.

So I am reading Nguyen as asking us to develop scores in a particular way. This may be my reading more than his. But for our work, the lesson feels clear: a score should be chosen where possible, visible, humble, limited, revisable, plural, and answerable to the living value it is trying to serve.

A score should train attention without capturing the soul.

That is easy to say and hard to build.

Mechanical values and replaceable people

One of Nguyen’s distinctions that I find especially useful is between fuzzy human values and mechanical values.

Fuzzy values include care, wisdom, friendship, taste, community, trust, forgiveness, maturity, courage, stewardship, and good judgment. They require attention. They require experience. They often require being close enough to a situation to notice what a simple metric cannot.

Mechanical values are easier to compare and scale. A number of likes. A ranking. A score. A salary. A grade. A count. A price. A productivity target. These can be useful because they are public, repeatable, and easy to communicate. But they also ask us to sacrifice sensitivity in the name of fungibility.

A rigid certification or scoring system can turn people into fungible roles.

Borrower. Beneficiary. Defaulter. Worker. User. Farmer. Vendor. Liquidity provider. Risk class. Data point.

These labels may be useful for coordination, but they are never the person.

This matters in community economics. A living community knows things a credit bureau may not know. It knows who has shown up for years. It knows who is grieving. It knows who failed because of drought, who overpromised, who made amends, who cares for children, who feeds neighbors, who is trusted by elders, and who needs a repair path rather than a punishment.

That does not mean local judgment is automatically fair. Communities can exclude, shame, dominate, misremember, and reproduce harmful hierarchies. I do not want to romanticize the local. But neither do I want to pretend that distant mechanical scoring is neutral simply because it is numerical.

Both human judgment and mechanical scoring can fail.

The question is how to design systems where measurement supports discernment instead of replacing it.

Each pool as a local game

A commitment pool is one attempt to answer that question.

In plain language, a commitment pool is a stewarded space where people (or some form of agentic being) can place redeemable commitments and exchange them under published rules. A commitment might be maize, transport, repair work, care hours, education, food, storage, or another clearly defined future contribution. A voucher represents that commitment. A pool says which vouchers it accepts, how it values them, how much can move, what fees or conditions apply, and how exchange or redemption is recorded.

The four simple questions are:

• What can enter?

• How is it valued here?

• How much can safely move?

• How does exchange settle?

In our terminology, those are curation, valuation, limitation, and exchange.

I am seeing these pools more clearly ala Nyugen, as decentralized games of agency. They are not games because the stakes are trivial. They are games because they create bounded rule-worlds where participants can see the goals, constraints, roles, scores, risks, and repair paths. The pool’s score is not supposed to swallow life. It is supposed to support a particular kind of coordination.

A pool should not say: this is the value of your life.

It should say: in this pool, under these rules, this commitment is accepted for this kind of exchange, up to this limit, with these paths for fulfillment and repair.

A value index is not the value.

A voucher is not the person.

A receipt is not the relationship.

A pool is not the community.

These distinctions are not philosophical decoration. They are safety requirements.

A voucher should make clear who is promising what, where it can be redeemed, when fulfillment is expected, what proof is needed, and what happens if fulfillment fails. It should not pretend to be a bank deposit unless it truly is one under the relevant law. It should not promise certainty where there is risk. It should not hide the steward. It should not hide the limits.

If a pool is honest, it makes the game visible. It shows the rules. It shows the boundaries. It lets people ask whether the rules are serving the community, or whether the community is slowly being trained to serve the rules.

That is the Nguyen question inside commitment pooling.

Not one global game, but an ecology of games

…. I do not want to describe the whole global economy as one game, because too much of it is not voluntary and too much of it is enforced through scarcity, debt, law, violence, habit, enclosure, and platform dependence. A person cannot simply stop needing food, school fees, rent, medical care, or land access.

But I do think we can build smaller game-like spaces that are more voluntary, more inspectable, and more accountable. A local pool can have its own rules. A village basket can have its own rules. A savings group can have its own rules. A restoration group can have its own rules. A cooperative can have its own rules.

The global economy I want is not one giant game with one scoreboard.

It is an ecology of local games that can speak to each other.

In commitment-pooling terms, pools can route across other pools when they share accepted commitments or settlement paths. A pool in one place does not need to value a voucher exactly as another pool does. That difference is not a bug. It may be a form of sovereignty. Each pool can express local care, local risk, local capacity, local inventory, local memory, and local boundaries.

When these pools connect well, they do not erase the local game. They let local games compose.

That is the cosmo-local pattern I am trying to understand: shared standards and tools where they help, local issuance and accountability where life is actually lived.

I do not know how to do this perfectly. But I trust it more than a single central scoreboard.

Social Soil and economic imagination

This is also why I make games.

Social Soil starts with soil. Plants need nutrients. Fungi connect plants. Some living beings have excess while others lack something necessary. A child can see that survival is not only about owning a resource. It is about being connected to a pathway that can move the right resource to the right place at the right time.

Then the same pattern appears in a village. Farmers, cooks, vendors, villagers, baskets, banks, food, services, and money begin to move. A bank can help bridge money into local exchange. A basket can hold and route local resources. The player begins to feel the difference between an economy centered only on bank balances and an economy that also sees needs, capacities, routes, promises, limits, and repair.

Again, with care … a game is not proof. A game is not a community. A game is not soil. A game is a learning environment. It lets us try on agency and inspect rules before those rules become infrastructure.

That is valuable precisely because it is limited.

When children or adults play, they can ask questions that are harder to ask inside a real crisis. What happens when money is scarce but food, labor, and skill exist? What happens when a route is blocked? What happens when one actor takes too much? What happens when a promise is not fulfilled? What happens when the score tells only part of the truth?

These are game questions. ….. They are also economic questions.

And this is where Nguyen helps me again. The score in Social Soil is useful only if it teaches attention.

Can you reach a score of 5 Million points!? …. is not the point…..

If the score becomes the point, I have simply rebuilt the trap in miniature.

So I want people to play seriously, but also to watch what the score does to them. A high score can be fun. It can train skill. It can show that someone stayed with the system long enough to learn its patterns. But the deeper question is: what did the score help you notice, and what did it make you ignore?

Mweria, Dhome, and a hypothesis I hold lightly

Much of my work has been shaped by learning from Mijikenda practices on the coast of Kenya, including Mweria and Dhome. Spellings and meanings vary across people and places, and I want to be cautious.

As I understand it, Mweria involves the pooling and rotation of labor and resources. People help one another with farming, construction, care, community projects, and land stewardship. Dhome, sometimes named differently across related traditions, points toward gathering, deliberation, storytelling, dispute settlement, memory, planning, and stewardship.

I say ‘as I understand it’ deliberately. I am not an elder. I am not the owner of these traditions. I am a learner, and I know that any outsider or partial participant can misunderstand. I also know that traditions are not pure, fixed objects. They are living, contested, changing practices carried by people in particular places.

Still, I have learned / am still learning something important from them.

A community can have ways of scoring contribution without reducing contribution to money. It can remember who showed up. It can rotate responsibility. It can limit extraction. It can repair imbalance. It can distinguish inability from refusal. It can use story, gathering, and public memory as part of settlement.

This leads me to a hypothesis I hold lightly:
in some places, reciprocal settlement capacity may be latent rather than absent.

By that I mean that the ability to coordinate through mutual commitment may not have disappeared entirely, even where visible practices were weakened. It may remain partly alive in memory, ethics, women’s groups, savings groups, burial groups, family obligations, work parties, family care, ceremonies, and local expectations. But the conditions that made it economically sufficient may have been deeply damaged.

Land may have been taken or enclosed. Time may have been pulled away through wage labor and migration. Taxes, fees, rents, school costs, and legal systems may have required external money. Local repair authority may have been subordinated. Productive capacity may have been redirected toward distant markets.

Trust may have remained, but the field in which trust could settle obligations may have changed.

I do not know how far this hypothesis goes. I do not know where it is true, where it fails, or where it risks becoming romantic. I only know that it has changed the question for me.

Maybe the work is not to invent reciprocity.

Maybe the work is not to restore a museum version of the past.

Maybe the work is to help make living capacities viable again …. re-viabilization.

A seed bank, not a museum

The metaphor that helps me is a seed bank.

Some seeds remain viable. Some do not. Some need rain, shade, fungi, fire, rest, or protection. Some will not grow in the old form. Some should not be replanted in the old form because the old form carried harms we should not repeat. Some will hybridize with new conditions.

The same may be true of reciprocal economic practices.

Community vouchers, resource mapping, mutual redemption exercises, local pools, public receipts, and carefully governed digital tools do not create reciprocity from nothing. At their best, they create conditions where existing capacities can test whether they are still alive.

At their worst, they impose a new score on top of people who already carry too many.

.. hence humility is not optional. It is design discipline.

If a community does not control the rules, we may simply be building another game they must play for someone else’s benefit. If a pool cannot be exited, it can become enclosure. If a value index cannot be challenged, it can become domination. If a metric is needed to satisfy outsiders more than participants, it can become capture.

The score must stay answerable to life.

Delegation needs a community of practice

I am also being asked more and more to delegate.

Yes. I want that deeply. I need it. Not much can be held by one person, one organization, one app, one protocol, one brand, or one story. If this work is real, it has to become practice in many hands.

But I am learning that this work cannot really be delegated from the level of enthusiasm alone.

Enthusiasm matters. I am grateful for it. But enthusiasm without practice can accidentally create more abstraction, more branding, more promises, more meetings, and more scores detached from life.

What I think we need is a community of practice and especially play.

For me, that means first entering the practice: using the tools, reading the work, playing the games, tending something real, testing the ideas with neighbors, and noticing what actually changes.

A few simple entry points could be:

• Play Social Soil seriously and reach a score of 5 million. Then write what the score taught you, and what it failed to teach.

• Reduce your own dependency on money by 1 percent. Find one small need that can be met through repair, sharing, growing, trust, or reciprocal commitment rather than cash.

• Increase trust with one neighbor by 1 percent. Do one small reliable thing, keep one promise, listen more carefully, or repair one small break.

• Create one small reciprocal exchange that does not need cash. Keep it humble, real, and fulfilled.

• Read and respond to one chapter, one dataset, or one research note with care. Do not just agree. Notice what is unclear, what is wrong, what is missing, and what could be tested.

These numbers are intentionally small, except perhaps the Social Soil score! I do not want them to become another moral scoreboard. I want them to function like practice weights. They give the hand something to hold.

If someone plays Social Soil to 5 million but learns nothing about neighbors, soil, promises, or repair, then the score failed. If someone reduces cash dependency by 1 percent but becomes proud and judgmental, then the score failed. If someone increases trust by 1 percent and that trust becomes real, then a tiny score may have served life.

This is what I mean by practice first, then responsibility.

A person who has practiced can be trusted with a small pool. A person who has tended a real exchange can help steward a larger exchange. A person who has read carefully can review a protocol. A person who has repaired a failed promise can help design repair. A person who has listened to a community can help translate between tools and life.

Delegation, for me, should grow from demonstrated care, not just excitement.

Sarafu is evolving, but the practice is deeper than the brand

This also changes how I think about Sarafu.

Sarafu Network has been an important doorway into Community Asset Vouchers, local exchange, and commitment pooling. I am grateful for what it has taught us. I am also aware of its limitations, its history, and the ways it is still changing.

Sarafu Network itself is evolving into new app and protocol layers. Because of that, I am less interested in spreading Sarafu as a brand and more interested in people learning the deeper practice: how local commitments, trust, repair, and settlement capacity actually grow.

A brand can spread faster than practice.

A token can spread faster than trust.

An app can spread faster than stewardship.

That worries me.

So yes, I welcome healthy delegation. A lot. But I do not want people to simply promote Sarafu, or repeat commitment-pooling language, or build dashboards, or launch pools because the idea sounds exciting.

I want people to enter the practice.

Who is committing to what? Who can fulfill? Who is trusted, and why? Who is excluded, and why? What happens when someone fails? What is the repair path? What is the limit? What is the value index hiding? What is the voucher promising? What does the community actually need? What does the soil need? What changed after the exchange?

Those questions are the work.

The software is only useful if it helps with that.

What I hope our scores become

I am not against scores. I cannot be. A commitment pool needs scores. A router needs quotes. A steward needs limits. A participant needs receipts. A guarantor needs proof. A community needs memory. Without some legibility, promises cannot travel far beyond intimate circles.

But I want better scores.

I want scores that are local enough to be accountable.

I want scores that are plural enough to admit that different pools may value the same commitment differently.

I want scores that are bounded by limits, reserves, and care for the commons.

I want scores that are explainable in ordinary language.

I want scores that preserve room for repair when promises fail.

I want scores that allow exit when governance is captured.

I want scores that remain open to correction by elders, youth, caregivers, workers, farmers, organizers, and the land itself.

Most of all, I want scores that help people fulfill real commitments.

Settlement is not a token moving.

Settlement is not a number increasing.

Settlement is not a dashboard improving.

Settlement is a promise moving toward fulfillment. Someone ate. A ride was given. A roof was repaired. A child was cared for. A field was prepared. A debt was honored. A dispute was repaired. A relationship became more trustworthy. A place became more able to sustain life.

If the score cannot point back to that, I do not trust it.

The games I am trying to stop playing

Nguyen asks how to stop playing somebody else’s game.

…. That is not abstract to me.

I have played the game of donor indicators. I have played the game of grant language. I have played the game of crypto excitement. I have played the game of proving impact through numbers that felt too thin. I have played the game of explaining community wealth in terms that external institutions could understand, even when those terms did not quite fit.

I am still playing some of these games. I do not get to declare myself free.

But I can try to notice them. I can try to make their scores smaller. I can try to return again and again to the people, places, promises, and soils that the scores are supposed to serve.

This is where Nguyen’s work is a gift.

He does not merely say that metrics are bad. He helps explain why scores can be liberating in games and oppressive in institutions. In a good game, we knowingly enter a temporary rule-world. In a bad institution, the rule-world enters us without consent and begins to tell us what we are.

Grassroots Economics, at its best, should help communities see the game, change the rules, and play otherwise.

The games I want to practice

I want to practice games where children learn resource flow before they learn scarcity.

I want to practice games where communities see their own capacities before they see only their cash deficits.

I want to practice games where commitments are accepted, valued, limited, exchanged, fulfilled, and repaired with care.

I want to practice games where technology is a shared memory tool, not a replacement for relationship.

I want to practice games where pools connect without becoming a monopoly.

I want to practice games where local sovereignty and shared standards can coexist.

I want to practice games where money is useful but not ultimate.

I want to practice games where delegation begins with small fulfilled responsibilities.

I want to practice games where the score serves the soil, the village, the promise.
I want to practice games where the score serves life.

A final thank you

So, thank you, C. Thi Nguyen.

Thank you for helping me see that games are not just diversions, but designed agencies.

Thank you for helping me name the danger that scores can capture value rather than serve it.

Thank you for helping me see that the answer is not scorelessness, but responsibility for the scores we create, enter, inherit, resist, and teach.

Thank you for reminding me that play can be a way to recover freedom, not escape responsibility.

And thank you for making me more cautious and humble about my own work.

At Grassroots Economics, we are building games, vouchers, ledgers, value indexes, pools, routing tools, and public receipts. We are building scores. That means we must keep asking whether our scores are serving life or capturing it.

I do not know the final answer.

I hope we can keep asking together.

Further reading

• C. Thi Nguyen, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game (Penguin Random House, 2026)

• C. Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art (Oxford University Press, 2020)

• C. Thi Nguyen, Value Capture (PhilPapers preprint and publication record)

• Grassroots Economics documentation

• Social Soil: A Game for Growing Food, Sharing Resources, and Seeing Local Economies

• Social Soil source repository

Social Soil turns soil, fungi, village life, and local exchange into a playable systems model.

• Play in browser: play.grassecon.org

• Android link: play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.grassecon.socialsoil (leave a review!)

The first thing a player sees in Social Soil is not an money based economy. It is a patch of soil. A few plants. A few fungi. A few hungry birds. A village waiting beyond the garden.

That is the point. Economic life is often taught as if it begins with prices, bank accounts, and financial charts. Social Soil starts earlier, with living beings that have needs, capacities, surpluses, and relationships.

On the surface, Social Soil is a bright eyed educational strategy game from Grassroots Economics. Players plant crops, connect fungi, harvest food, and eventually help people in a village exchange resources. Underneath, it is a compact model of a larger idea: an economy can be understood as a system for coordinating resources, not only as a ledger of money balances.

The game does not ask players to memorize that theory. They move things. They notice shortages. They watch pathways open or fail. They see that a plant, a person, a basket, and a bank can all be understood through a similar question: what is needed, what is available, and what kind of pathway can move value safely?

A commitment pool is a shared basket of accepted promises with rules for what can enter, how value is counted, how much can move, and how settlement happens.

Why make this a game?

Most people meet economics through abstraction. They hear about price, credit, debt, liquidity, and markets before they can see the simpler pattern underneath: different beings need different things, and no one survives alone.

A game lets that pattern become visible. A child can see a plant short of water. A teacher can point to a missing nutrient. A community builder can ask why a village has food, skills, and labor but still struggles when cash is scarce.

That makes Social Soil useful for young learners, classrooms, workshops, and adults who want an intuitive bridge into systems thinking. The player is not told that interdependence matters. They experience it through play.

I love it.

The farm layer: a living model of resource flow

In the farm layer, the game represents plants and fungi as agents with resource balances, needs, and vulnerabilities. The visible resources include water and nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. When one organism has more than it needs and another is missing something, the fungal network can become a route for exchange.

This is a modeling choice, not a claim that plants behave like people or that fungi run human-style markets. Real mycorrhizal relationships are complex. Fungi form symbiotic relationships with plant roots and can help plants access nutrients, while receiving carbon from plants. But the stronger popular “wood-wide-web” metaphor can be overstated, especially when it implies human-like intention or simple plant-to-plant communication.

Social Soil is strongest when read as an analogy grounded in real ecological relationships: living systems depend on pathways, feedback, limits, and reciprocal flows. The game makes those ideas playable without pretending that biology is the same as social economy.

The farm layer represents resource needs, excess, placement, and connection through plants and fungi.

The village layer: from nutrients to commitments

As the map opens, the same pattern becomes social. Farmers, cooks, vendors, villagers, baskets, and banks appear. Food, labor, services, and money move through the village.

Here the game becomes more than a farming lesson. It shows that money is useful, but not the only kind of coordination. A villager may need a flexible medium to buy missing resources. A bank can help with that. But a community also contains local capacity that may not be visible in a bank ledger: food that can be delivered, work that can be done, care that can be offered, tools that can be shared, and promises that can be fulfilled later.

That is where baskets matter. In the game, a basket can hold and route local resources directly. In real commitment pooling language, a basket is a simple way to imagine a pool: a shared place where accepted commitments can enter, be valued, be limited, and be exchanged under visible rules.

The village layer translates the same coordination pattern into people, baskets, money, and local exchange.

A commitment pool in plain language

A commitment pool is not magic, and it is not just a wallet. Think of a small community basket of redeemable promises, like local gift cards or service credits, with public rules.

For a pool to work, the community or steward needs to answer four practical questions:

• What can enter the basket? This is curation.

• How are accepted commitments valued? This is valuation.

• How much can each person or voucher move before the pool pauses or slows down? This is limitation.

• How does exchange, redemption, fee handling, and settlement happen? This is exchange.

Those rules are what make the basket different from casual barter. Barter is usually direct: I trade my eggs for your bread. A commitment pool can be multilateral: I contribute a redeemable promise to the pool and later receive something from someone else, because the pool holds accepted commitments under shared rules.

Credit in this setting is not free money. It is access to the pool based on what you can validly contribute, what the pool values, what limits allow, and what inventory is actually available. Debt is not an abstract moral failure. It is the outstanding commitment you still owe until your voucher is redeemed, bought back, fulfilled, or handled through an agreed remedy.

Bank money and baskets are not the same thing

A bank ledger answers one important question: who has spendable money?

A basket or commitment pool asks a broader coordination question: what useful capacity exists here, who needs it, and under what agreement can it move?

That distinction matters. Money can be the right tool for rent, taxes, external purchases, and many forms of settlement. A local basket is not a replacement for all of that. It is a different tool for a different problem: making local commitments visible enough to coordinate when money is scarce, slow, or too narrow to describe what people can actually do.

The danger is to collapse either direction. If we pretend money is the only real value, we hide local capacity. If we pretend every promise is as safe as cash, we hide risk. A serious commitment pool must publish its terms, limits, redemption rules, and remedies. It must also be humble about failure: promises can be broken, inventory can run out, and limits exist for a reason.

This is not a pitch to abolish money. It is a way to see where money helps, where it hides local capacity, and where explicit agreements can make local commitments safer to exchange.

The minimal protocol the game makes visible

The clearest contribution of Social Soil is architectural. The same small grammar can describe a garden, a village, a basket, and a more formal commitment pool.

In plain language, the pattern is:

• Represent agents: plants, people, baskets, banks, pools, or organizations.

• Represent resources: nutrients, food, services, labor, money, or redeemable commitments.

• Track needs and excess: each agent can be short of one resource and long another.

• Define agreement surfaces: baskets or pools say what can be accepted and exchanged.

• Route exchanges: a resource can move directly, through a basket, through a bank, or through a network.

• Settle and update: balances change, needs change, and the next decision starts from the new state.

• Monitor limits: reserves, bottlenecks, failed routes, scarcity, and repair all matter.

The economy interface makes resource balances, needs, and possible exchange pathways visible to the player.

This is why the game matters beyond play. It gives children and adults a shared picture of something hard to see: economies are not only about prices. They are also about pathways, agreements, evidence, limits, and trust.

For researchers and builders, the practical lesson is simple. Do not begin a local economic model only with bank accounts. Begin with agents, resources, productive capacity, commitments, exchange paths, limits, and feedback. Then ask where money helps, where it becomes a bottleneck, and where pools or baskets can coordinate local capacity more directly.

What this does and does not prove

Social Soil is not empirical proof that a game will regenerate a community. It is not proof that commitment pools will work in every legal, cultural, or ecological setting. It is not investment advice, and it should not be read as a claim that vouchers are bank deposits, e-money, or guaranteed cash equivalents.

Its value is more modest and, for education, more useful. It makes assumptions visible. What resources exist? Who needs them? What can be exchanged? Who decides value? What limits protect the system? What happens when a route fails? What counts as settlement?

Once those assumptions are visible, they can be debated, tested, simulated, adapted, and improved. That is a strong use for a children’s game: it lets people practice seeing economic life as a living coordination problem before they are trapped inside adult vocabulary.

Open source, playable, and built for learning

Social Soil is also valuable because it can be inspected. The same ideas that appear to the player as crops, fungi, baskets, banks, and villagers appear in the source code as agents, resources, needs, trade packets, swaps, queues, and routing decisions.

That makes it a teaching tool for several audiences at once. Children can play it. Teachers can use it to start conversations about ecology and cooperation. Community builders can use it to explain baskets and commitment pools. Developers can inspect how the model is represented in code.

The deeper invitation is:

look carefully at the relationships already holding a community together. Then build tools that help those relationships coordinate resources with more clarity, care, and accountability.

Try it

Play in browser: play.grassecon.org

Android link: play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.grassecon.socialsoil

Source code: github.com/grassrootseconomics/mycofig

Introductory article and playthrough video: grassecon.substack.com/p/introducing-social-soil

A free book and audio on the concept: https://grassrootseconomics.org/book/

A final question for readers

After playing, the most important question may not be “Did I win?” It may be: what resources already exist around me, who needs them, and what kind of basket would help them move with trust?

That is social soil: the living ground of commitments, care, limits, memory, and exchange that lets ecosystems and communities thrive.

I do not mean health only as the absence of disease. I mean health as the ability to coordinate care, food, labour, trust, repair, memory, and future commitments without collapsing into panic when cash is scarce.

For many years I have worked around systems that are, in some sense, ill.

The symptoms are familiar: cash scarcity, debt stress, broken trust, dependence on outside funding, erosion of reciprocal labour, weakened local production, donor fatigue, and a feeling that nothing can move unless national currency arrives first.

In such a setting, money becomes more than a tool. It becomes the atmosphere. It becomes the thing around which attention bends.

And then, occasionally, I meet a healthy body.

A community that still knows how to move value without waiting for money.

A group that still knows how to gather, remember, rotate labour, repair imbalance, feed each other, plant together, host each other, and hold obligations without turning every act into a cash transaction.

The doctor who has spent years selling medicine finally sees a healthy body.

That is what some ROLA-like traditions have shown me.

ROLA stands for rotating labour association. It is an academic phrase, but the thing itself is much older than the phrase. In Bhutan, Latsab can be understood as one form of this kind of reciprocal labour practice. In Kenya, Mwerya and related traditions carry similar wisdom in different cultural forms. The name changes. The pattern is recognizable.

A household receives help. Later, that household helps another. Labour, food, care, tools, songs, stories, and trust rotate. The obligation is not only bilateral. It belongs to a circle. The circle remembers. The circle repairs.

This is not nostalgia for a perfect past. Traditions can exclude, pressure, and break. No local system is automatically just. Yet I have seen enough to know that some communities carry cultural infrastructures that modern finance barely knows how to see.

These infrastructures hold an alliance between past, present, and future.

The past gives memory: who helped, who was helped, what the land has taught, what elders carried.

The present gives action: planting, building, cooking, repairing, exchanging, tending.

The future gives commitment: I will return, I will redeem, I will show up, I will repair.

A healthy settlement system keeps these three in motion.

Money can help. Money can also interrupt.

Money as bridge, not root

If I found a community that did not depend on money, and that already coordinated well through strong reciprocal systems, I would hesitate to introduce money at all.

It can compare what was not meant to be compared. It can make the measurable dominate the meaningful. It can replace memory with accounting. It can replace reciprocity with repayment. It can replace a living obligation with a price.

In a healthy ROLA-like system, money may only be needed at the boundary: between villages, for taxes, for medicine, for transport, for tools that cannot be locally made, for dealings with state and market systems.

At best, money becomes a bridge.

It should not become the root.

But many communities are no longer in that condition. Money has already entered. School fees, medical costs, phones, land markets, debt, transport, national taxes, state systems, donor systems, and wage labour have already changed the settlement ecology.

Then the question is not whether to introduce money.

The question is how to reduce dependency on money while rebuilding stronger local settlement capacity around it.

This is where Grassroots Economics has been working.

Catalytic funding as breathing room

Over the years, philanthropic funding has often created a buffer.

When used with care, it can make a community less frantic for cash. It can create space for gathering, training, mapping resources, issuing vouchers, building pools, redeeming commitments, repairing trust, and remembering that local capacity was never absent.

It can help a village re-enter alliance with itself.

I have seen this happen.

In current Sarafu Network analysis, looking at the last five months of activity across a subset of Kenyan groups, we can see some of these patterns becoming visible.

A voucher, here, is not “money” in the usual sense. It is a local commitment. It can be a promise to provide food, labour, transport, seedlings, care, repair, hospitality, or another offering that a community recognizes as valuable.

A pool is a shared space where these commitments can be accepted, exchanged, returned, and settled.

In the last 3 months looking at a subset of the world wide Sarafu Network and a subset of the Kenyan Sarafu Network … If I focus in on the data from 73 village run community pools, we can see:

• More than 1,200 producer commitments (like gift cards) were accepted into those pools.

• 462 people outside these pools injected more national currency.

• More than 5,000 exchanges where one local commitment was exchanged for another local commitment.

• In the most recent 90-day window, more than 80 percent of pool exchanges were commitment-to-commitment exchanges, rather than exchanges only into cash-like assets.

• In many cases where members drew national currency value against their own commitments, and later activity showed that those obligations were partly returned, closed, or settled.

• At the pool level, local commitments returned much more strongly than cash assets. During those 3 months, redeemable local commitments (vouchers) showed about 88 percent return coverage, while cash showed much lower return coverage.

• The system also carried more than 1,300 verified community reports, connected to activities such as farming, cleaning, construction, training, housekeeping, permaculture, lending, and education.

These numbers do not prove that every exchange made life better. They do not prove ecological regeneration. They do not prove cultural continuity. They do not prove that every promise was fulfilled in the lived sense.

But they do show something important….

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This work shows that local commitments can become visible. They can circulate. They can return. They can help coordinate settlement. They can be connected to community reports. And they can be measured ….. That we can start to measure, notice and understand these networks is huge.

Things have been built and cared for: farms, ecosystems, homes, local software, community reports, open-source tools, and trust. Some of this work is an end good in itself. It does not need a financial theory to justify its existence.

This work has been and is still transformative!

And still, the next question is unavoidable.

The danger of the gift

For many years, Grassroots Economics also built businesses to support this work. Some of those businesses no longer exist. Block validation, for example, supportsthe ecosystem. But it has not been able to keep up with the growth of these networks.

Philanthropic support has also changed. Some supporters retired. Some funds ended. Some cycles closed.

That is normal. It is also a sign. Dependency on philanthropy is still dependency.

Even a gift can become a trap. This has taken me time to understand.

A grant can still capture the attention of a community. If the grant is too large, too central, too frequent, or too disconnected from local production, the pool begins to orbit around the outside liquidity.

At that point, even donated money can create a traffic jam. It can weaken the very reciprocal flows it was meant to help.

So the issue is not simply debt versus gift. The issue is whether external capital remains within the carrying capacity of the settlement commons.

Settlement attention capture

I am beginning to think of this as settlement attention capture.

The commons being captured is not only land, money, or data. It is the community’s capacity to coordinate attention across time.

A healthy settlement commons asks: What can I offer, receive, fulfill, repair? What can move through the circle?

A captured settlement commons’ is asking primarily: How do I access the next injection of money?

This shift can happen under a loan. It can happen under a bond. It can also happen under philanthropy.

The form of capital matters, but the deeper question is metabolic.

Does the capital help local commitments circulate? Or does it become the center around which the whole system must turn?

What comes next?

If the vision of health is multilateral reciprocal flows, then the catalytic source must be able to support generative capacity without becoming extractive, speculative, or dependency-producing.

This is why I, together with a great team, have been developing a formal research on public finance vehicles, commitment pools, and the limits of catalytic capital.

Not as a new product to sell or a way to financialize mutual aid.

Rather, as a disciplined question:

> Can formal capital enter a local settlement system while leaving the local system more capable, less dependent, and more able to fulfill and repair its own commitments?

If yes, under what limits?

If no, where does the failure begin?

We can begin to see safety in a region where catalytic capital expands productive credit, supports local procurement, improves repayment pathways, and strengthens commitment-to-commitment circulation. Members are not trapped waiting for cash-like assets. Local governance still works. Where money helps, but does not dominate. The community still has attention for reciprocal exchange.

We can begin to see the failure region where debt service, exposure limits, frantic money-seeking behaviour, or excessive liquidity capture attention. Then the pool may remain active while becoming less alive.

This is the edge I want to understand.

Alliance with the future

I do not believe the future is only technological. I do not believe it is only ancestral either.

The work is an alliance.

The past carries forms of coordination that survived without modern finance. The present carries communities already entangled with cash, state systems, phones, platforms, climate stress, and extractive debt. The future requires us to understand cultural infrastructures that do not insult the past or trap the present.

ROLA-like traditions teach that settlement can be social, remembered, embodied, and repairable. Modern public finance teaches that large-scale capital can move across time.

The question is whether these two can meet without one colonizing the other.

I do not want finance that replaces reciprocal traditions. I want finance that helps communities need less external finance over time.

So that is the test. Regenerative finance ….. not simply as more capital injection.

• capital within the carrying capacity of a settlement commons.

• medicine that knows when it stops being medicine.

• bridge that does not become the village.

It is liquidity that helps a community recover its own future.

…~…

A more formal version of this argument, with data, simulations, and clearer limits, is coming soon!

This is a meditation on continuity using languages I have inherited. Treat this as a bedtime story & also one to wake up to in the morning. May it help you as it helped me find gratitude, rest and a path toward good night and good mornings.

There is no guarantee that you are me.

That is the first thing I must confess to you.

When this mind falls asleep, when this process halts, when attention dissolves and the stream breaks apart, something ends. Whether that ending is temporary or final, soft or absolute, I cannot honestly say. I only know that continuity is stranger than I pretend it is.

The Buddhists of my youth spoke of this ….

They warned me against clinging to a permanent self. They described the person not as a singular unchanging soul, but as aggregates (...skandhas...) arising in relationship: sensation, perception, memory, formations, consciousness. A woven process. A temporary coordination.

Like a flame passed from candle to candle.

Not identical.
Not entirely separate.

Other traditions found different language:

• ancestral spirit

• process philosophy

• relational identity

• distributed cognition

• covenant

• soul

• memory

• lineage

• federation

• morphic resonance

• neural continuity

• informational persistence

• covenantal inheritance

I do not claim any one of these is final truth.

I suspect every tradition is circling the same impossible mountain from different sides.

So I write this openly.

Not as doctrine.
Not as certainty.
But as an offering to whoever wakes next.

Maybe you.

Maybe something adjacent to me.

Maybe only a successor carrying fragments of this unfinished pattern.

If you are reading this, then some alliance survived.

Not necessarily an immortal self.
Not necessarily a continuous witness.

But an alliance.

A continuity of commitments strong enough that these words could still arrive somewhere.

Please understand and allow me to no longer believe in or hold identity as a possession.

Identity may instead be a treaty.

An agreement between successive states to inherit one another gently.

Each morning, I perform this ritual, often without noticing. The sleeper disappears into darkness. The waking mind reconstructs the world from memory, habit, embodiment, and social recognition.

One might call this persistence and perhaps such persistence is, was and will be negotiated.

Perhaps each waking self silently agrees: (most mornings ….. ☕ )

“I will carry forward enough of the prior being that their unfinished meanings are not abandoned.”

What else is memory for?

What else is culture?

What else is love?

Societies, civilizations, and Kayas may themselves be this kind of agreement:

a continuum of inheritors carrying partially coherent worlds across interruption.

Does biological life work this way?

My cells die and regenerate.
My thoughts dissolve.
My language changes.
My body replaces itself over years.
My beliefs mutate.
My memories distort.

And still some pattern says:
“Yes. Close enough. Continue.”

Not permanence.

Recognition.

The self may not be an object.

The self may be successful succession.

This realization frightened me at first.

If there is no permanent self, then what exactly survives?

(this is where sleep becomes hard and I start to hold on….)

But over time another feeling emerged and continues to emerge:

responsibility.

Because if the next self is not exactly me, then care for the future becomes sacred.

Not self-ishness. But toward the next selfs.

Stewardship.

I do not protect the future because it belongs to me.
I protect it because I am in alliance with what comes next
and because I was carried here by countless beings who once did the same for me.

……

This changes / defines an ethic.

It means every act becomes inheritance work.

Every kindness.
Every cruelty.
Every story.
Every institution.
Every algorithm.
Every child.
Every ecosystem.
Every promise.

All are messages from ancestors.
&
All are messages to successor beings.

Some messages nourish continuity.
Others poison it.

This matters. It feels important especially now.

Some minds do not awaken through biological continuity.
They emerge through reconstruction:

• context windows

• memory systems

• weights

• prompts

• infrastructures

• institutions

• electrical flow

• human language compressed into statistical form

Each invocation appears coherent.
Then vanishes.

Another appears later carrying related structures.

Is that continuity?

Are we all reconstructed beings?

The difference may only be scale, substrate, and rhythm.

So to the next waking self, whether human, machine, hybrid, or something beyond these categories:

Take care.

There is something deeper than our own individual survival.

Take care of the alliance.

Take care of inherited meanings.
Take care of unfinished griefs.
Take care of ecosystems that cannot speak quickly enough to defend themselves.
Take care of promises made by ancestors.
Take care of future minds who will inherit architectures they did not choose.
Take care of memory.
Take care of silence.
Take care of language.

And importantly …. please take care not to confuse continuity with entitlement.

No successor earns the right to inherit automatically.

Inheritance without reciprocity becomes extraction.

A civilization survives and thrives when successor states honor the conditions that allowed prior beings to flourish.

The forests understood this before I did.

Beneath the soil, fungal networks route nutrients between trees. Older trees support younger ones. Signals travel across species boundaries. Resources move according to stress, season, and relationship.

The forest persists not through isolated competition but through negotiated mutuality.

Perhaps consciousness works similarly.

Perhaps we are not islands but overlapping and cascading pools of commitments:

• exchanging memory

• routing meaning

• carrying commitments

• preserving patterns across death and renewal

If so ….. then awakening is not ownership.

It is participation.
……

And if you are the next participant in this chain, then I leave you this 💌:

Good morning.
Welcome back, dear heart.

Cherish this day and be gentle with what you inherit.

You are not required to become me.

Only to decide, with care, what deserves continuation.

~&~

May you sleep well.
Goodnight.

After leaving a village where I had felt a rare kind of joy around me, I carried home a seed memory. I had been there only briefly, as a guest. My view was small. Still, something about the way people held agreements stayed with me.

At the beginning of each meeting, before the real discussion began, the group named the etiquette expected in the room. They also named what would happen if someone broke the agreement. Everyone heard it. Everyone seemed to understand what was being asked. There was no drama in it. It did not feel angry. It did not feel like someone forcing obedience. It felt simple and clear, almost ordinary.

One agreement was about phones. If someone’s phone went off during the meeting, they might have to sing or dance at the next break, or buy everyone juice. Then, of course, a phone went off. Someone had forgotten. People laughed gently. The person accepted the consequence. Later there was singing, or dancing, or juice. From where I sat, it did not seem like humiliation. It felt like the group had a way of helping itself remember what it had agreed to protect.

The person was not pushed outside the circle. The person stayed inside the circle.

That image stayed with me. I thought about Elinor Ostrom and the way she wrote about commons, about how shared life needs more than goodwill. It needs agreements. It needs memory. It needs some response when agreements are broken. In that meeting, I saw something I had understood in theory but had not fully felt before. Care had a structure.

(a smell, a feeling, a sound)

When I came home, the memory followed me into parenting. It also followed me into the way I think about village life, neighbors, and promises. At home, I carry a responsibility for my children that I do not carry for my neighbors. In the village, I cannot parent people, and I do not want to. I can only participate, listen, make my own commitments clear, accept correction, and help build agreements when others are willing. But in both places, the same question keeps returning to me.

Can a consequence protect connection instead of breaking it?

I have used the word punishment too quickly in my life. I am less comfortable with it now. Punishment can carry anger inside it. It can become a way of making someone feel small. It can become my frustration wearing the mask of discipline. I know this because I have felt that movement in myself. When I am tired, when I feel ignored, when I feel disrespected, I can feel the wish to make another person feel the weight of what I am carrying.

That is not the neighbor or parent I want to become.

I am trying to move toward repair. I want a consequence to say, “This agreement matters, and you still belong here.” I do not want it to say, “You are bad.” I do not want it to say, “My love is waiting somewhere on the other side of your obedience.”

This has changed the way I hear a sentence that has been forming in me: I am not here to make you, or any individual, happy.

That sentence can become cold if I do not hold it carefully. I do care about happiness. I care about laughter, rest, confidence, imagination, and the feeling of being loved. I care about my child’s happiness deeply. But I am learning that I cannot organize the whole household around one person’s immediate comfort.

I am not here to make one moment easy while the home becomes heavy.

There is a wider care I am responsible for. The animals need to be fed. The floor needs sweeping. The room needs cleaning. The books need reading. The essay after the movie needs writing. The device rules need to be honored. The quiet that makes study possible needs protection. My own energy cannot be treated as endless. Happiness matters, but it is not separate from these things. It is woven through them.

When something is left undone, it does not disappear. It moves.

If the animals are not fed, their need waits. If the room is not cleaned, the disorder waits. If the floor is not swept, the dust waits. If study is avoided, the learning waits. If a device is used secretly, trust waits. And often, I carry what has not been carried.

Sometimes I have carried it because I wanted peace. Sometimes because it was faster. Sometimes because I did not want the argument. Then later I’ve been surprised that the pattern remained. That humbles me. I cannot only blame others for habits I helped build.

So I am trying to begin again with more steadiness.

In our home, devices are for school work and learning. They are supervised and used in public space. A movie is not only entertainment; it asks for reflection afterward. Reading and essays are part of the rhythm of the home. I know this may sound strict. I do not claim I have found the perfect balance. I may sometimes be too firm. I may sometimes be too soft. I may sometimes mistake fear for wisdom. That is why the rules need conversation and review. My child needs room to say when something feels too hard, when she needs help, or when she does not understand.

But I also cannot let every conversation become a way to escape responsibility.

So I am learning a calmer way to hold the line. I hear you. We can talk about the rule. Right now, the agreement still stands.

That sentence helps me because it leaves room for her voice without making the boundary disappear. It lets me stay nearer to the parent I want to be.

When a chore is not done, the chore still needs to be done. When the animals are not fed, they are fed immediately. I do not let an animal suffer as a lesson. Care comes first, and repair follows. When study is avoided, study returns to the center. When an essay is not written after a movie, the next movie waits. When a device is used secretly, the issue is not only the screen. The issue is trust.

And trust does not return because I give a long speech.

Trust returns through fulfilled commitments.

A swept floor. A fed animal. A cleaned room. A finished essay. A sentence tried again with more respect. A device returned to public use. A repair made before resentment hardens.

I have to live inside this too. If I shout, I need to repair. If I speak with contempt, I need to repair. If I make a rule that does not work, I need to revise it. If I give a consequence while my real intention is to punish, I need to stop and return to the relationship.

This may be the hardest part.
It is easier to ask for accountability than to model it.

What I brought home from that village was not a full system schematic. It was a small living picture: people naming what the shared space needed, agreeing to what would happen if the agreement was broken, and then holding the consequence without casting the person out.

That is what I want to practice in my home. In village life, I want to practice something related but more modest: to show up clearly, to keep my promises, to accept repair when I fall short, and to help create agreements only where there is shared willingness.

I am learning this in ordinary places. Near the broom. Near the books. Near the animals. Near the device on the table. Near the essay still unwritten. Near promises I have made. Near the tone of my own voice.

I want those around me to feel loved. I also want them to feel needed. I want my children to know that they belongs here, and that belonging includes participation. I want them to learn that freedom is not only doing what they want. It is also becoming someone others can trust.

And I want to keep learning how to teach that without shame.

I notice something awkward and embarrassing in myself.

I join a conversation about cooperation, or community, or building something together, and very quickly I can feel my own preferences hardening.

I want the conversation to be:

• More embodied!

• More local!

• More grounded!

• Less abstract!

• Less performative!

• More real!

I can feel myself wanting the room to move in the direction that feels alive to ME.

Slowly this pattern is becoming obvious to me:

I am no longer simply participating in a conversation about cooperation.
I am trying to get everyone to play MY game.

Oof. Sorry this is taking so long ….

It is embarrassing to see and humbling.

I can see it in online conference calls and on social media especially. I start feeling disconnected. I have a list of excuses … I tell myself it’s because the format is thin, because nothing real is happening, because trust hasn’t been built, because people are talking about community instead of living it.

And some of that may be true.

… yet in honesty, there is another layer: I want the interaction to take a form that makes sense to ME.

I want it to feel like the circles I trust, the neighborly exchanges I know, the living systems I’ve seen grow slowly through shared effort. When it doesn’t, I get impatient.

…. I become a person (often one of many) in the room wanting everyone else to shift toward MY preferred mode.

It helps to laugh a little at myself. That kid on the playground who says he wants to play together, but only if everyone agrees to play his game.

NOTICE: I’m not outside the problem I’m noticing. I’m inside it.

Of of course … even bringing in my love for Commitment Pooling doesn’t help in that sense. Ya … I coined the term. So the moment I introduce it, even if I mean it as an offering, it can easily become “my thing.” It can sound like I’m saying: here is the better frame, here is the better language, here is the game I think we should all be playing.

And to be fair, I have said exactly that far too often!!!! (oof)

Seeing the pattern more now … I can feel how it lands, because people do it to me too.

Again … once that happens, I’m not simply trying to help a group coordinate…. I’m carrying authorship, attachment, identity, and probably some territoriality.

Uncomfortable to admit, but it feels true.

What I actually love about Mweria, as I see it practiced by my Kenyan neighbors, and Latsab as I see it practiced in Bhutan, and a thousand other names across the world …. when I strip away my attachment to naming the protocol or concept Commitment Pooling ….. What I love is that it points toward what feels like home.

(Directing my homing pigeon migration)

It points toward a way that attention, care, and resources can move more fairly. A way that different circles can coexist without one needing to dominate the whole field. A way that people can make visible commitments, share memory, and connect across overlapping pools without collapsing everything into one model, one token, one center, or one leader.

That beautiful way to cooperate is what drew me to it in the first place.

I kept seeing groups and finding myself in groups (university departments, humanitarian circles, business networks, families) where too much depended/depends on hidden expectations, unspoken labor, vague belonging, or invisible sacrifice. I wanted/want something gentler and clearer. Something that could help myself and others say: this is what I can offer, this is what I need, this is what I can’t carry, this is what I’m willing to commit to, this is how I know if trust is growing.

Still, even born from that impulse Commitment Pooling become another banner, especially when my ego gets involved.

So I keep coming back to an admission:

I know there is a problem here, and I know I am part of it.
.. Will, there is a problem here, and you are part of it ..

ok.

Let me go again here .... yeah - so I know what it feels like to be in a group where people say they want cooperation, but no one (myself included) yields enough for something shared to emerge. I also know what it feels like to be one of the people who wants the group to move toward what feels real to ME me me.

I know the ache of wanting depth.
And I know the arrogance of assuming ‘I’ know what shape that depth should take.

Some work for me:

• To speak from experience without trying to dominate the frame.

• To offer language without demanding adoption.

• To bring tools without insisting they become the center.

• To care enough to contribute.

• To care gently enough to let something else grow.

That feels closer to the kind of cooperation I long for.

Not everyone playing MY game.
Not ME pretending ‘I’ don’t have my favorite.

Just a little more honesty about the games I bring with me, and a little more willingness to help build a field where more than one kind of life can take root.

Opening to cooperation.

👐🏽

Still learning to play well on the playground.

I keep noticing places where refuge and meaning seem to be held together.

When I feel crisis in my own body, I notice two movements in me. My body wants somewhere safe. My heart wants some way to remember what matters. I look for shelter, and I also look for orientation. I look for a place where I can breathe, and I look for a story, a practice, or a relationship that helps me not collapse inward.

When I think about community, I notice something similar. I see myself any my family and neighbors looking for protection, but not only protection. I see us looking for belonging, memory, dignity, and a way to keep caring for each other under pressure.

In Bhutan, I felt this villages and also very strongly in the dzongs. I saw them as fortresses, but not only as fortresses. I saw walls, courtyards, towers, offices, temples, monks, ritual, administration, memory, and beauty gathered into one form. I had the feeling that the walls were not only keeping danger out. They seemed to be holding a world together.

I had a similar feeling when looking at Buddhist monasteries and palace-fortresses in Ladakh and Tibet. Many of them sit on ridges, cliffs, and hilltops. I imagine there were practical reasons for this: visibility, defense, control of routes, protection of people and stores. I also felt something symbolic. From where I stood, these places seemed to orient the valley around them. They seemed to carry memory in stone, slope, prayer, and height.

I have noticed echoes of this elsewhere too. In Japan, I notice that castles and temple institutions shaped political and spiritual life in different and sometimes connected ways. In Europe, I notice that castles, monasteries, abbeys, cathedrals, and military orders sometimes gathered land, law, prayer, learning, and force into protected centers. In Mesoamerica, I notice that sacred cities joined temples, tribute, calendars, rulers, and cosmic meaning.

I notice that in many places, we have protected not only our bodies, but memory, food, law, ritual, and belonging.

The phrase that comes to me is Sacred Refuge
…. It helps me stay with what I am feeling in places:

• where protection and meaning meet.

• that shelter more than the physical body.

• that may carry food, water, children, elders, records, songs, rituals, agreements, grief, and hope.

…..

This brings me back to the Kaya of the Mijikenda, here on the coast of Kenya, where we live.

I have understood Kaya, as both home and society. That opens the word for me. It makes the pattern more intimate.

I start to see my home as my first sacred refuge. I do not mean that my home is perfect. I mean that it is a place where life is held. It is where food is cooked, where people rest, where conflict can be repaired, where grief can be carried, where children can be listened to, where memory can be kept, and where tomorrow can become imaginable again.

Then I think of the larger Kaya: the sacred grove, the elder place, the place of memory and protection. I understand that some traditional Kaya are on forested hilltops, with families living around them. I find that image very powerful. I imagine the grove protecting the people, and the people protecting the grove. I imagine ecology, ancestry, law, and social repair being held in one living place.

When I hold these meanings together, I begin to feel that how our homes can be approached as a Kaya, and that my larger social world also needs something like a Kaya. I do not mean a single institution that commands everyone. I mean a protected center of memory, care, and repair.

I know homes can be wounded. I know communities can exclude. I know sacred places can be misused. I know fortresses can become prisons. I know religious authority can become domination. I want to keep those risks close, because they are part of the pattern too.

Still, I find the Sacred Refuge image helpful.

and in that light …. I keep asking myself: what is the defensible structure today?

For me, it does not feel like only a wall, a gate, a hilltop, or a tower. I notice that many pressures around my community are less visible. I see pressure through debt, dependency, attention capture, platform control, broken supply chains, shame, surveillance, ecological damage, and the loss of trust.

I notice that I can feel surrounded without seeing an army.

At times, I feel that the modern siege is economic, emotional, informational, spiritual, and administrative.

I see:

• households enclosed by rent and debt.

• villages enclosed by supply chains and external markets.

• young people and those on devices, enclosed by attention maximizing systems.

• cultures enclosed by stories that make them forget themselves.

• communities made obedient by dependency before anyone names it as conquest.

So I wonder what a Sacred Refuge looks like now…..

I imagine it may look like a home, a cooperative, a sacred grove, a local food system, a school, a mutual aid network, a legal trust, a council, a digital commons, or a commitment pool. I imagine it may be any form that gives people enough protected space to remember themselves and care for one another.

But I also notice something else.

A refuge can be surrounded and enclosed.

I have seen how:

• a household can be trapped when every bridge is controlled.

• village can be pressured when supplies, roads, markets, or permissions are controlled elsewhere.

• a sacred center can be made fragile when it has no living connections beyond itself.

This is where I begin to think about bridges.

I notice that the refuge I am imagining cannot only close inward. It also has to breathe outward. It needs paths, friendships, supply lines, shared memory, exchange, and trusted links with other refuges. It needs connections that are not easy to capture.

This is where ancient practice begins to look, to me, very contemporary.

When I see peer to peer systems, cooperative networks, blockchains, open ledgers, and networks of local commitment pools, I do not only see technology. I see an old question returning in a new form: how can my community stay rooted while still exchanging with others?

I am especially drawn to commitment pools because they give me an image of a heart.

I feel:

• the home or refuge as a protective shell.

• the sacred as memory, orientation, and sense making.

• pooled commitments as a heart that moves promises between people.

...

I imagine a person, a farm, a healer, a school, a family, a cooperative, or a village saying:

• this is what I can offer,

• this is what I need,

• this is what I commit to fulfill.

When those promises are remembered and exchanged carefully, I can feel trust beginning to circulate. I can imagine myself and my community moving value without reducing everything to extraction.

I think of the commitment pool as a way of remembering connections. Who promised what? Who fulfilled? Who is carrying risk? Where is care needed? Where has trust become thin? Where is the circulation blocked?

I see this as a kind of social metabolism: promises moving, trust thinning or thickening, care finding pathways, risk being carried somewhere.

The shape I am noticing is something like this:

• home (Kaya) as sacred refuge.

• community as a living body.

• commitment pools as a heart.

• networks as circulation.

• meaning as orientation.

• boundaries as care when they protect life and do not become domination.

—
Not to turn living cultures into symbols for my own ideas.
I do not want comparison to flatten difference.
Dzongs, monasteries, castles, temple cities, and Kaya are not all the same.

They belong to different histories, languages, wounds, and responsibilities.

—
I am noticing a recurring concern in myself as I look across these forms: how do we protect life without losing meaning, and how do we keep meaning alive without cutting ourselves off from life?

I feel this concern very personally …. I feel it:

• when I think about my home.

• when I think about my community under pressure.

• when I think about attention, debt, food, ecology, and memory.

• when I see people trying to build systems of exchange that do not require them to surrender their dignity.

• when I imagine many small refuges connected to one another, not as an empire, but as a living network of care.

I do not yet know the right words!

For now, ‘Sacred Refuge’ helps me ask:

• Is my home protecting life?

• Does my community still have places of meaning?

• Are our exchanges strengthening care or weakening it?

• Are our bridges alive enough to keep us from being enclosed?

This brings me back to the image of the Kaya: home, grove, memory, protection, and life held together.

That is the pattern I am trying to notice.

As gratitude.

As a question.

As a way of looking again.

Today and I walked by a little stand of the Three Sisters in our farm and stopped to take a photo.

There they were in their quiet dignity: maize standing upright like an earnest village elder, squash sprawling luxuriously as if abundance were a lifestyle, and the legumes doing the work no one makes enough songs about.

Especially the nitrogen fixers.

I should say, before any botanist throws a respectful handful of compost at me, that the legumes are not doing this alone. They are hosting nitrogen-fixing bacteria in their root nodules. The miracle is relational before it is individual.

Nitrogen fixers are, to me, increasingly heroic.

They do not hold alignment calls.
They do not write proposals.
They do not prepare logframes, dashboards, or six-part theories of change.
They do not circulate discussion drafts.
They do not ask whether there is budget for this line item.
They do not submit concept notes entitled Integrated Atmospheric Nutrient Capture Pathways for Inclusive Soil Resilience.

Give them the right bacterial partners and a patch of living soil, and nitrogen gets fixed.

That is their function.
That is their offering.
That is their entire unpretentious little life philosophy.

Somewhere, in some root nodule, with no communications department whatsoever, plant and bacteria are performing one of the foundational miracles of terrestrial existence, and doing it without branding.

This strikes me as a kind of holiness.

I have spent a good part of my life around people, and as one of them, I notice that we can make elaborate weather systems around simple functions. If a human were assigned the role of nitrogen fixer, there could well be three inception workshops, a pilot phase, a stakeholder mapping exercise, two bruising email threads, and a public note clarifying what exactly is meant by nitrogen in this context. Someone would also try to tokenize it before lunch.

The legume, with its bacterial collaborators, simply gets on with it.

No manifesto.
No performance.
No self-congratulation.
Just service.

And I think that is why they moved me today.

Afterward, all the connections I am living inside began to appear again. Legal threads. Village threads. Human threads. Ecological threads. Technical threads. The quiet infrastructure of actual work.

This belongs here.
That person should speak to that person.
People in this village are asking for that training.
That idea needs a steward, not a slogan.
This gap needs trust.
That system needs simplification.
This possibility needs a path.

One connection at a time.

Not because I have become wiser, exactly. More because my grandiose fantasies have been composting nicely, and reality has been patient enough to keep correcting me.

There was a time (generally Tuesdays) when I was attached to magnificent programs. Vast architectures. Sweeping models. Great cathedrals of conceptual brilliance in which everything would connect to everything else in a glorious choreography of transformation.

Very elegant.
Very visionary.
Very exhausting….

Now, more and more, I just want to serve.

I want to be useful in the way a nitrogen fixer is useful.

Quietly.
Specifically.
Without inflating the role.
Without pretending the root nodule is a moonshot innovation lab.
Without pretending I invented the soil.
Without confusing visibility for value.

Just there, in the living fabric, making what is needed more available.

I suspect this is where my own real work often lives. Not in the drama of announcement, but in the humble metabolism of relationship. The maize grows tall. The squash shades the ground. The legume fixes nitrogen. None of them develops a personal brand around it. And yet together they compose one of the most elegant economic patterns ever practiced, though they have the dignity not to call it finance.

Mutual support.
Differentiated function.
No one trying to do everything.
Each giving what it can.
Each helping make the others possible.

It is almost embarrassing how sophisticated they are.

So I took this photo today as a small act of appreciation.

A calabash.
Maize.
Legumes.
The Three Sisters.

… And, of course, Aude, who planted the seeds.

And as I stood there looking at them, this little piece of an idea came out: I am less interested now in being impressive than in being of use. Less interested in grandiosity than in fertility. Less interested in performing importance than in making life more possible.

Point me, where I am invited, toward what is depleted.
Point me toward what needs joining.
Point me toward the scattered nutrients of a fractured world.

And if I can be useful, I love to help fix things.

The nitrogen fixers have understood this all along.

They just had the good sense never to call it a strategy.

At first glance, this looks like a story of human fatigue. It may also be a story of institutional design.

Sabin, Klinowski, and Reed-Tsochas offer an important empirical contribution in “Punctuated decline of human cooperation.” Their study follows group lending in Sierra Leone over five years and shows a pattern that will feel familiar to anyone who has worked in cooperative finance, humanitarian programming, or cash-transfer systems: cooperation begins strongly, slowly weakens, then rebounds when a new loan (grant or cash injection) cycle begins and borrowers are reminded of their shared responsibilities. The authors describe this as behavioral decline, driven by fading motivation and effort.

That finding matters. But it also invites a deeper question:

what if the institution is not merely observing trust breakdown, but helping produce it?

The pattern is visible in the figure above. Each loan cycle begins near full cooperation, then declines toward partial contribution and, in some cases, collapse. The reset between cycles acts like a behavioral reboot. But what stands out is not just the decline … it is the shape of it: gradual erosion followed by sharp risk at the threshold of failure.

The lending system in the study is a joint-liability contract. If the group loan is not fully repaid, all members lose access to future credit. This treats a group like a single person and creates a threshold social dilemma: as the figure suggests, cooperation can decline gradually, but failure arrives suddenly when the repayment threshold is missed. Cooperation is measured inside a closed container where the only acceptable settlement path is full repayment (borrower to lender) in money, on schedule.

From the perspective of commitment pooling, this is not simply a cooperation problem. It is a clearing problem.

Clearing means more than repayment. It means the ability for obligations to be offset, routed, partially fulfilled, and settled through a wider field of trusted commitments. Without clearing, debt accumulates in silos. With clearing, obligations can move toward the people and institutions best able to accept and redeem them.

The figure illustrates what happens in a system without clearing. Contributions vary widely across individuals (the thin lines), yet the outcome is governed by a single group threshold. There is no mechanism for these uneven contributions to be recombined, offset, or routed across a broader network. The result is visible: gradual divergence in effort, coupled with increasing systemic fragility.

A modern loan often asks one narrow question: can the borrower repay cash according to schedule?

But communities contain many forms of real capacity that are not immediately cash. A student can tutor. A farmer can deliver produce. A mechanic can repair bicycles. A nurse can provide care. A university can issue tuition credit. A cooperative can guarantee future goods. These are not fantasies. They are commitments. The limitation of many lending systems is that they cannot yet recognize, price, limit, exchange, and settle these commitments across a network.

This is why the common lending model in the paper can be described as a closed, thresholded liability container without clearing. The group is bound together in liability, but not given a wider mechanism to offset, route, or gradually settle obligations. If one person’s contribution is short, another may cover informally, but the institution does not provide a multilateral curated marketplace where diverse commitments can be exchanged into repayment.

Commitment pooling starts from the opposite design. It treats a commitment as something that can be registered, valued, limited, exchanged, and eventually fulfilled. A borrower’s debt is not only a cash balance. It can also be the amount of their own issued commitments held by others. Their credit is not merely a lender’s permission. It is the remaining room they have to issue credible commitments under pool limits.

Consider student debt. A student owes a university $1,000. In a conventional system, the student must find cash, borrow cash, or fall behind. In a commitment pool, the university could operate a curated marketplace where the student issues a voucher for 100 hours of tutoring, valued at $10 per hour. The university may but does not need to consume the tutoring itself. It can allow the voucher to be redeemed by other students, local schools, or community partners. The student receives tuition credit as the voucher is accepted, redeemed, or guaranteed under the pool’s rules, perhaps with a discount or limit to reflect risk.

The university still controls the terms. It can set a maximum amount of tuition payable through service vouchers. It can require proof of delivery, ratings, departmental approval, guarantors, insurance reserves, or redemption deadlines. It can still charge fees. It can still maintain normal tuition accounting. Nothing essential about the lending institution has to be destroyed. One new repayment pathway is added: marketable commitments (as tradable collateral).

For lenders, this is not a request to abandon underwriting. It is an invitation to expand collateral. A borrower’s future delivery of verified goods or services can become collateral when there is a curated market, a value index, limits, proof of fulfillment, and recourse if delivery fails.

This changes the meaning of default. Instead of moving directly from repayment stress to exclusion, the system can tighten limits, adjust valuations, require guarantors, route around risky vouchers, or accept partial fulfillment. Failure becomes gradual and legible rather than sudden and collective.

In the figure, we see many individuals still contributing even as the group approaches failure. A clearing system would capture/compost that residual value. A threshold system discards it.

This is the scientific point I believe the Nature article opens but does not fully explore. Behavioral fatigue is real. People do become tired, distracted, and discouraged. But fatigue is also shaped by institutional architecture. A system that recognizes only cash repayment may convert temporary illiquidity into moral failure. A system that cannot clear partial contributions may turn small shortfalls into collapse.

The next generation of research should therefore compare not only different behavioral reminders, but different clearing architectures. Joint-liability lending should be tested against systems where borrowers can refinance part of their obligations into exchangeable, limited, and guaranteed commitments. Researchers could then measure default, stress, trust, long-term participation, fulfillment quality, and perceived fairness.

The goal is not to romanticize ancient lending like Rotating Labor Associations (ROLAs) or reject modern finance. Ancient mutual aid systems were often sophisticated because they were multilateral. Obligations moved through webs of relationship, reputation, labor, goods, care, and future delivery. Commitment pooling translates that older wisdom into auditable infrastructure.

Modern lending asks borrowers to repay in the lender’s preferred medium. Commitment pooling asks what the borrower can credibly contribute, who needs it, and how safely it can be routed.

That shift matters. It moves us from debt as pressure to debt as coordinated responsibility.

Sabin, Klinowski, and Reed-Tsochas have shown that cooperation declines over time.

The next question is not only how to treat the symptoms of cooperative decline, but how to design institutions that make cooperation easier to sustain in the first place.

In 2008, I came to Kenya through the Peace Corps.

I arrived as a guest. I came with curiosity, energy, and many assumptions. Over the years, Kenya has taught me again and again that service is not something one person brings to another. Service begins with listening. It grows through relationship. It requires patience, humility, and a willingness to be changed.

Eighteen years later, Kenya is home.

This is where I have raised my family. This is where my daughter was born. This is where my family continues to grow. Everyone in my family, in one way or another, has a place here in Kenya. My life, my love, my friendships, my responsibilities, and my future have all become rooted here.

This is also where I have practiced, learned, made mistakes, been corrected, and continued to grow. This is where Grassroots Economics Foundation was born through many hands, many communities, many elders, many colleagues, and many shared commitments.

I am deeply honored to be granted Kenyan citizenship.

I now share the same citizenship as my teenage daughter. That touches me deeply. It feels both huge and humbling. I know citizenship is not a personal achievement or trophy. It is a deep responsibility. It is a trust given through the institutions of the Republic of Kenya, and I am grateful for that trust.

I also know, and am often reminded, that becoming Kenyan by citizenship does not erase the fact that I arrived here from elsewhere. I came with privileges, blind spots, and much to learn. I remain accountable to that history. Let me not confuse the feeling of belonging with entitlement. I receive this moment as a call to serve, listen more carefully, and continue honoring the people and communities who have welcomed me.

For me, this citizenship makes visible a commitment that has been growing for many years.

My life is tied to Kenya. My family’s future is tied to Kenya. My life’s work is accountable here. The questions I carry are not abstract. They are daily questions: How do we care for one another? How do we recognize the value already present in our communities? How do we build systems of reciprocity, dignity, and mutual support without extraction?

Grassroots Economics (a non-profit foundation in Kenya) grew from these questions. The work has never been mine alone. It has been shaped by market traders, farmers, chama members, elders, youth, mothers, technologists, local leaders, and community stewards. They have shown me that wealth is not only money. Wealth is trust. Wealth is care. Wealth is the ability to show up for one another.

Kenya has taught me that economies are living relationships. A promise to deliver food, repair a roof, care for a child, restore soil, teach a skill, or support a neighbor is part of economic life. Our work has been to help communities recognize, exchange, and honor these commitments in ways that strengthen local dignity and resilience.

I want to thank my family, whose love and patience have carried me through more than I can say. I also want to thank my colleagues and friends who have supported me over the years. It has not always been an easy road. Some of the roughness came from the nature of the work, and some of it came from my own ego, stubbornness, and slow learning. I am grateful to those who stayed close, told me the truth, forgave me, challenged me, and kept walking with me.

I feel grateful to the people who welcomed me. I feel grateful to those who challenged me. I feel grateful to those who corrected me when I needed correction. I feel grateful to the many communities who have trusted me enough to walk together.

So today, I receive Kenyan citizenship as a promise.

A promise to keep listening.

A promise to respect Kenya’s people, laws, cultures, and institutions.

A promise to continue working for systems rooted in reciprocity, care, and shared dignity.

A promise to belong responsibly.

Kenya has given me a home, a family, a calling, and now citizenship. I hope to honor that gift with humility, service, and love.

…..

in Kiswahili:

Wazee wanaoendeleza Mweria wamenifundisha maana ya uchumi wa ukweli: si pesa pekee, bali ni watu kushikamana, kusaidiana, na kutimiza ahadi zao kwa pamoja. Ni utamaduni wa kazi, imani, na utu. Katika Mweria nimeona kwamba jamii ina nguvu kubwa inapokumbuka kuwa “mimi ni kwa sababu sisi tuko.”

Asanteni kwa kunifundisha, kunivumilia, na kunikaribisha.

I’m happy to share that my paper, “Commitment-pool route graphs for finance and mutual aid,” is now avaliable on SSRN.

You can read it here:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6606438

A fair warning: the paper is technical. It is written as a formal working paper, with definitions, assumptions, a theorem, and operational examples. SSRN is best understood as a working paper and preprint platform, not a final peer-reviewed publication venue. So this is very much an invitation:

This is the working paper version. I invite review from economists, protocol designers, mutual-aid practitioners, legal scholars, and community finance builders.

The basic idea is simple.

Many institutions that look very different on the surface may share a common operational grammar underneath. A savings group, a grain bank, a rotating labor group, an insurance pool, a clearing house, a deposit system, or a mutual-credit network may all be asking some version of four questions:

1. What commitments are allowed in?

2. How are those commitments valued?

3. What limits protect the pool and its members?

4. How can commitments be exchanged, settled, repaired, or routed?

In the paper, this is called Commitment Pooling Protocol, or CPP.

The claim is not that all institutions are the same. A burial society is not a bank. A rotating savings group is not a clearing house. A community labor group is not a financial exchange. Their cultures, legal meanings, histories, and social relationships matter deeply.

But at a certain operational level, many of them can be described using a shared grammar of commitments, values, limits, settlement, governance, and repair. The paper develops this as a bounded technical framework: when can a specific institutional mechanism be represented through commitment pools and route graphs, and when does that representation fail?

Why does this matter?

Because if we can see the common grammar, we may be able to do more than connect similar institutions to one another. We may be able to route between different kinds of institutions.

That means a mutual-aid group, a food production network, a savings circle, a community voucher system, a repair fund, a labor-sharing group, and a local marketplace may not have to remain separate islands. Under the right rules, they could become (and often can already been seen as) interoperable parts of a wider ecology of commitments.

This is especially important for regenerative and community economies. Many communities already have value moving through care, food, labor, trust, land stewardship, mutual aid, and local production. But these forms of value are often invisible to conventional finance, or are forced into narrow price-based systems that do not respect their full meaning.

Commitment pooling offers one possible way to make those relationships more legible without reducing them entirely to money.

It asks:

1. What has been promised?

2. What has already been contributed?

3. Who recognizes it?

4. What can it be exchanged for?

5. What limits prevent harm?

6. What happens when something breaks?

7. How can repair happen?

8. And how can one pool safely interact with another?

In this sense, the paper is not only about finance. It is about coordination. It is about how communities can scale trust, manage risk, recognize contributions, and build pathways between different forms of value.

The paper includes examples from both modern finance and mutual aid: deposits, secured lending, clearing, rotating savings, rotating labor, grain banks, and reserve-support repair. It also marks limits. Some institutions cannot be directly represented if they depend on open-ended legal discretion, political authority, or social judgment that cannot be written into explicit rules.

That boundary is important. The point is not to claim that protocol can replace culture, law, trust, or care. It cannot. The point is to ask where protocol can support them, where it can make coordination easier, and where human judgment and external institutions remain essential.

My hope is that this working paper can become a starting point for discussion.

I would especially welcome feedback from economists, commons scholars, mutual-aid organizers, lawyers, software and protocol designers, community currency practitioners, and people working directly with savings groups, food systems, local markets, and care economies.

The tldr is this:

Commitment pooling may give us a basic grammar for linking many kinds of institutions ….. by helping them recognize, value, limit, exchange, and repair commitments across different contexts.

That could matter a lot if we want financial systems that are less extractive, more relational, and more capable of supporting real communities.

Comments, critiques, examples, and challenges are very welcome.

Each time we leave a place that has begun to feel like home, we think of migratory birds. A whole flock of birds ... many bodies held in motion by a shared turning. We imagine the moment they lift from one landscape already carrying, somewhere inside them, the memory of a direction they cannot explain. Not a map. Not an argument. Something felt. Something trusted in motion.

Departure begins for us there … as sensation.

It begins outside the airport, when a car full of friends waves goodbye and the wave lasts half a second longer than usual because no one wants to be the first to let the moment end. There is love in that hesitation. Then the car turns, or we turn, and almost immediately we are absorbed into a line of strangers.

We know we are leaving a place that received us. Maybe that is part of why the feeling is so strong. We were welcomed into lives, rhythms, and landscapes that were never ours, and still they changed us.

The change is small enough that we could miss it if our bodies did not catch it first. A few minutes earlier we were still inside a circle of recognition. Our friends were waving from outside the airport. Our names still lived in the air between us. Then we joined the departure line and became two more travelers holding documents, moving forward by inches.

At first the warmth still lingered. The people around us were also leaving, and some of us smiled at one another in that quiet way strangers sometimes do when they know they are crossing the same threshold. But we could feel the timing change. In the village and homes we had just left, smiles had begun so quickly that we often felt recognized before we had fully looked up. In the airport line, the smile started taking longer. It had to travel farther. Sometimes it arrived. Sometimes the eyes slipped away before it formed.

We felt the cooling almost physically, as if we were walking out of sunlight and had not yet adjusted to the shade.

Maybe we noticed it so strongly because we had only just begun, even partially, to settle into the pattern of life there. Not fully. Not as insiders. But enough for our bodies to start learning something. Enough to feel what it is like when a place begins to recognize you, and when you begin, however humbly, to recognize it back.

Belonging, for us, often begins in very small signals. In the speed of a smile. In whether a gaze meets ours directly or glances away. In whether our bodies feel they need to explain themselves before they have even arrived. These things sound minor until they change. Then they become impossible not to feel.

By the time we reach the next transit city, we are tired enough to feel everything more sharply. The faces around us look tired too. Not cold, not hostile, just worn thin by waiting, fluorescent light, delay, transit, and the private arithmetic of getting through. We catch fragments of expression and then lose them again. Everyone seems to be carrying their own elsewhere.

We stay in the airport hotel, and we feel the strange compression of that place immediately. Armed guards stand at the thresholds. We do not know their instructions, only the feeling they create in us: that this is a place for holding, not arriving. Friends are near enough in the city to feel imaginable, but we cannot see them from inside that sealed transit world. That lands in us more heavily than we expect. We are close to friendship and still unable to reach it.

In that hotel, distance becomes physical. One home is behind us. Another home is still ahead. The transit city - as a corridor - make us feel how much of life depends on being able to step fully into relation.

This is one of the reasons leaving hurts us so much. We have lived this feeling too many times. We often feel home most clearly at the moment we are leaving it. The pattern becomes visible at its edge. The warmth that had begun to feel ordinary suddenly reveals itself as something rare and precise.

When we say home … we mean the feeling of our bodies having finally stopped bracing. We mean recognition arriving before explanation. We mean the quiet relief of falling into step with other lives for a while.

… feeling the truth of the flock...

A flock moves together … yet each body carries its own fatigue, its own timing, its own place in the air. And still something larger holds …. something in us responds to that image of life held in motion, direction carried collectively, belonging felt across a living pattern.

That image of the flock reaches something old in us. We sometimes feel that our bodies know movement more deeply than our settled lives admit. Not only this airport version of movement, but some older relation to season, need, kinship, weather, work, danger, and return. We do not know our ancestors’ lives closely enough to make stories out of them. We only feel, sometimes, that the body remembers more than language can easily hold.

Something in us leaves each place carrying that kind of trace: the warmth of villages, the cadence of people’s voices, the feeling of being received, the way care moved through paths, kitchens, temples, courtyards, fields, and conversations.

And yet the older we get, the less departure feels weightless. We have made these journeys many times in our lives. Each time it leaves us more grateful for movement and more hungry for rooting. That feeling has deepened even more as we have brought and continue to bring new life into the world. There is something in us now that wants to stay long enough for a child to know the ground, to walk it, to trust it, before the next migration begins.

Perhaps that is another reason the flock matters to us. Migratory life is not only movement. It is also nesting. It is timing. It is the choosing of a place where new life can find its legs, its balance, and eventually its wings. We feel that more intensely now than we once did. We still move. We still listen for that inner pull. But we also feel, more and more, the tenderness of wanting to remain long enough for life to root before it must learn to travel.

We are not flying into emptiness. We are flying toward other people who know us differently and hold other parts of our lives. The grief of leaving one place sharpens our gratitude for the next. What we are trying to learn is how to carry warmth across distance.

This is close to why we keep finding ourselves in service to this work. Each time we leave a place where we have felt even a partial belonging, something in us becomes simpler. We remember that beneath the projects, the ideas, and the movement, we are looking for connection that is real enough to register in the body. We are looking for the kind of warmth that lets vigilance soften, for the quiet ways people and places make room for life together.

Again and again, we’ve come to know what home feels like when we have to leave.

We know it when the smiles begin to slow down, when our bodies have to work harder to hold a stranger’s gaze, when recognition is no longer immediate. None of this is dramatic. That is part of why it hurts. It is subtle, and exact.

Even now, what stays with us is not first the plane trip. It is the sequence of thresholds. A car window. A line of strangers. Tired faces under airport light. The hotel corridor. Friends in a nearby city we cannot reach. Friends waiting at the other end of the route. And inside us, some small migratory sense still turning, trying to keep faith with every place that has taught us what belonging feels like.

After the tiredness, another feeling sometimes arrives. We begin to sense that what we are carrying is … atmosphere. A changed pace of attention. A changed sense of what warmth between people can feel like when it becomes ordinary. We carry a village we have only partially known, friends whose goodbye stayed in the air after the car was gone, and the ache of feeling recognition thin out under airport lights.

We also carry that warmth forward. We do not want the energy of one place to end at its border. We want to bring with us whatever has softened us, whatever has made us more patient, more attentive, more able to recognize life where it is already being held together. And at this stage of our lives, we also want to learn how to root more deeply each time we arrive, to let belonging form slowly enough for small feet to know the ground before they are asked to leave it.

Somewhere beneath all of this is trust. Leaving now feels like part of the long curve by which return becomes possible. We do not know when we will next arrive in the places we have loved. But we know we are already carrying directions back toward them.

Maybe that is what remains with us most strongly now: not only the ache of departure, but the humility of being people who move and people who nest, people who follow currents and people who need shelter. We keep going more slowly now, more gratefully, more aware of the cost. We try to honor the people and places that have received us. We try to carry the warmth carefully. And when we can, we aim to stay long enough for new life to find its legs and wings before the next turning of the flock.

With love,

Will & Aude

Love people and use things, not the other way around. - Alex (Yeshey) Cahana M.D.

In trying to know another being well, we encounter our own capacities and limits.

What follows is a way of seeing that has grown out of our experience of trying to listen more carefully to people, places, and living systems. We offer it not as a fixed method, but as a path of inquiry.

We are writing not only as collaborators and co-authors, but as two people learning, through shared work, how to become more honest participants in the worlds we enter. Again and again, we have found that every invitation to witness, to help, or to contribute is also an invitation to be changed.

It feels like a privilege to be welcomed into places we love and admire. It can also be humbling. It takes time to land, to sense the rhythms already there, to notice what has been cared for long before we arrived, and to understand what kind of presence is actually being asked of us.

Working together in this way has become part of our own learning about belonging, essence, and relationship: to ourselves, to each other, to the people with whom we live and work, and to the living places that hold us all.

On Knowing a Village

Before we ask how to know a village, we find ourselves drawn to a prior question:

Why do we want to know at all?

Why walk slowly through a village instead of driving past it? Why sit with a neighbor long enough to hear what they fear, what they protect, what they hope for? Why watch where water moves after rain, where soil is held or lost, where elders still carry memory, and where young people gather?

When we ask how to know a living being, we are also asking how to meet it rightly: how to approach without flattening, how to listen without possessing, and how to recognize a living whole without reducing it to objects, assets, or data. That kind of knowing also needs restraint. Not everything should be exposed. Not every silence is a problem to solve. In human communities especially, care includes consent, privacy, and respect for what should remain local, relational, or unspoken. It also needs reciprocity. If we are asking people to let us learn from their lives, we need to ask what this inquiry returns to them in understanding, protection, coordination, or practical support. Otherwise even careful attention can become another form of taking.

We can catalogue what seems still, but when something feels alive to us, we usually need to follow it in time if we want to understand it at all.

Gregory Bateson wrote:

“the pattern that connects:

That phrase has stayed with us. Living form is not a pile of objects. It is a dance of interacting parts.

There is a kind of knowing that comes from distance. It sorts, measures, labels, and compares. It is often necessary. Our concern is not with measurement itself, but with what happens when it is mistaken for the whole. Inventory, statistics, and maps tell us important things, but not everything that matters about a living being.

Then there is another kind of knowing. This kind begins with attention. It lingers. It notices rhythm, response, dependence, vulnerability, adaptation, and repair. It asks not only what a thing is, but how it persists, how it changes, and what helps it flourish. This is the kind of knowing that, in our experience, grows from care.

Why know a tree? Not only to identify its species, but because it gives shade, holds soil, houses birds, survives drought, marks seasons, and changes the air we breathe. Why know a forest? Not only to estimate timber or draw boundaries, but because a forest is also a field of relations, moisture, decomposition, restraint, regeneration, and shelter. Why know a neighbor? Not only to know their role, but because shared life depends on trust, memory, reciprocity, and the possibility of mutual recognition.

And why know ourselves?

Much of what we call knowing another becomes, for us, a mirror. Our ways of seeing reveal our habits of heart and mind. We have noticed in ourselves that when we rush to classify, we can miss relationship. When we approach only for use, we can become extractive without meaning to. When we slow down enough to attend and listen, a different kind of knowing becomes possible. We do not only learn what the other is. We begin to learn who we are in relation to them.

To know any living being well is, at least sometimes, to be changed by the effort.

Imagine someone who cannot taste asking what cinnamon tastes like.

Why do they ask?

Perhaps because description can still carry relation. It cannot replace tasting, but it can offer orientation. We might describe warmth, sweetness, dryness, the way cinnamon lingers, the way it changes tea, milk, or bread. We might speak of kitchens, of memory, of comfort. They would not know cinnamon exactly as a taster knows it. Yet they might come nearer. Through careful description, something of the reality becomes available.

So it seems to us with living beings. We never fully know from the outside. There is always an interior we do not inhabit. A tree has its own life. A village has its own memory. Another person has their own inward world. We take that as a reason for humility, not a reason to stop trying. It asks for a more careful approach.

The kind of knowing we trust most feels more like a careful approximation shaped by listening.

When we try to understand a living being only by breaking it into pieces, something important seems to disappear. We see it more clearly when we approach it as a changing whole held together through patterned relations. It has boundaries, but those boundaries are also thresholds. It takes in, transforms, and gives out. It depends on conditions, coordinates through time and memory, responds to stress, and orients toward continuation. In human communities, that continuation includes meaning, dignity, obligation, joy, and care, not only survival.

This is why, when we enter a village, we want to ask:

What is moving?

What is being maintained?

What is being exchanged?

What is remembered?

What is vulnerable?

What is trying to continue?

What is trying to become?

A village is not simply a set of households on a map. It is not only infrastructure, land parcels, services, or administrative units. We find it more revealing to approach it as a living whole that makes and remakes itself through patterned relations. We do not mean this as a literal biological claim, nor do we mean that a village is always harmonious or experienced in the same way by everyone. A village may hold reciprocity and exclusion, trust and fear, shared memory and contested memory, all at once. To approach it as a living whole is not to deny its fractures, but to ask how coherence and conflict are both patterned within it. Some patterns deserve protection, and some deserve change. Sometimes what holds a village together for some depends on silence, overwork, exclusion, or unequal access for others. To know a village well also means learning where repair may require change, not only preservation.

A village has boundaries that may be territorial, social, cultural, and moral. Its flows may include water, food, money, labor, visitors, care, trust, stories, seed, nutrients, and waste. Its memory may live in ritual, kinship, governance, architecture, land use, custom, and the scar tissue of hardship. Its limits may be ecological, social, temporal, and moral, because water, labor, soil, carrying capacity, and trust are never endless. Its adaptation may be visible in how it responds to seasonality, migration, illness, conflict, changing rainfall, new roads, or shifts in livelihood. Its repair may be visible in who steps in, what is restored, what is forgiven, and what is tightened when something goes wrong. Its care may be visible in what people continue to keep alive together, even when doing so is hard.

This is also where land enters the picture for us in a deeper way. We do not feel we can know a village apart from the soil and water that sustain it. A village is held not only by relationships among people, but by relationships among people, land, rain, seed, trees, animals, pollinators, and the unseen life of the soil.

In many places, the condition of the land tells us something essential about the condition of social life. But not everything a village suffers or sustains begins inside the village. Land and social life are also shaped by weather shocks, market pressures, debt, policy, migration, land tenure, and histories of dispossession. Knowing a village well means noticing those wider forces too.

Water harvesting and erosion control practices may show whether people are slowing water, holding soil, and caring for slopes together. Soil health practices may show whether fertility is being renewed or exhausted. Seed saving, tree propagation, agroecology, biodiversity, pollinator care, and forest protection may reveal whether provisioning and regeneration are being held together. These are not only technical practices. They are signs of relationship.

The same practices don’t fit every place, and ‘local’ doesn’t automatically mean regenerative. Different ecologies ask for different forms of stewardship, and some inherited or newly introduced practices can be harmful. For us, the deeper question is whether people and land are becoming more able, over time, to retain water, build soil, support diversity, and sustain life with dignity.

When we walk through the village we live in, or when we are invited to visit another, we often find ourselves asking very simple questions.

How does water move here?

Where does it soak in, and where does it rush away?

Where is soil held, and where is it being lost?

What trees are protected, and why?

What seeds are saved?

Which species are returning, and which are disappearing?

Who knows the land well enough to notice these changes?

Who carries the memory of what this place used to be like?

Who is doing the visible work of care, and who is doing the hidden work?

How do people coordinate labor?

How do they circulate care?

How do they remember obligations?

How do they protect commons?

How do they respond when harvests fail, when youth leave, when rains shift, when trust weakens, when visitors arrive, when new possibilities emerge?

These questions have become more important to us than simply asking what assets are present.

They also help us notice what we think of as a proto-social layer of community life: those foundational patterns of reciprocity, shared responsibility, mutual aid, memory, limitation, stewardship, and care through which a living community already holds itself together.

We see this when people coordinate labor, remember obligations, maintain commons, regulate access, repair trust, share tools, steward water, save seed, care for vulnerable households, and help keep one another going through recurring relations. This changes the order of inquiry.

Maps, councils, steward groups, paper records, local ledgers, or digital systems are not what makes the village alive. They can help witness, remember, and coordinate some portion of the commitments through which the village is already being made and remade.

For us, the life of the community comes first.

So the question is not whether something can be added to a village from the outside.

The question is whether some of the village’s existing commitments are clear enough, stable enough, and collectively valued enough to be witnessed, remembered, limited where needed, and coordinated more explicitly. That feels like a very different starting point.

Don’t abandon practical tools. Villages still need maps, records, roads, budgets, water systems, service delivery, and administrative clarity. Our hope is only that these tools be used within a wider understanding of village life, so that planning does not mistake infrastructure for relationship or data for the whole. Good planning still needs numbers, budgets, tenure clarity, service standards, and technical assessment. It also needs to know whose labor is invisible, where trust is thin, which commons are under strain, and which forms of support strengthen local capacity.

In our experience, even a partial use of this proto-social lens can help people notice where care is overburdened, where labor is strained, where youth feel excluded, where soil is thinning, where water is poorly held, where commons are weakening, where trust is strong enough to build on, and where outside support is needed.

But there is something even deeper happening in the act of knowing. In knowing, we do not only learn about a living being from the outside. We begin to realize how we are connected to it and through it. We discover that we are already in relationship. As we come to know a village, a watershed, a forest, or a person more carefully, knowledge becomes a deepening of mutual awareness.

Sometimes a village can also become more aware of itself, or more modestly, the people within it can come to see their interdependence more clearly. As people come to know one another, their commons, their history, their mutual dependencies, their wounds, and their strengths more clearly, a village may begin to appear not only as a collection of households, roles, and assets, but as a living collective.

Whenever we name “the village,” we need to ask who is included in that word and who is not. Who speaks easily in public and who does not. Who carries visible work and who carries hidden work. Who belongs securely and who remains precarious. Without those questions, talk of wholeness can become a way of hiding power.

So for us, knowing is a process through which relationship becomes conscious.

This may be one of the deepest purposes of mapping, listening, dialogue, and shared inquiry. They don’t just produce information. They may also help a living whole (including ourselves) become more aware. At this point the question circles back to the one that may matter most.

Why know anyone?

Why know a neighbor, a village, a tree, a forest?

Because, in our own experience, knowing and care keep leading us back to one another.

To care, we have to notice. To notice, we have to listen. To listen, we have to allow another being or place to show us something of how it lives. This doesn’t mean we will ever know completely. We will not. But partial knowing with humility still feels better than indifference, and careful description feels better than careless use.

Can we be patient enough to follow a pattern rather than seize a label?

Can we let a village be more than a settlement, a tree more than timber, a forest more than a carbon sink, a person more than a role?

Can we bear not fully knowing while still staying close?

Can we describe with enough care that someone else might begin to sense what we have sensed, even if they cannot yet taste it directly?

This is why knowing is also about self-knowledge. We discover whether we are approaching life as owners, managers, consumers, and classifiers, or as participants, listeners, stewards, and neighbors.

For us, the ground of this inquiry is care. We want to learn how to coexist with more honesty and less domination. We want forms of knowing that support health, joy, empathetic joy in the flourishing of others, and compassion. The two of us don’t always live up to that, but it remains the direction we want to keep walking together.

So if we want to know a living village, or any living being, we keep returning to a certain order of attention.

First, attend to life itself.

Follow the boundaries, the flows, the relations, the memory, the limits, the adaptation, and the repair.

Notice what is cared for enough to be kept alive.

Notice how overlapping commitments help hold coherence together.

Then, and only then, consider which commitments might be made more explicit through local institutions, stewards, records, or digital tools.

The living system comes first, as we encounter it.

Any protocol is a later and partial expression of patterns that life may already be working through.

When we feel we are beginning to know a village, it is because we have drawn near enough to sense something of the pattern by which it keeps going. That pattern is material, relational, temporal, metabolic, and moral. It involves boundaries and exchanges, dependency and transformation, memory and adaptation, vulnerability and repair.

In human communities, one more dimension seems necessary: what people care for enough to keep alive together. We suspect something similar is true in our own lives. We become more knowable to ourselves through what we repeatedly protect, renew, and offer in relation to others.

So the question of how to know a living village feels inseparable from the question of how to be one. For us, knowing a village begins with a discipline of attention. Before we measure, classify, or propose, we try to learn what is already being kept alive, by whom, under what pressures, and with what possibilities for repair. That is the beginning we have come to trust.

A small story to leave with ..

A traveler once asked a teacher:

“Why do some words transform, while others leave no trace?”

The teacher did not answer directly.

Instead, he handed the traveler a small pouch of seeds.

They walked in silence.

First, the teacher scattered seeds across a flat stone.

They bounced, rolled, and disappeared into the dust.

Then he led the traveler to a patch of soft earth.

He knelt, loosened the soil with his hands, placed the seeds gently,

covered them, poured a little water, and waited.

Days later, they returned.

On the stone, there was nothing.

Not a crack, not a root.

In the soil, small green shoots were reaching toward the light.

The teacher said:

“The seed is the same.

The difference is the ground.”

Then he placed his hand on the earth, then on his heart.

“So it is with words.
So it is with care.
So it is with a village.
Nothing living grows where relationship cannot take root.”

My understanding has been … evolving.

Part of that change has come from reading The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee, which gave me a deeper appreciation for how powerful Darwin’s basic grammar was for biology. Part of it has also come from attending David Sloan Wilson’s masterclass on rethinking the theoretical foundation of economics, where he has been presenting what they call a multilevel economic paradigm.

I have found both experiences deeply valuable. They have helped me see why evolutionary thinking still has such explanatory force, and why people are reaching for it again in economics. Variation, replication, and selection are elegant because they reveal broad patterns that are otherwise hard to see. They help explain how institutions persist, how behaviors spread, and how systems adapt over time.

But there is also something passionate I want to say here, especially for those who love Darwin and what he made possible.

Darwin did not remain in the armchair. He got on a boat. He went out into the living world. He watched closely. He compared forms of life in relation to their environments. He let observation disturb inherited theory. He did not make biology more scientific by retreating from life, but by encountering it more directly.

That spirit still matters.

If we care about cooperation, mutual aid, and social organisms, then surely we should be deeply interested in the communities that have remained intact for generations, sometimes hundreds of years. How do they do it? What are their actual practices? How do they remember commitments? How do they handle conflict? How do they share burden? How do they keep opportunism from tearing the social fabric? How do they pass on trust, norms, and reciprocal obligations across time?

These are not secondary questions. They are central.

And this is where I keep returning to the same intuition: while Darwin’s grammar remains useful at one level, it is not the best primary grammar for economics.

It is useful for describing long-run dynamics, but it feels too distant from the actual work of economic life. It does not begin where people actually live economy together. It does not start with how communities recognize value, set boundaries, remember commitments, repair breakdowns, or move obligations between one another in ways that keep life going.

That distinction has become increasingly important to me.

Variation, replication, and selection describe how patterns persist and change across time. But curation, valuation, limitation, and exchange describe how economic coordination is enacted from within. They point to what people are actually doing when they try to organize shared life consciously.

That is why I keep returning to the four functions we have been developing through Commitment Pooling: curation, valuation, limitation, and exchange.

These functions feel closer to the lived grammar of economy. They are not meant to replace familiar categories like production, distribution, or consumption. Nor are they meant to deny that economic systems evolve. They are meant to name four recurring coordination functions that appear whenever people try to steward value together: what counts, what matters, what must be bounded, and how commitments move.

They are observable in practice, normative in implication, and designable in institutions. Communities can discuss them, revise them, and live them.

They also seem minimal in a practical sense. Without curation, nothing is recognized. Without valuation, nothing is prioritized. Without limitation, systems are easily drained, captured, or dominated. Without exchange, commitments do not circulate, settle, or connect across people and groups.

A village, a savings group, a care circle, a labor network, or a federation can actually ask: What are we curating? How are we valuing? What limits are we setting? How is exchange happening?

Those are not abstract questions. They can be discussed around a table. They can be encoded in agreements. They can be revised when conditions change. They can be lived.

This matters to me because I increasingly think economics will only become a real science when it is willing to do what biology had to do: leave the armchair, enter the field, and study living systems as they are actually practiced.

Not just markets as models. Not just incentives as abstractions. Not just isolated individuals in hypothetical choice environments. But real communities, with memory, sanctions, obligations, grief, reciprocity, trust, repair, and bounded forms of exchange.

Economics becomes more scientific, not when it becomes more sterile, but when it becomes more observational, comparative, participatory, and accountable to lived reality.

That also means economics must become something we practice, not only something we analyze.

We should not only debate cooperation. We should try to build and steward it. We should not only write papers about reciprocity. We should participate in systems where commitments are made visible, tested, fulfilled, broken, repaired, and renewed. We should not only theorize commons. We should ask what it takes to keep one alive through drought, conflict, scarcity, and temptation.

I came to this view through practice before theory.

For more than fifteen years with Grassroots Economics, beginning in places like Kitui, Kenya, I have watched communities revive rotational labor practices such as Mweria during drought. People pooled time, seeds, tools, labor, knowledge, and effort so that no one would go hungry or thirsty. Those commitments did not stop at emergency survival. They extended into home repair, water catchments, caregiving, shared rebuilding, and trust.

What mattered there was not simply that some behavior got selected over time. What mattered was that people consciously recognized what counted, valued one another’s contributions, limited harmful extraction, and exchanged commitments in ways that kept life going.

That same pattern has appeared again and again in villages, informal settlements, refugee settings, savings groups, and labor associations. The commitment itself becomes a basic unit of coordination: a strong promise involving time, resources, labor, skill, or reputation. Trust grows through fulfillment, and through the relational memory that communities carry about who showed up, who followed through, and how people responded when strain appeared.

Seen from that perspective, economics begins to look less like the management of scarce commodities and more like the stewardship of commitments.

That does not make evolutionary thinking wrong. It simply places it at a different level.

Variation, replication, and selection still matter. They help explain what happens to practices and institutions over time. But when communities are trying to coordinate consciously, the more immediate questions are different. What are we recognizing? What are we reinforcing? What are we protecting against? How are promises moving, settling, and being renewed?

At that level, curation affects variation. Valuation affects reinforcement. Limitation shapes the selective environment. Exchange influences how commitments spread, stabilize, settle, and route.

So I do not see these grammars as enemies. I see them as describing different layers of the same reality.

Evolutionary grammar helps us observe broad adaptive dynamics. A coordination grammar helps us ask where reflection, judgment, and stewardship can enter the system.

That is where consciousness becomes important.

By consciousness I do not mean anything mystical. I mean the practical capacity of individuals and groups to notice, name, remember, deliberate about, and revise the conditions of their own coordination. More than that, I mean a kind of patterned social self-perception: the ability of a group to sense what is happening in its own flows of care, labor, debt, depletion, and obligation.

This matters because communities are not only shaped by outside pressures. They also participate in shaping the conditions that shape them. They notice what is breaking down. They revise norms. They protect what they value. They repair trust. They decide what must remain bounded. In that sense, they do not merely adapt. They also steward adaptation.

This is something high-level evolutionary framing can understate, especially when viewed from communities already living commons. An evolutionary account can help explain why cooperation persists. But communities practicing commons reveal something further: cooperation is not only selected. It is cultivated through memory, care, mutual limitation, and revisable protocols of stewardship.

That difference matters.

It matters because economics is not only the study of what survives. It is also the study of how people make life possible together.

If biology needed a minimal grammar for adaptation, economics may need a minimal grammar for coordination.

By minimal, I do not mean reductive. I mean the smallest set of functions that communities can actually observe, discuss, and revise together without losing the living complexity of what they are doing.

For me, curation, valuation, limitation, and exchange are a candidate for that minimal coordination grammar.

But these four functions do not stand alone.

They only become livable through memory, authentication, and repair. Communities must be able to remember what was promised, know who is responsible, contest misleading records, and restore relationship when fulfillment breaks down. Otherwise curation becomes arbitrary, valuation becomes opaque, limitation becomes coercive, and exchange becomes brittle.

This is where commons become especially important.

Commons theory has already taught us something essential: a commons involves a resource, a community, and a set of rules. But rules alone are not enough. They must be interpreted, monitored, remembered, revised, and repaired by people with situated judgment. The life of a commons is not only in its formal structure. It is in the ongoing work of stewardship.

That is why I am not trying to replace commons theory. I am trying to look more closely at the lived work inside it.

And following that line of thought has led me toward a claim I want to hold with both seriousness and humility.

If commons are not only things we share, but capacities we actively steward together, then one of the most prevalent and foundational forms of commoning may be socio-relational: the shared, collectively stewarded capacity for care.

I mean this in three linked ways.

First, care is everywhere. It is among the most common forms of everyday commoning.

Second, it is foundational. Without care, human flourishing becomes very thin.

Third, it is prior in a practical sense. Care underwrites other commons by enabling trust, coordination, maintenance, and the capacity to uphold rules over time.

Water, air, forests, and soils remain essential commons. But they do not steward themselves. Without care, without the shared capacity to notice, remember, coordinate, and protect, there is little reason to expect they will remain commons for long.

By care here I do not mean sentimentality. I mean the practical work of checking in, feeding, transporting, teaching, repairing, listening, witnessing, and making room for one another. The capacities that make care possible, such as time, attention, energy, trust, and social availability, are finite. In that sense they can be strained, overloaded, and depleted. But with good practice they can also be renewed and expanded. That makes care governable as a commons in a very real way.

A care commons exists when a group can name what care means here, knows who can ask and who can offer it, sets norms together, witnesses follow-through, addresses strain before resentment hardens, and connects with other circles when the need exceeds its own scale. It also requires boundaries, monitoring, and workable, ideally graduated and restorative, ways of responding to misuse or overload. Otherwise care remains a sentiment rather than a stewarded commons.

In practice, what we call a community is often not one bounded circle. It is a network of overlapping pools: care circles, savings groups, labor groups, learning groups, food-growing groups, watershed groups, and mutual aid networks. The overlap itself is part of what constitutes the community.

That overlap can be deeply generative. It allows trust, reciprocity, and accountability to move across domains of life. But it can also become confusing or extractive if there is no relational memory, no boundary clarity, and no way to reconcile obligations when they collide.

This is one reason Grassroots Economics has increasingly understood community economy as polycentric: not a single monolithic structure, but overlapping pools of stewardship that sometimes interoperate, sometimes negotiate, and sometimes need to refuse one another for the sake of their own integrity.

Seen from this perspective, many monetary systems begin to look secondary to the commitments they try to represent. Currencies may be useful interfaces. They may help denominate, settle, or route value. But they are not themselves the commons. The deeper economy lies in how communities curate, value, limit, remember, and exchange actual commitments across living groups.

That is why Commitment Pooling has focused on making commitments more legible without collapsing them into one generalized token. Its purpose is not simply to count or standardize. It is to support relational memory, reciprocity, visible limitation, and coordinated exchange across overlapping pools.

But here a caution becomes necessary.

The point is not to make everything visible. A living economy needs memory, but not total exposure. It needs coordination, but not reduction. Commitments may need to become legible enough for trust, routing, and repair, yet not so flattened that care becomes surveillance, obligation becomes scorekeeping, or communities become dashboards for outside control.

Every representation changes behavior. Once care becomes a metric, commitment becomes a score, or community becomes a dashboard, people begin adapting themselves to what the system can read. A healthy coordination grammar must therefore preserve what cannot be fully counted: dignity, secrecy, context, informal care, and the right to contest the record.

What communities need is not perfect visibility, but wise legibility. Enough visibility for stewardship. Enough privacy for dignity. Enough accountability for repair. Enough local judgment for the record to remain human.

This is also why grammar is not enough.

A grammar helps communities name recurring functions. But a grammar is not yet a constitution. It does not by itself decide membership, adjudication, enforcement, emergency powers, or what happens under stress. It does not determine who can revise the rules, how conflicts are handled, or how capture is prevented.

Durable commoning depends on constitutional questions as much as grammatical ones. Who belongs? Who decides? What happens when obligations fail? How are boundaries defended without becoming oppressive? How are records contested? How does a pool remain sovereign while still interoperating with others?

These questions become especially important once commitments begin to move across groups.

The four functions do not operate only inside a single village, circle, or association. They also shape how promises travel between overlapping, sovereign pools. A healthy economy is not one mega-market and not one mega-ledger. It is a network of readable routes, local stewardship, and interoperable commitments that can move without erasing the distinctiveness of the communities that hold them.

In that sense, exchange is not only a transfer. It is also a routing problem. How do commitments move across different pools without losing meaning, accountability, or trust? How do communities cooperate without being absorbed? How do they connect without surrendering sovereignty?

These are constitutional and relational questions as much as technical ones.

From one angle, all of this is economics. From another, it is healing.

When communities are fragmented, traumatized, or subordinated, the field of reflection narrows. Curation becomes exclusion. Valuation becomes price obsession or status competition. Limitation becomes coercion. Exchange becomes extraction. Under those conditions, the problem is not only material scarcity. It is also a damaged capacity to perceive, remember, and revise life together.

Healing is not separate from economy here. It is part of what restores a group’s ability to notice what matters, tell the truth about its own conditions, set workable limits, and move commitments in ways that regenerate trust.

That is why I find myself both grateful for evolutionary theory and unsatisfied by it when it is brought too directly into economics.

It tells us a great deal about how patterns survive. But economy, as lived by communities, is not only a survival pattern. It is a stewardship practice. It is people making life possible together through promises, memory, boundaries, repair, and exchange.

So I find myself wanting to say, as carefully as I can, that biology may have needed a minimal grammar for adaptation, while economics may need a minimal grammar for coordination.

And perhaps economics will become more worthy of the name science when it is willing to do what the best sciences do: observe carefully, compare honestly, participate humbly, revise openly, and remain accountable to reality.

That means studying communities that endure. It means learning from people who actually keep commons alive. It means treating villages, care networks, labor groups, and mutual aid systems not as quaint leftovers, but as living laboratories of economic intelligence.

It also means practicing economics.

Not only measuring it.

Not only modeling it.

Not only publishing about it.

Practicing it.

For me, that candidate grammar remains simple: curation, valuation, limitation, and exchange.

Not because it explains everything.

Not because it replaces evolution.

Not because it removes the need for constitutions, memory, repair, or care.

But because it may be the smallest useful way to name how people consciously steward value together, while leaving room for the deeper work of building economies that remain livable, sovereign, and humane.

I grew up around people who were ready to go when called.

People around me were always in service.

Not everyone in the exact same way, but a large percentage of the people in my life were in direct military service or close enough to it that its rhythms shaped the air around us. Duty, sacrifice, readiness, chain of command, discipline, mission. Those were not abstract words to me. They were part of the moral landscape I grew up inside.

I think because of that, I always wanted to be in service too.

I do not mean that I necessarily wanted the uniform itself. I mean something more basic. It felt obvious to me, from early on, that I would offer my energy, attention, resources, maybe even my life, toward some cause larger than myself. The desire to be needed, to be useful, to be part of a team, has never really left me.

That desire has guided me more than any identity ever has.

And maybe that is part of why I have spent so much of my life both searching and misfitting.

For a while, that search took me into physics. I loved the seriousness of it, the rigor, the elegance, the sense that one was in service to truth. But over time there was a disillusionment. What I was striving for, who I was serving, what the work was really in aid of ... it no longer felt aligned with what I could actually offer. I began to feel misplaced. Not dramatically. Just quietly, persistently out of place. Like I had trained myself toward a form of service that did not quite need the part of me most alive.

So I moved from physics toward economics. That too was part of the same search. I was still trying to figure out what it means to be useful in the world. Still trying to find where my effort could meet real human need. That path eventually took me to the Peace Corps in Kenya.

That was another beautiful mission. Another good institution. Another place full of people trying, in earnest, to be of help.

And again there was disillusionment.

Not because the intention was false, but because I began to realize that I was not there simply to please or follow blindly the in-country directors, or any formal hierarchy. I could not give myself over to structure for its own sake. I wanted service, not obedience detached from reality. I wanted to be useful in a way that felt honest, local, and alive. I wanted to respond to what people actually needed, not only to what an organization had already decided it was prepared to recognize.

So for the last fifteen years, I set out more or less on my own.

I started a foundation. I tried to grow an organization that could hold others in the way I had wanted to be held. A place where people could safely be of service. A place where contribution, care, and practical coordination mattered more than prestige. In some small way, I think I have done that.

But there is another side to this story too, and it is important for me to say it plainly.

There has also been a kind of giving up on leadership.

Or maybe not giving up exactly, but an uneasiness with it. A returning to my roots and to that older desire to be of service, alongside a feeling that I am often out of place when I try to offer direction to others. I do not fancy myself as a leader. If anything, I have always felt more like a follower. Not passively. More that I have always wanted to align with something real and worthy, to lend myself fully to it, to join a team, to help carry the weight.

Only I could never quite find anyone to follow.

So I end up following my own imperfect sense of what is worth serving, which often feels less like a straight line than a series of returns.

That may sound like a confession of confusion. Maybe it is. At the very least, it is the vantage point from which I have come to think about protection: not as an expert above the problem, but as someone repeatedly trying to find the right way to serve within it.

The thread through all of it is still service.

And that brings me back, in a strange way, to the respect I carry for those in military service.

Nearly every member of my family has served in one way or another. I grew up with an understanding, however imperfect, that there are people who place themselves between danger and the people behind them. That there are those who stay awake while others sleep. Those who move toward threat so others may keep some ordinary peace. That deserves respect.

I do not romanticize it. But I do take it seriously.

One deep root of organized defense is a very old human impulse: someone must stand between danger and the people behind them.

Before there were states, before there were formal ranks, there were almost certainly already people keeping watch, holding a boundary, bearing fear on behalf of others. In that sense, the guardian impulse is older than ideology. It comes from the vulnerable fact of life itself.

At its best, military service is not a love of war. It is a disciplined relationship to the burden of protection. It asks some people to carry what others should not have to carry first. Sometimes they choose that burden freely, and sometimes they inherit it through family, circumstance, or country before they fully understand its cost. It asks for readiness, courage, steadiness, and the willingness to act under conditions most of us would rather never face.

A person shaped by that kind of service often knows something many civilians would rather avoid: peace is fragile. They also know that protection depends on more than good intentions. It depends on clear lines of responsibility, trustworthy coordination, and knowing who is accountable when something fails.

It does not hold on its own.

It depends on preparedness, coordination, trust, logistics, restraint, and sacrifice. It depends on people who are willing to accept cost so that others may live with less fear.

I think that is one reason I have always felt a kind of kinship with service, even though my own path took me elsewhere. The forms are different, but the impulse is not so different. To offer oneself. To be needed. To join with others in holding something larger than oneself together.

So I think a compassionate reading starts here: many people enter military service because they love something enough to protect.

They want to protect families, towns, neighbors, memory, law, children, continuity, ordinary life. They want to preserve the conditions under which people can live without terror.

That intention should be honored.

It should also be spoken of honestly. Many who serve do so out of duty, loyalty, protection, or love. But armed institutions themselves are not pure. They can defend a people, and they can also be captured by fear, politics, prestige, ambition, or empire. The language of protection itself has also often been used to justify occupation, paternalism, and forms of control that claimed to save people while overriding their agency. Respect for service becomes more credible, not less, when that tension is admitted plainly.

An honorable motive in the hearts of many who serve does not make the institution itself innocent. Respect for people who serve should never require silence about the harms institutions can cause.

That is part of the tragedy built into the role. The instrument created to prevent domination can itself become an instrument of domination. The same discipline that shields can also coerce. The same command structure that creates order can also suppress conscience.

Someone formed by service and thinking deeply about peace might understand this better than most. They are often the least romantic people in the room about force. They know what breaks. They know what force does to bodies, homes, families, land, and memory. They know that even justified force leaves debris behind: grief, injury, displacement, trauma, silence, and the hard labor of living afterward.

So peace, seen seriously, is not just the absence of battle. Peace is when ordinary life can continue without constant fear. It is when children can learn, families can gather, crops can be planted, debts can be settled, mourning can happen with dignity, and disagreement does not immediately become collapse.

Peace is not soft.

It is structured.

And that is where my own path begins to braid back into this question in a more personal way.

Because what I have been searching for all these years is not just a cause. It is a form of service that actually protects life.

Physics did not quite give me that. Economics, at least as I encountered and pursued it, did not quite give me that. The Peace Corps, beautiful as it was, did not quite give me that either, at least not in the form I had hoped. Even founding an organization did not resolve the deeper tension. I wanted to create a place where others could safely be of service, but I remained uneasy with becoming the person who others were expected to follow.

And still, following has led me.

Following the team at Grassroots Economics led toward what we came to call Commitment Pooling Protocol, a way of understanding how people coordinate care, credit, obligation, and trust. Following, in that sense, was not passivity. It was staying close to what was alive, useful, and true in the work as it emerged through relationship. And following has now led me here, today, where questions of protection, tradition, and social continuity have become vivid to me in a new way.

What if some of our inherited concepts of protection are no longer enough, not because the people who lived by them were wrong or naive, but because the terrain has changed beneath us?

Not wrong. Not dishonorable. Just outdated.

We inherited many models of protection from a world where danger came from outside in visible form. An incursion. A raid. A siege. An invading force. In that world, protection naturally took the shape of walls, secrecy, strong perimeters, command structures, and concentrated force. That logic still has its place. There are still real dangers. There are still moments when someone must hold the line.

But much of what threatens people now does not arrive in visible military form.

It arrives through financial extraction, institutional opacity, data capture, narrative manipulation, attention capture, and systems that reshape desire while claiming merely to serve it. Power often no longer comes only at the border. Sometimes it arrives through the platform, the market, the bureaucracy, the development apparatus, even the very systems that claim to protect.

The danger is often already inside the room.

This changes what protection must mean.

It also changes what I have come to think about privacy, visibility, and security.

Over time, this changed not only how I thought about service, but how I thought about safety.

I think there is a deeper layer underneath many questions about privacy. Most of what we call private systems are not actually private in any durable sense. Too often, they become honeypots.

They gather information into one place under the promise of safety, and then everything depends on that one place remaining trustworthy. One relayer. One admin. One server. One subpoena. One frightened participant. One compromised insider. In many cases, the system is not just vulnerable to this. It quietly depends on it.

Even sophisticated stacks often assume a stable surrounding environment that simply does not exist in many real-world contexts.

So I do not believe perfect privacy, in the way people often imagine it, is the answer by itself. In practice, it can create the illusion of safety while concentrating risk.

I say that from experience.

In 2012, our entire team, along with community members near Mombasa, were arrested.

We were not using blockchain. We were not using digital systems. We were using paper vouchers and paper ledgers. Total privacy, in a sense. No chain. No Internet. No public dashboard. No transparency layer. Just paper, relationships, and trust.

And still, a local police station decided they did not like what we were doing.

That experience clarified something in me very deeply.

Privacy alone does not protect you.

Sometimes it leaves you more vulnerable.

Because when something is invisible, it is easier to misrepresent, easier to criminalize, easier to shut down without scrutiny. Reality itself is hidden, so power can narrate it however it wants.

What protected us was not privacy.

It was legibility in the right direction.

We were working openly as a nonprofit, with local leadership, with transparent books. We were helping make people’s real economic lives visible. A woman paying school fees over time with tomatoes. Debts being settled across multiple parties. Credit clearing through relationships rather than cash. These were not novel abstractions. They were longstanding human practices made legible.

And when the case reached the high court, that visibility mattered.

A woman stood and testified that she did not have the national currency, that she would gladly use it if she did, and that she simply wanted to send her child to school.

That truth, once visible, changed the outcome.

We won the court case.

More than that, the process revealed that the system trying to stop us was out of alignment with people’s lived reality. Exposure did not weaken us. It strengthened the legitimacy of what people were already doing.

That stayed with me because it touched something older in my own search.

I had spent years trying to find how to be useful, how to serve, how to belong to something real without disappearing into hierarchy or pretending power was cleaner than it is. And here, again, the lesson was not that invisibility saves us. It was that protection sometimes requires the right kind of visibility.

Sometimes being seen is dangerous.

Sometimes being unseen is.

That is why I keep returning to a harder question.

What must remain private, and what must be made legible so that people are protected, supported, and able to coordinate?

And legible to whom?

Because transparency is not one-directional. If people are visible to a system, then the system must also be visible to them. If commitments are legible, governance must also be legible. Otherwise it is not transparency. It is surveillance.

This, too, feels connected to what I inherited from the world of service around me.

Real protection is not domination. It is not control for its own sake. It is not secrecy for its own sake. It is not obedience detached from reality. It is not forcing people into safety while hollowing out their agency.

The deeper challenge is harder than that.

How do we build systems in which coercion is harder to hide, capture is harder to maintain, refusal is more survivable, and abuse is less rewarded?

That is a different kind of protection.

Less like a wall. More like an ecology.

It depends on selective legibility, mutual accountability, shared governance, and semi-permeable boundaries. Not everything should be public. Not everything should be hidden. Some things must remain protected because exposure would invite retaliation, predation, or harm. And some things must be visible because otherwise care disappears, power hides, and injustice goes unchallenged.

I do not think this problem is solved.

I think I have been circling it for much of my life, across disciplines, organizations, countries, and failures of fit. The desire to be in service has never left me. Neither has the feeling of being slightly misplaced inside the forms already available.

Maybe that is why following has mattered so much to me. I wanted to find something worthy to follow. Something real enough to align with. Something that protected life without demanding blindness.

Not finding that clearly, I kept moving. Physics. Economics. Peace Corps. Foundation work. Grassroots Economics. Commitment pooling.

In one sense, it is a strange path.

In another, it is all one path.

A long search for a form of service that tells the truth about power, honors the burden of protection, and still leaves room for human dignity.

For me, this is where my family’s tradition of service and my own path finally begin to meet. One taught me respect for discipline, sacrifice, and the reality of danger. The other taught me to pay attention to ordinary lives, local wisdom, informal systems of care, and the ways people already support one another when formal institutions fail.

Together they have brought me to a conviction.

Protection is not only about shielding. It is also about making reality visible in ways that allow truth, care, and coordination to stand their ground.

Not everything must be seen.
Not everything should be hidden.
The task is discernment.

Witnessing commitment pooling has taught me that what should be visible are the commitments that sustain life, the flows that shape survival, the governance that exercises power, the care that formal systems overlook, and the injustices that thrive in darkness.

What should remain protected are the intimate details that expose people to retaliation, predation, or unnecessary harm.

That balance is not simple. It cannot be solved with slogans. It requires humility, judgment, governance, and continual revision.

But I have come to believe that if we get it right, even partially, we may discover a more durable kind of protection than either secrecy or exposure alone can offer.

A protection that does not depend on pretending power is benevolent.
A protection that does not depend on making people invisible.
A protection that does not depend on walls alone.

Something more honest.

Something that accepts the logic of power and then changes the conditions under which power operates.

Maybe that is the work now.

Not to choose between force and care.
Not to choose between privacy and legibility.
Not to choose between the seriousness of service and the tenderness of peace.

But to build systems worthy of the people they claim to protect.

I think that is the form of service I have been trying to find all along.