The Social Soil Guild session began with a few short videos, three learning games, and the presentation I often use when working with communities. The conversation quickly moved beyond a technical account of vouchers or software. We found ourselves talking about promises that meet old conflicts, cash entering and leaving a pool, limits, reputation, bad curation, emergency support, competing offers, and the difference between recording a commitment and actually carrying it.

One distinction we kept coming back to is that Commitment Pooling is a protocol and Sarafu.Network is just one implementation of it. A pool does not become trustworthy because it is digital, decentralized, or placed on a blockchain. Its usefulness depends on what is admitted, how commitments are valued, which limits protect the pool, how exchange and settlement occur, who holds the memory, and what happens when something goes wrong.

The discussion also made the educational work feel more urgent for me. Three games we went over: Recipes, Cellular, and Social Soil let us start to see coordination rather than merely hear a theory about it. The questions raised in the meeting point toward the next step ... a more serious role-playing environment in which difficult relations can unfold over time. A player should be able to encounter unclear commitments, bad actors, incompatible needs, institutional pressure, refusal, repair, and nonviolent character departure inside a world that remains safe enough to examine.

Sadly - no video was captured, despite my intention to record and share the session. I am sorry about that, but instead I have written a detailed account of what we discussed and collected the materials shared during the call. (will get zoom recordings working properly next time).

Several members spoke candidly about unfinished projects and experiments that had failed as well as succeeded, so I ask that the detailed record remain within The Guild.

If you want to join these group bi-monthly guild sessions or want 1 on 1 sessions please message me or become a paid subscriber.

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Late on a rainy night in March 1843, a Black family escaping slavery arrived at a farmhouse in southern Indiana and received shelter. The house belonged to one of my Quaker ancestors.

By the next day, the people pursuing the family had reached the house. They demanded that the fugitives be surrendered. My relative refused. A struggle followed, and he fought the men badly enough to drive the group away for a time. The escaping family continued north.

Three months later, Quaker elder’s came to see him because he had done something forbidden … “striking his fellow man in anger.” He faced disownment, the Quaker version of being kicked out of the community. This was only one episode in a much longer conflict that eventually led him to leave the Quakers.

I keep coming back to that sequence. Shelter someone. Refuse the people hunting them. Fight. Protect the family. Then answer for the fighting.

These people lived inside a particular moral world. To understand even a bit of my father’s line, I had to understand that world.

Ireland

The oldest established ancestor in this particular line was born around 1689. The family history and genetics point toward Ireland. That places the family inside a strange religious movement.

The early Quakers, also known as the Society of Friends, had no professional priesthood at the center of worship and called their buildings meetinghouses rather than churches. They gathered, often in silence, and expected religious conviction to appear in everyday conduct. Plain speech and plain clothing mattered. Drinking, dishonest dealing, marriage, military service, debts, and disputes could all become concerns of the meeting.

I used to picture Quakerism as a gentle form of individual spirituality. In my reading, these communities could also be demanding, intrusive, and remarkably organized. The tension among conscience, religious authority, and reverence becomes a recurring thread among my ancestors.

Most likely, my ancestors belonged to the English-speaking Protestant settler population of seventeenth-century Ireland and became Quaker there rather than arriving as an already Quaker family.

I can’t tell exactly why my father’s Quaker ancestor left Ireland. By his generation, the first fierce persecution of Friends had begun to ease, but refusing tithes and oaths still carried costs, while rents, weak trade, and uncertain harvests made ordinary life difficult. Pennsylvania offered land, work, religious freedom, and, perhaps most importantly, other Friends already waiting there.

They were dissenters from the Protestant establishment, but also beneficiaries of a Protestant settlement. They could be persecuted by the state while still occupying a privileged position relative to dispossessed Irish Catholics. They could renounce violence after arriving through a world created by violence.

My ancestor may have left one plantation society because another settler colony offered his family better terms. The freedom he found and the dispossession beneath it became part of the same inheritance.

A road and a piece of paper

By the early eighteenth century, my father’s family line becomes visible in Pennsylvania. Soon afterward, according to the family history, one of my ancestors and one of his sons were commissioned to build a road from the Marsh Creek settlement, around present-day Gettysburg, toward Lancaster and York.

I can picture farms becoming connected to markets, children to possible spouses, and isolated Quaker meetinghouses to other meetinghouses. Letters, gossip, debts, tools, visitors, and news begin moving along the same strip of cleared ground. My family was building roads while belonging to a religious network that had developed its own way of moving people between communities.

When Friends relocated, they normally requested a certificate of removal. Their old meetinghouses recorded their standing, and the new meetinghouses received them. Two brothers in my family received certificates when they moved from Pennsylvania to North Carolina, and the genealogy keeps recording these transfers for generations.

A person could cross hundreds of miles carrying a handwritten statement that amounted to this: These people know me. I belonged here. Receive me there.

Truth without an oath

My Quaker ancestors kept elaborate records and were also deeply suspicious of formal oaths. During the Revolution, two successive generations in my direct line refused to swear allegiance to the state. Their objection was that Friends believed a special oath placed a double standard on truth.

If my sworn statement is especially truthful, what exactly is ordinary speech?

My fourth-great-grandfather married without the required Quaker approval and was disowned in 1778, although he was later restored. The family history describes marriage contrary to discipline and marriage outside the Society as common causes of disownment, along with drinking, dishonesty, and other conduct thought incompatible with membership.

It was certainly not a community in which everyone followed their own conscience and expected the neighbors to mind their business.

That same ancestor accumulated about 390 acres in southwestern Virginia and helped establish a meetinghouse on the land. In 1794, the county paid him for killing two old wolves. Three years later, he transferred land rights to the Quaker meetinghouse and burial ground.

The following summer, he fell while working on his barn, broke his neck, and died.

Into Indiana

His widow and children eventually moved west through Tennessee and Kentucky into Indiana Territory. The stories in the genealogy remember the early Indiana years as frightening. Men were killed and wounded. Families slept in forts and returned to work their farms during daylight.

In one story, an ancestor returned to her cabin and discovered that someone described only as an “Indian” had taken her mattress, sliced it open, and left the feathers to blow away. A quiet image beside all the accounts of ambushes and militia: an empty cabin and feathers scattered through the clearing.

The danger to the settlers was real and of course, so was the other history occurring on the same land.

These families were entering long-inhabited territory while American treaties, militia, surveys, roads, farms, and county governments were making their settlement permanent. The family genealogy naturally remembers events from inside the fort. It does not preserve an equivalent account from the people outside it.

It was not a landscape that had been waiting empty for my relatives to arrive.

My third-great-grandfather chose to remain when some members of the family retreated south. He became a captain in the Indiana militia, then township clerk, county commissioner, and justice of the peace. He eventually accumulated around 600 acres and helped build the first permanent courthouse.

Something had shifted. His ancestors had refused oaths and struggling with military service. Now their descendant was helping build the local state itself.

Back to the rainy night

One relative and his wife were Quaker elders who sheltered numerous people escaping slavery. They also hosted Black families who later remained in the community. Their son and his wife are the couple in the rainy-night story I began with.

They were prosperous farmers and deeply involved with the Quaker meetings, overseeing schools and carrying minutes to quarterly gatherings. In March 1843, according to the family account, the Black family arrived, their pursuers followed, the confrontation happened, and the meeting later visited the homeowner over his violence.

Ten years later, that same relative entered an extended dispute with the Society over a contract, his conduct, and the use of alcohol. Friends repeatedly visited him. He defended himself in writing. Finally, he was disowned no longer a Quaker.

Even he was apparently capable of becoming thoroughly fed up with the Quakers. His father supplies one more story that I cannot leave out. During the Civil War, robbers entered the elderly man’s home, put a rope around his neck, and threatened to hang him unless he revealed where his money was hidden.

He replied, “Hang away, thee cannot cheat me out of my many days.”

The robbers searched the house, but apparently missed most of his money because it was hidden in a molasses jar.

Six years for California

My direct line continued through Indiana, where my second-great-grandfather was orphaned young and worked on neighboring farms. He heard about California and wanted to go, but he lacked the money. He worked and saved for six years before he could afford the journey.

In 1855, he left with a sister and brother-in-law, sailed toward Panama, crossed the isthmus by caravan, and took another ship north into San Francisco Bay. He went into the Amador County goldfields and found that the prosperity he had imagined was not there.

So he returned to Indiana.

Two years later, he came west again, this time bringing a brother and two sisters with him. Eventually he bought 100 acres near Ukiah, began raising hops, prospered, married, and expanded the ranch.

The family story I inherited does not come from striking gold. It comes from failing at gold, going home, and trying California again.

Ukiah, of course, was already inhabited. The family farm belonged to the nineteenth-century transformation of Pomo homelands into settler farms, ranches, roads, and towns. My family belonged to a religious culture capable of organizing resistance to slavery and suspicious of coercion, yet it also benefited from successive waves of settler expansion.

After the old Quaker world dispersed

The branches did not remain inside one religious community. Some stayed Friends for generations. Others became Methodist or Baptist, served in wars, ran stores, worked on railroads, taught school, practiced medicine, and moved to Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, Colorado, Oregon, and California.

The old network of meetinghouses and certificates gradually became a much more familiar American scatter. My family history itself changes texture. There are fewer meetinghouse minutes and more occupations, divorces, military units, newspaper clippings, and street addresses.

One branch eventually reached Pueblo, Colorado. In the 1950s, they opened a small ceramics shop, with their apartment behind it. My relative was an accomplished ceramic artist and continued running the shop after her husband died in 1968.

One old newspaper page from October 1975 survives in the genealogy (above). The photograph shows the little storefront with CERAMICS stretched across the awning. My relative was raped and murdered in the rooms behind the shop. A neighbor who walked in before the attacker had left was also severely assaulted.

I do not know how to fit this into a grand migration story, and perhaps that is the point. A family history can stretch across oceans and territories and still arrive at an ordinary storefront, an apartment behind it, and terrible randomness.

The epic and the ordinary are not separate histories.

What traveled

On paper, my father’s line moves cleanly enough: Ireland, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, southwestern Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky, Indiana, Panama, San Francisco, and finally Ukiah.

But the more I read the old family history, the memorable things become smaller.

A certificate handed from one meetinghouse to another. A refusal to swear allegiance to the state. Two old wolves. A barn. Feathers outside a fort. A frightened family arriving in the rain. A fist thrown at the men pursuing them. An old man under a noose. Money in a molasses jar. Six years of wages. A failed goldfield. A ceramics shop.

Even the question of how much of me is “Quaker” feels a little silly. If I reduce the documented branch to pedigree arithmetic, it is at most a few percent of the family tree.

Yet families inherit more than chromosomes. They inherit phrases, habits, disputes, institutions, and stories about what happened when somebody knocked on a door. Most of those things eventually disappear. Some survive in forms nobody would recognize.

I cannot draw a direct or straight line from an Irish or Pennsylvania meetinghouse to anything I believe today. I can only notice that my father’s line, much like my mother’s, spent several centuries moving while repeatedly rebuilding some way of living with other people.

What makes this family ordinary is that the story is made of migration, reinvention, contradiction, luck, violence, work, faith, and people trying again somewhere farther west. We kept traveling west until eventually someone traveled so far that “west” stopped making much sense.

Honoring my ancestors, for me, means allowing their actual lives to remain complicated and asking …

What did they carry with them, and what did they leave for the next people to notice?

I would especially love to hear:

• What does gift mean to you or in your language?

• Does the word Gift make the commitment clearer, or does it hide the obligation?

• Do Gift Lists / Baskets and Gift Exchanges feel more understandable than voucher registries and pools?

• What important confusion have I missed?

Please vote, comment, disagree, improve it, or suggest something completely different.

~*~

Here is my take on the subject ….

For fifteen years, I have asked people to use a word almost nobody seemed to like.

Voucher.

We chose voucher back then because we did not want a community-issued commitment to be confused with Kenyan shillings. We did not want anyone to think that participating businesses were pretending to print national currency, misleading the government, or trying to replace the money issued by the state.

Eco-Pesa operated in 2010 and 2011 using printed vouchers, initially backed by donor funds. Bangla-Pesa followed in 2013 as a collaborative credit system backed by the goods and services offered by participating businesses. After Bangla-Pesa was publicly accused of being an illegal rival currency, six of us were jailed and charged. The charges were later cleared, and the program resumed.

Keeping these instruments distinct from national currency was crucial, and still is. In the communities where I worked, money was often understood as national currency, with state power, taxation, scarcity, and colonial history behind it.

Still, we needed a generic word for an object that could represent commitments for real goods and services while keeping responsibility tied to the person or group that issued it.

So we chose voucher.

And, honestly, almost nobody ever liked it.

Fifteen years of “….what?”

In my experience, voucher, is not a living everyday word for most people. But after more than fifteen years of introducing these systems, the reaction has been consistent.

I tell someone:

“Think about something you offer, and express it as a voucher.”

They look at me.

“A what?”

When people do know the word (voucher), it often brings up discount coupons, relief-agency chits, prison meal tickets, or some small conditional thing issued by an institution. It does not immediately suggest or invoke dignity, abundance, care, teaching, food, transport, skill, or a future that somebody can help create.

And yet we kept using it.

Community Asset Vouchers. Digital vouchers. Voucher registries. Voucher limits. Voucher redemption. Pools of Vouchers. Vouchers on Sarafu.Network. Ohmy….

A pseudo-academic-ish word chosen partly so we would not have to say money.

Kinda lame.

Sorry, everyone, for fifteen years of that.

The Grassroots Economics team has discussed alternatives for a long long time. Recently, I think we finally made some headway.

Gift card

Whenever we explain what a voucher actually does, we often say:

“It is like a gift card.”

Suddenly, many business owners understand.

A restaurant gift card can be purchased today and redeemed later for meals. A transport gift card can be redeemed for rides. A shop gift card can be passed to somebody else. The plastic or paper or card stock is not the value. What matters is the issuer’s undertaking to accept the instrument back under stated terms.

The analogy isn’t perfect. Many of the commitments we work with are not conventional prepaid retail gift cards, and some are admitted to an Exchange (pool) before a final customer has paid the issuer. Transfer, financing, custody, guarantees, and regulation can also differ. “Gift card” is therefore an explanation, not a legal classification.

Still, the explanation generally works.

So why not call the public-facing object a Gift Card?

That language fits many businesses. Businesses already understand gift cards, tickets, prepaid services, loyalty balances, and store credit. But it does not fit every person or relationship. Someone offering childcare, listening, farming, house repair, teaching, or community labor is not necessarily creating a commercial gift card.

And, these days, there is often no physical card.

So why not drop the card?

Gift.

……... ! ? Gift ? !

Before somebody sends me a dictionary definition of gift, I know. ….
Merriam-Webster: Gift …. “Something voluntarily transferred by one person to another without compensation.”

Fine, dictionary. You got me.

That is a valid ordinary and legal sense… but this is not the only way gifts have lived in human societies.

Gift scholarship has long examined practices that create relationships, expectations, status, obligation, gratitude, and delayed reciprocity. Marcel Mauss famously organized his research around giving, receiving, and returning. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about gift economies through reciprocity, gratitude, abundance, interdependence, and responsibility to the living world.

I wrestled with this tension in an earlier piece, Gift Economy: When the Basket Comes Back Full. The notion of freely giving is real and valid … So is the gift basket coming back, perhaps later, perhaps fuller, perhaps carrying something completely different.

so … I am making a practical proposal:

Replace Voucher and use Gift as a defined public term, in the Gift Card sense, for a portable and redeemable commitment.

A Gift can be purchased, given, or exchanged under its terms. Calling it a Gift does not mean that every transfer is gratuitous or that every holder received it for free.

Mweria was never a voucher

Looking more carefully at Mweria and other forms of rotating labor made the word voucher feel even stranger for me. (Note: we started using the term voucher well before we began relating this work to Mweria.)

In parts of coastal Kenya where we live, I have heard Mweria used for locally organized collective labor. In a Mweria, people may gather to prepare a field, harvest, repair a roof, cook, care for children, or do work that would overwhelm one household alone. Another gathering can later concentrate effort somewhere else. Contribution and expectation may be carried through embodied participation, memory, testimony, reputation, emotion, custom, seasonal timing, and the sequence of turns.

In the Mweria practices I have encountered, participants were not walking around issuing one another gift cards or carrying vouchers. There may be no exact statement saying:

“You owe me three days of labor.”

Instead, there can be a relational understanding:

“People came when I needed them. I will come when others need me.”

The reciprocity may be delayed and approximate. One person contributes heavy labor, another cooks, another provides tools, another cares for children, and another contributes later after recovering from illness. Fulfillment may take a different form from the original contribution.

An aspect of that relation feels closer to what I want the word Gift to evoke than anything the word voucher evokes.

But Mweria contributions are not simply a Gift either. Kinship, friendship, ritual, duty, belonging, care, and locally specific concepts may describe the relationship much better.

Local words and participant interpretations must retain priority. People can call it whatever they want …. this is normal on Sarafu Network for people to call their Voucher something like Sally’s Help.

The movement I am trying to name is simple enough to feel in the body:

Someone offers.

Someone receives.

Someone remembers.

Someone responds.

The Gift moves.

Naming …

For a moment, I can suspend the question, “Is this money, a voucher, credit, or a Gift?” …… long enough to examine how the object is actually given and what each description reveals or conceals.

To the issuer (giver), the object may be given as future responsibility. To the holder (recipient), it may appear as a possible meal, ride, lesson, or repair. To a steward, it may appear as accepted exposure under a limit. To a business, it can appear as advance demand and future delivery. To a regulator, lawyer, or accountant, it appears through another horizon of rules and consequences. To somebody receiving it from a friend, it may appear as care.

These are different profiles of one institutional object whose identity needs to be maintained across people, times, interfaces, and acts. The identity is not guaranteed. It depends on an identifiable issuer, intelligible terms, clear Offerings behind the Gift, a history that can be corrected, and shared evidence of what has or has not happened.

Every public word opens a horizon. Voucher brings along institutions, discounts, conditions, aid programs, and low-value chits. Gift brings generosity, freedom, celebration, relationship, blessing, and also possible obligation. Both terms carry biases.

The name changes what people anticipate before they read the terms.

…. I don’t think there is a correct word. (and atm I really don’t want to invent a brand new term)

so ..

Does this word help people encounter the actual relation, its horizons, its responsibilities, and its possible fulfillment, or does it cover them over?

Of course … that question requires listening, translation, interface testing, participant correction, and attention to what people actually understand. So I am sharing that listening journey here with you.

From Gift Lists to Gift Exchanges

The vocabulary can start to simplify..

Offerings are the goods, services, labor, care, access, and other responses people or organizations can provide.

Gifts make particular Offerings portable and redeemable under stated terms.

A Gift List (basket?) curates Gifts that somebody recognizes, recommends, or wants to bring together. (this is what we would call a pool registry or curation).

A Gift Exchange adds actual holdings, values, limits, fees, permissions, and exchange rules to a List. (This is what we would call a Pool)

The Gift List idea came alive for me through Spotify. Anybody can make a playlist. The playlist does not create the songs, own the artists, or guarantee the quality of the music. It curates things that already exist and brings them together in a meaningful way.

Imagine that anybody could make a Gift List.

A person could create My Favorite Local Food Gifts. A neighborhood could create Things We Need Nearby. A cooperative could create Regenerative Agriculture Gifts. A business association could curate its members. A project group could curate Gifts connected to a shared mission.

A mixed List might also display national currencies, or other accepted resources.

At first, the List is only curation.

Listing is not backing. Listing is not custody. Listing is not a guarantee.

Then somebody places actual resources behind the List and establishes the exchange rules (aka a pool). It sets values, Gift Limits, fees, permissions, inventory rules, guarantees, pause conditions, and routes.

At that point, the List becomes a Gift Exchange.

The technical layer may call it an active commitment pool. The public experience can be simpler:

“These are the Gifts and other resources we recognize. This is what is available. These are the rules for exchange.”

The cycle can be written like this:

Offer → Commit → Gift → Give or Exchange → Receive → Redeem → Fulfill or Repair → Reciprocate → Offer again

The Gift Economy I am describing here is one where exchange remains connected to visible Offerings, identifiable issuers, finite capacity, responsibility, memory, fulfillment, and repair.

It is movement with memory.

Credit access emerges when an Exchange accepts, values, and limits an issuer’s Gifts, then allows the issuer to obtain resources from the Exchange’s actual holdings.

Suppose a bakery needs $300 for flour. An Exchange accepts $300 worth of the bakery’s future meal Gifts …

The bakery now has Exchange Access.

That access depends on the Exchange’s valuation, remaining Gift Limit, fees, guarantees, route conditions, and actual inventory. It is not determined by the bakery alone.

Why I like the term Gift

I keep coming back to Gift. Voucher tells me that something represents something else. Commitment tells me that somebody is answerable. Promise tells me that a relationship extends into the future.

Gift can hold all three ideas while giving people an immediate bridge through the familiar Gift Card.

Gift begins with what somebody can provide.

A Gift can be purchased, given, exchanged, redeemed.

A Gift points back toward a real Offering and an identifiable issuer.

Gift supports the language of Gift Lists and Gift Exchanges.

Gift also opens a path toward a deeper Gift Economy, where value can circulate through relationships rather than terminating in isolated transactions.

It is imperfect.

That may be part of why it works.

So, should we do it?

I am not announcing a final renaming. I am asking.

Should we replace the public-facing word Voucher with Gift on Sarafu.Network and in our general writing and trainings at Grassroots Economics?

Should the underlying technical language remain Commitment or Voucher where precision, compatibility, accounting, or legal review requires it?

I would like to encourage everyone to express and share their Gifts ….

Everyone has some gift.

Listening. Caring. Cooking. Growing. Repairing. Teaching. Transporting. Building. Organizing. Remembering. Making people laugh at exactly the moment nobody thought laughter was possible.

Not every gift needs to be represented as a token.

But where somebody genuinely wants to make an Offering portable, redeemable, and exchangeable, perhaps Gift is finally the word we have been looking for.

…
After fifteen years of voucher, I am ready for a change.

Appendix: Working Vocabulary

More Layers

• Public and interface term: Gift

• Plain definition: a portable, redeemable commitment

• Business analogy: a Gift Card without the card

• Relational language: an offer or promise to provide something

• Technical and research category: Commitment

• Legacy or context-specific term: Voucher

• Implementation term: token, balance, paper note, ledger entry, smart contract, record, or another representation

• Legal description: whatever classification applies to the instrument under applicable law
  Local description: the words participants consider meaningful in their own practices and languages

The Offering is the actual good, service, labor, care, access, or response.

The Commitment is the issuer’s undertaking to provide it.

The Gift is the human-facing, portable, redeemable object carrying that undertaking.

The record or token is the medium through which the Gift is represented and moved.

A café might issue a Gift redeemable for meals on its menu. A farmer might issue a Gift redeemable for a produce basket. A mechanic might issue a Gift for repairs. A teacher might issue a Gift for lessons.

Each Gift should make some basic facts visible:

• who issued it;

• what it can be redeemed for;

• quantity, quality, place, and time conditions;

• whether it can be transferred or exchanged;

• what evidence counts as redemption and practical fulfillment;

• which guarantees exist, if any;

• what happens if capacity changes or fulfillment fails;

• who can contest, revise, release, or repair the undertaking.

Not every Offering needs to become a Gift.

Not every meaningful gift should become a token.

Listening, care, friendship, ceremony, intimacy, grief, and mutual aid can lose something when they are forced into transferable accounting objects. Formalization should be chosen, not assumed.

The Gifts held by other people or Exchanges remain Outstanding Gifts until they are fulfilled, released, expired under valid terms, or otherwise resolved.

Warm language shouldn’t soften the accounting fact:

Outstanding Gifts are unfulfilled issuer obligations.

Depending on their terms, use, and jurisdiction, they may also be treated as liabilities, debt, prepaid value, vouchers, contracts, payment instruments, or something else.

The public and technical language can remain paired:

• Gift Limit: the Exchange’s acceptance or exposure limit for that Gift

• Exchange Access: the resources currently available through accepted Gifts

• Outstanding Gifts: unfulfilled commitments

• Redemption: presentation of a Gift to its issuer

• Practical fulfillment: provision of the stated Offering

• Remedy: the agreed response when fulfillment does not occur

A swap or gift exchange does not eliminate the obligation. It changes the holder.

Fulfillment, release, or another valid remedy closes the underlying commitment.

Cosmo-Local Credit can then be described as a network of independent Gift Exchanges. Each Gift Exchange chooses which Gifts and other resources it accepts, how it values them, how much exposure it permits, what inventory it holds, and what guarantees it requires. Compatible standards allow Gifts and money-like resources to be routed between Exchanges while issuance, redemption, stewardship, and responsibility remain local.

The cosmo part is the shared protocol, open software, discovery, and routing.

The local part is the heavy reality: who grows the food, who repairs the bicycle, where the Gift can be redeemed, who stewards the Exchange, what a community values, and who remains answerable when something goes wrong.

Or, more simply:

Local Gifts. Local responsibility. Global pathways.

Overlapping Exchanges can connect wherever they recognize compatible Gifts or other resources, while retaining the right to refuse a route.

While in France I began reading about a wedding that was supposed to end a war.

The bride was Marguerite de Valois, a Catholic princess, the sister of King Charles IX, and the woman later remembered as Queen Margot. The groom was Henry of Navarre, a Protestant prince and one of the principal leaders of the French people known as Huguenots. Their marriage was intended to bind together two religious and political worlds that had spent a decade tearing France apart.

I heard of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. I knew that Catholics had killed roughly 1000 Protestants in Paris in 1572. But I had not understood the shape of the event. I had not understood that the massacre came only six days after a royal wedding presented to the country as an act of reconciliation.

The wedding bells had barely stopped ringing before the killing began.

I read this history through a story carried on my mother’s side of the family: that one branch of our ancestors was French Huguenot, that their community was affected by the long persecution of French Protestants, and that the family line was eventually driven out of France and made its way to America.

In France, I began asking how a belief about access to God could become a mark by which a person might be excluded, dispossessed, forcibly converted, or killed. I began asking how a marriage arranged by rulers could gather one political faction into a hostile city, how an order issued inside a palace could become permission for neighbors to murder neighbors, and how the prince at the center of it all could later change religions and become king while ordinary Huguenot families were left to hide, conform, or flee.

I also began to see this Huguenot line as only one strand among many. Elsewhere in my mother’s family were Lutheran migrants from Holstein in northern Germany, remembered as having fled religious persecution in the eighteenth century. Their path led through Philadelphia and then into Virginia and Tennessee. Another branch reaches into nineteenth-century London, where my great-great-great-grandfather was a Jewish greengrocer. He took his family across the Atlantic on a sailing ship. Over succeeding generations, that line met the Holstein line, and their descendants later met the Huguenot line.

Those families did not know that they were traveling toward me exactly. They were trying to reach a church, a marriage, a livelihood, a home, a field, and a safer future. I can imagine some might have had thought about their great great great great grandchildren but ‘I’ am not the purpose of their journeys.

And centuries after a royal wedding in Paris, my mother cleaned wealthy people’s toilets so that three boys could grow up in the United States as what appeared to be a normal American family.

One of those boys was me.

(enjoy the soundtrack)

A Different Road to God

What attracted the Huguenots was not an escape from religion but a different road to God. They believed that Scripture and divine grace did not require the Catholic Church to stand as the single indispensable mediator between a person and the divine. They still built churches, appointed pastors, worshipped together, and disciplined their communities. What they challenged was Rome’s exclusive authority.

In sixteenth-century France, that was never going to remain a private spiritual disagreement. The Catholic Church was woven into government, education, marriage, burial, law, and public identity. To question the Church was also to disturb the structure through which the kingdom understood obedience and belonging.

The wedding gathered much of the Huguenot leadership in Paris under the appearance of royal protection. Four days later, Admiral Coligny was shot. During the night of August 23–24, the court authorized the killing of leading Huguenots. Once royal soldiers acted, local hatred acquired the appearance of permission. Neighbors knew who attended Mass, who worshiped as a Protestant, and which homes and shops belonged to Huguenots. Power gave fear a signal, and the killing spread.

Henry of Navarre survived. Under pressure he conformed to Catholicism, later returned to Protestant leadership, and eventually became Henry IV of France. To secure the throne, he entered the Catholic Church again. He granted Huguenots limited protection through the Edict of Nantes in 1598, but later kings gradually stripped those protections away. In 1685, Louis XIV revoked the edict, leaving Protestant families to convert, worship secretly, or flee.

A prince could change religions and remain a prince.

Ordinary families had to change their lives.

I don’t know exactly what each of my Huguenot ancestors believed. But I can understand the attraction of a faith that insisted no single earthly institution owned the road to God. I can also understand why such a belief frightened an institution whose spiritual authority had become inseparable from political power.

The Catholic Church did not disappear, and neither did Catholic faith (Hello to my Catholic friends!). But over the centuries, its ability to define one compulsory public religion and stand beside the state as an almost unquestionable authority declined. That decline was gradual, uneven, and sometimes violent.

It is worth remembering because today’s power structures also present themselves as permanent. Governments, churches, corporations, financial systems, and technologies can all begin to look like part of nature itself. Yet their power depends partly on people continuing to believe, obey, participate, and imagine no alternative.

The lesson for me is not that every institution is wicked or every rebellion liberating. It is to be cautious whenever any structure claims exclusive access to truth and then uses fear to defend that claim.

Honoring my Ancestors

There is a great deal of talk about honoring our ancestors. I appreciate it, but sometimes the word ancestors becomes so large and ceremonial that I forget about the fairly recent, actual people. They were not symbols of migration, faith, or perseverance. They had bodies, tempers, jokes, appetites, disappointments, debts, illnesses, and mornings when they did not want to get out of bed.

These three lines … German-Lutheran, French-Huguenot and London-Jew account for roughly one-fifth of my family tree. That fraction quickly opens into dozens of other people and places. There are Scottish and Irish lines in my family as well, along with many others I know less about or have not yet discovered. Some people left Europe because of persecution. Others may have moved for work, land, marriage, family, or reasons that disappeared from the record.

My particular combination is mine, but the mixture itself is not at all unusual for an American. When someone asks where I am from, I might simply say that I was born in California. That is true. It may even be the most useful answer.

The longer answer contains France, Germany, England, Scotland, Ireland, Philadelphia, Virginia, Tennessee, and many places and people whose names have been lost. It contains ships, roads, marriages, conversions, and changes in language. It contains people escaping old power structures and entering new ones. My family history is not some certificate of ancestral innocence. People can be persecuted in one place and privileged in another. (I’ll save more ancestor stories for another day).

Now I live in Kenya, among people who are close relatives of my first daughter … and far more distant relatives to me in the wider human family. Living here makes the old national categories feel small. The family tree keeps expanding until it becomes difficult to say where one people ends and another begins.

But among all these ancestral lines, my mother remains much closer.

She cleaned wealthy people’s toilets. She took care of children. She took work that other people preferred not to see and converted the hours and strength of her body into food, shelter, school, transportation, and possibility for three sons. She gave us the privilege of appearing ordinary.

Her work is not at all some kind of symbolic ancestral story…. It is near enough to remember.

Public history teaches us to notice royal weddings, councils, assassinations, conversions, wars, and edicts. Family history is also carried through hands, cleaning supplies, paychecks, aching backs, and the repeated decision to get up and do what is necessary.

Kings issue edicts. Mothers make futures inside the conditions those edicts leave behind.

I do not think of myself as a temporary meeting place within a much larger human tree. The respectful thing for me is not to turn my ancestors into heroes or abstractions. It is to remember that they were real.

When I first read about the massacre in France, I saw a wedding turned into a political doorway for killing. Now I also see everything that came after: the hiding, conversions, departures, vegetable shops, ships, marriages, migrations, and ordinary work through which life continued.

And I see my mother carrying cleaning supplies into the houses of wealthy people, making from nearly invisible work the visible lives of three sons.

That, too, is history.

The two books belong together for me.

I read Julio Linares’s Decolonizing Money and Diana Finch’s Value Beyond Money after more than fifteen years of helping to develop community currencies, mutual-aid systems, vouchers, digital ledgers, and commitment pools through Grassroots Economics.

I expected both books to draw me back into the question that first animated much of my work: What kind of money should communities create?

Instead, reading them together reinforced a different question:

What if money should no longer be the center of how we understand coordination?

The two books reach that threshold from very different directions.

Julio Linares confronts the imperial and colonial power of money. Pluto Press describes Decolonizing Money as an anarchist theory of money that draws on abolitionist and anti-colonial traditions, challenges the familiar choice between market control and state control, and imagines a grassroots democratic movement toward debt cancellation and reparatory justice. I know Julio from before his days at Circles UBI.

Read it. https://www.plutobooks.com/product/decolonizing-money/

One of Linares’s central claims is that money is more than a store of value or medium of exchange. It is “a series of promises a society makes to itself.”

I have also come to understand economic systems through promises, obligations, trust, limits, and fulfillment.

Linares’s framing provoked another question in me: If money is made of promises, does that mean every promise should be called money?

I have come to believe the answer is no.

Recognizing the promises inside money should help us see money more clearly. It should not cause us to rename every promise, commitment, voucher, relationship, and act of coordination as money.

Diana Finch approaches the question from another direction….. She was the managing director of the Bristol Pound during the final years of one of the United Kingdom’s best-known local currency projects. Her book follows that project from its ambitious beginnings, through its public success and recognition, into the operational, financial, and social problems that eventually led to its ending. She then asks what kind of economy might recognize social and ecological value without trying to force all of it back into monetary form.

Her work can be found here: https://www.dianafinch.info/

The page for Value Beyond Money is here: https://www.dianafinch.info/value-beyond-money/

“Even if we create tokens to count them, those values cannot be restated as money.”

Diana’s message is clear and reaches the heart of a problem I have spent years circling.

A token can represent something. It can record something. It can help a group remember something. It can make a commitment transferable or visible. It can trigger a payment, exchange, or governance process.

But creating a token does not transform kindness, care, biodiversity, trust, belonging, responsibility, or ecological health into money (nor should that be our goal).

Representation is not equivalence. Counting is not valuing. Exchangeability is not monetary identity.

Reading Linares and Finch together helped me see two necessary movements.

• Linares asks us to decolonize money from imperial power, concentrated authority, debt, and domination.

• Finch asks us to recognize value beyond money, including forms of value that monetary instruments cannot adequately carry.

Together, they led me toward a third movement:

We also need to decolonize coordination from the assumption that money must remain at its center.

The two books clarified:

• One helped me see why monetary power must be confronted.

• The other helped me see why creating alternative money is not enough, and why monetary interventions can sometimes become burdensome or harmful in particular contexts.

Between them they reveal the path Grassroots Economics has been walking.

The calls I now receive

Again and again, I am asked to speak with groups at one of two moments.

A) The first group has already gone down the community-currency path.

Its members may have spent years choosing a name, developing a visual identity, defining a unit, recruiting merchants, training users, negotiating with regulators, maintaining software, raising grants, resolving disputes, producing reports, and trying to persuade people to keep the currency circulating.

Some remain proud of what they built.

Some are exhausted.

Some quietly want permission to stop.

B) The second group is just beginning.

Its members have identified a real problem: National currency is scarce. Local capacities are underused. Wealth is leaving the region. Small businesses lack working capital. Supply chains are fragile. Care is undervalued. Ecological restoration is unsupported. People cannot find one another’s offers and needs.

These groups have often been told that the next step is obvious:

Create a new local currency or mutual-credit.

I recognize both groups because Grassroots Economics has occupied both positions.

We helped develop Eco-Pesa, Bangla-Pesa, Sarafu-Credit, Community Inclusion Currencies, Community Asset Vouchers, and several generations of digital exchange infrastructure.

Community currency was not a side experiment for us. It shaped our language, identity, funding, research, software, partnerships, and public reputation.

Yet the deepest lesson of that work was not that every community needs its own money. ….. It was that money is often the first coordination map modern people learn to read.

Maturity begins when we stop confusing that first map with the whole territory.

An invitation to monetary maximalists

I am writing especially to authors, researchers, funders, designers, and practitioners whom I would gently describe as monetary maximalists. (Specifically promoters of community currencies and mutual credit systems).

I do not mean everyone who studies money, criticizes banking, supports monetary reform, experiments with alternative currencies, or advocates public and democratic control of finance.

Money matters enormously. Who can issue it matters. Who receives credit matters. Who pays interest matters. Who bears losses matters. How taxation, law, banking, and settlement systems are governed matters.

Monetary maximalism begins somewhere else.

It begins when money becomes the primary explanation for nearly every coordination problem AND the preferred solution to nearly every coordination failure. (i.e. Money is the problem … we are going to make a better sort of money to fix it)

It appears when every transferable promise is called money, every ledger is treated as a monetary system, every reciprocal practice is translated into mutual credit, every shortage is diagnosed as a currency shortage, and every possible intervention begins with the creation of a unit or special token.

This habit is understandable.

Governments, banks, economists, accountants, funders, and software platforms can see monetary transactions much more readily than they can see care, trust, reciprocal labor, ecological stewardship, reputation, restraint, hospitality, shared memory, customary responsibility, forgiveness, or repair.

Money is highly legible. Life is less so.

The danger is that we mistake what is easiest to count for what is most fundamental.

Honoring the community-currency movement

Moving beyond the monetary and even the community-currency frame does not require dismissing the people who built it.

Community currencies have exposed the political nature of money. They have challenged monopolies over issuance, supported local exchange, helped businesses find one another, revealed unused capacities, created spaces for experimentation, and shown that national currency is not the only possible accounting or payment instrument.

Many projects have also built friendships, institutions, knowledge, confidence, and political imagination that lasted longer than the currencies themselves.

Our own early work produced real learning and, in some settings, meaningful local benefits. I remain grateful for it. The point is not that community currency was foolish. The point is that serious practice should be allowed to teach us something our founding theory did not predict.

Diana Finch’s work is important precisely because she does not simply celebrate or condemn the Bristol Pound.

She preserves the hope, work, imagination, and relationships that brought it into existence while also examining what its monetary form could not accomplish.

The later academic case study coauthored by Marcus Petz and Diana Finch adds operational detail. It reports that the Bristol Pound struggled to become financially viable without grants, reached a much smaller active population than its public profile sometimes suggested, created practical burdens for participating businesses, and did not produce the scale of local economic effect its designers had hoped for. The authors are careful not to claim that no community currency can be viable. Their point is that this particular model did not become viable in its context and that others should learn from the experience.

The full paper is here: https://www.ijccr.net/article/download/8851/9078/25407

These findings should not be used to ridicule the Bristol Pound.

They are valuable because they come from practitioners and researchers willing to examine the distance between a beautiful theory and the daily work of implementation.

The field needs much more of that honesty!

A note to people carrying hurt

I use words such as exhaustion, grief, and trauma carefully.

Not every difficult project is traumatic. Not every currency that ends has harmed its participants.

Still, I have spoken with practitioners who describe years of pressure, shame, interpersonal conflict, regulatory anxiety, donor disappointment, technical failure, community mistrust, and responsibility for promises that could no longer be sustained.

Some became the permanent liquidity provider, customer-support desk, mediator, fundraiser, compliance officer, evangelist, and scapegoat for a system that was supposed to become self-organizing.

Some felt they had failed their community.

Some communities felt that another organization had arrived with a new project, asked everyone to learn a new token, gathered data, produced reports, and then left.

When people describe those experiences as traumatic, the answer is not another lecture about velocity, demurrage, tokenomics, or better marketing.

The first response for me is to listen.

What was promised?

Who relied on it?

What remains unsettled?

What relationships were strengthened?

What relationships were damaged?

What needs to be fulfilled, repaired, released, or ended?

Those are commitment questions before they are monetary questions.

What Grassroots Economics actually changed

In “From Abstraction to Aliveness,” I described our development directly:

We moved through three related changes.

From currency to voucher

We began with large group vouchers representing diffuse commitments across broad populations.

Over time, we moved toward clearer vouchers associated with individuals and smaller groups making more specific offers.

Each voucher could carry an identifiable issuer, promise, quantity, time condition, evidence requirement, and remedy.

This was not simply a technical improvement.

It was a movement from abstraction toward responsibility.

From one group voucher to a group as a pool

We then stopped assuming that a group had to be represented by one token.

A group could instead be represented through a collectively stewarded pool containing the distinct vouchers of its members.

The pool became the shared agreement.

The vouchers remained attributable.

From large pools toward smaller and personal pools

Large pools containing hundreds of commitments created heavy curation burdens.

Who could understand every issuer, promise, capacity, risk, value, and relationship represented in such a pool?

We gradually moved toward smaller pools and, in some cases, personal pools.

Individuals, households, cooperatives, public institutions, and other agents could express their own offers, needs, values, and limits while remaining connected to wider networks.

This was not a shift from economics to something non-economic.

It was a shift from abstracting community into a unit toward making the commitments, responsibilities, capacities, and relationships underneath the unit more visible.

Our 2023 field article introduced commitment pooling as an economic protocol inspired by ancestral resource-coordination practices: https://doi.org/10.15133/j.ijccr.2023.004

The longer field guide develops the movement from currency toward commitments, pools, overlapping agreements, rotating labor, and resource coordination: https://grassrootseconomics.org/book

The stewardship paper develops the four pooling functions and their governance implications: https://doi.org/10.26034/zh.ijccr.2026.9512

These are not simply new names for the same community-currency or another monetary system.

They describe a real change in the object of analysis.

Let’s stop calling every promise money

A voucher is a representation of a commitment. It may say that a farmer will provide maize, a clinic will provide a consultation, a transporter will provide rides, a carpenter will repair a roof, or a caregiver will provide hours of support.

A well-specified voucher can include:

• the issuer;

• the promised good, service, action, or redemption;

• quantity;

• time or redemption window;

• evidence requirements;

• transfer conditions;

• guarantees; and

• remedies if fulfillment fails.

A voucher can be paper or digital. It can use an ERC-20 token, a database entry, a signed card, or an oral and witnessed record. The technology does not determine the institutional category.

An ERC-20 token can represent a currency, voucher, certificate, security, governance right, membership, receipt, or many other claims.

A voucher does not become currency merely because it can be exchanged.

• Gift cards can be exchanged.

• Tickets can be exchanged.

• Warehouse receipts can be exchanged.

• Invoices can be transferred.

• Coupons can circulate.

• Shares can be traded.

None of these facts makes every such instrument money.

An instrument may become money-like where it is broadly accepted, standardized, fungible, routinely transferred, and used to settle a wide range of obligations.

That is an empirical possibility … and generally not a great idea or a goal worth pursuing or obtaining.

It is not an automatic consequence of issuance, tokenization, group acceptance, or one successful swap.

The safest default is: A voucher is a claim on a commitment unless its actual institutional use demonstrates something broader.

Acceptance does not perform alchemy

A common argument runs like this:

1. A participant issues a voucher.

2. A group accepts it.

3. The voucher can now be exchanged.

4. Therefore, the participant and group have created money.

This reasoning collapses several distinct operations …. The issuer created a promise. A pool or group recognized the promise as admissible. A valuation process assigned an exchange relation. A limit determined how much exposure the pool would accept. An inventory condition determined what could leave the pool in return. A swap moved claims or holdings.

Later fulfillment, redemption, buyback, guarantee payment, clearing, release, write-down, or repair may settle the underlying obligation.

Acceptance makes a voucher consequential within a governed setting.

It does not necessarily transform it into a general currency.

This distinction is not semantic decoration. It tells us who owes what, who bears the risk, which inventory exists, what limits apply, and what must happen before the obligation can close.

Issuance is not access

Suppose I issue divisible vouchers representing commitments to deliver up to one hundred baskets of vegetables over time, something like a Community Supported Agriculture subscription.

I have created claims on my promised future delivery. I have not created the vegetables themselves, one hundred units of national currency, or an unlimited right to withdraw other people’s resources.

A pool may decide that it will accept the value of ten baskets at a given time.

If the pool holds transport vouchers, maize vouchers, or stable-value assets, I may be allowed to swap some of my vegetable commitments for those holdings.

My access depends on whether:

• my voucher is listed;

• its terms are clear;

• the pool values it;

• my limit has been reached;

• the desired asset is in stock;

• fees or safeguards apply;

• the route is permitted; and

• my history of fulfillment supports continued acceptance.

Issuing more vouchers does not create more outgoing inventory.

The participant creates an obligation.

The pool creates bounded access by accepting, valuing, limiting, holding, and exchanging that obligation.

Commitment pooling is not simply mutual credit

This distinction deserves its own section because community-currency discussions often treat commitment pooling and mutual credit as interchangeable.

They are not.

In a common mutual-credit system, participants hold balances in a shared accounting unit. When one participant buys from another, the buyer’s balance decreases and the seller’s balance increases by the same amount. Across the system, positive and negative balances sum to zero.

The Credit Commons Society provides a clear general description here: https://creditcommonssociety.org/mutual-credit/

I have also explained how a mutual-credit arrangement can be derived from commitment pooling:

Mutual credit can be implemented through commitment pooling. Commitment pooling is not reducible to mutual credit.

A common mutual-credit ledger usually has:

• one shared unit of account;

• account balances that may be positive or negative;

• equal and opposite entries created through exchange;

• systemwide net balances summing to zero; and

• credit limits determining permissible negative balances.

A commitment-pool network can instead contain:

• many issuer-specific vouchers;

• different redemption promises;

• different values in different pools;

• seeded inventories;

• national currencies or stable assets;

• mutual-credit balances;

• certificates or attestations;

• guarantee and insurance assets;

• deposits;

• credit facilities; and

• claims that do not sum to zero in one common unit.

A pool may be configured to implement mutual credit. Another pool may operate more like a voucher exchange. Another may hold stable-value reserves against producer commitments. Another may coordinate labor, care, food, ecological work, or public procurement.

The common operational questions of a pool are not only “What is the balance?” and “Does the ledger sum to zero?”

They are:

• What is admitted?

• How is it valued?

• How much exposure is allowed?

• What can be received in exchange?

• What evidence and remedies apply?

• What inventory exists?

• What counts as fulfillment or settlement?

• Who can change the rules?

In one sentence:

Mutual credit records reciprocal balances in a common accounting system. Commitment pooling coordinates heterogeneous commitments through stewarded pools.

Mutual credit remains useful.

It is one important pattern inside a larger coordination architecture.

Current Sarafu Network is substantially pool-mediated

Earlier Grassroots Economics systems included group vouchers and community currencies that circulated more like shared local media of exchange.

Current Sarafu Network has a different center of gravity. A participant may seed a voucher into a pool and receive another voucher or stable-value asset from that pool.

The received voucher may later enter another pool. Another participant may eventually draw the original voucher and return it to its issuer for redemption or fulfillment.

Direct transfers can occur, but the architecture is not defined primarily by hand-to-hand circulation of one common unit.

It is defined by a network of stewarded pools.

The current Cosmo-Local Credit white paper describes commitment pools through four functions:

1. Curation

2. Valuation

3. Limitation

4. Exchange and settlement

It also distinguishes local issuance and redemption from shared routing and technical standards: https://cosmolocal.credit

The formal route-graph paper develops the same architecture through interfaces for admission, valuation, limits, fees, custody, settlement, governance, and routing: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6606438

This changes the questions we ask.

The goal shifts from maximizing circulation toward enabling responsible settlement.

Why we left the currency frame: the technical reasons

A group currency can hide who owes what

One group voucher may represent the mixed commitments of many people.

That can create solidarity.

It can also obscure responsibility.

• Who is responsible for redemption?

• What happens when some members fulfill and others do not?

• Who is overextended?

• Who receives recognition for successful fulfillment?

• Who carries hidden labor?

• Who controls issuance?

A pool of issuer-specific vouchers preserves more information.

The group can still govern the pool collectively, but each commitment remains attributable.

Circulation is not settlement

A token can move many times without closing the obligation underneath it.

High volume may indicate useful exchange. It may also indicate churn, recycling, speculative activity, wash trading, or claims being repeatedly passed onward because no one can redeem them.

Movement is not fulfillment. Volume is not welfare.

A blockchain event is not proof that food was delivered, a patient was treated, a field was restored, or a relationship was repaired.

The bioregional visualizer states this explicitly. Its labels describe transaction patterns, but a blockchain movement cannot prove that a legal loan existed, cash changed hands, a product was delivered, or a commitment was fulfilled.

One currency creates one large curation burden

A common currency requires some institution to maintain confidence in the whole unit.

As the system grows, someone must evaluate more participants, promises, redemption claims, disputes, exceptions, and political pressures.

This tends to produce one of two failures. Standards become weak and the unit loses coherence. Or authority becomes concentrated in the institution controlling admission, issuance, valuation, redemption, and suspension.

Smaller pools distribute the curation burden.

An individual, family, cooperative, public institution, ecological steward, or business can maintain a pool whose boundaries it understands.

Those pools can still connect where their accepted commitments overlap.

That is not necessarily fragmentation. It is polycentric coordination.

Tokenomics can automate the wrong question

Community-currency designers are often encouraged to add demurrage, expiration, bonding curves, automatic issuance formulas, universal exchange rates, or increasingly elaborate incentives.

These tools can be useful under narrow conditions.

They can also move numbers without understanding why a commitment is stuck.

A voucher may fail to move because:

• the promise is unclear;

• the issuer is overextended;

• the season has changed;

• the holder does not need the promised service;

• the valuation is wrong;

• the route is blocked;

• evidence is weak;

• trust has been damaged; or

• repair is needed.

No timer can diagnose all of that.

In “Tokenomic Automatons,” I describe why we moved away from treating demurrage and curves as permanent automatic governors:

The lesson can be stated simply:

Demurrage changes value by calendar. Stewardship can respond to capacity, evidence, relationship, and season.

Automation should reduce friction. It should not steal judgment.

Interoperability does not require one universal token

Communities do not need one shared currency in order to coordinate.

They need compatible routes.

• Pool A might accept maize vouchers and national-currency-linked assets.

• Pool B might accept maize and transport vouchers.

• Pool C might accept transport and clinic vouchers.

A route can connect a farmer to transport or healthcare without forcing every participant to adopt one unit.

Every hop still checks its own listings, values, limits, fees, inventory, and permissions.

The pools cooperate without merging.

The social reasons

Adoption places work on the people it is meant to help

A new currency asks participants to do more than exchange.

They must learn a unit, remember where it is accepted, explain it to customers, alter bookkeeping, train staff, manage balances, handle redemption questions, and carry uncertainty about future acceptance.

For someone with time, disposable income, ideological commitment, and technical interest, this can be exciting.

For a small trader, low-income household, caregiver, or overworked cooperative, it can be another demand.

The Bristol Pound research documents practical burdens, including checkout friction, staff training, reconciliation, supplier difficulties, cash-flow complexity, and business risk. It also shows that currency use competed with other demands on people’s time and attention.

Those responses are not evidence that people failed to understand the vision.

They may be accurate statements about capacity.

A community is not automatically one coherent issuer

The phrase “community currency” implies a community capable of issuing, governing, and standing behind one common claim.

Sometimes that coherence exists. Often it is assumed.

Communities contain disagreement, unequal power, overlapping identities, internal exclusions, contested histories, and participants who may not want to be represented by one token.

A group can act coherently. But coherence should be demonstrated through shared practice, clear governance, trust, and a history of fulfillment.

It should not be inferred from geography, ethnicity, poverty, project membership, or a group name.

Not everyone is a producer in a market sense

Community-currency narratives often celebrate the idea that everyone can be a producer.

That can be empowering. But it can also force all human participation into a commercial category.

A person may participate as a caregiver, recipient, learner, elder, steward, witness, mediator, guarantor, public servant, ecological custodian, or participant in repair.

Not every contribution is a product for sale. Not every need should require productive repayment. Not everyone has equal capacity to issue market-valued promises.

A healthy coordination system must make room for childhood, illness, disability, aging, grief, emergency, rest, and ecological limits.

The moral reasons

A commitment is not merely an asset. It creates reliance. Someone may act now because another person, role, group, or institution has undertaken to respond later.

That relation distributes capacity, vulnerability, recognition, burden, and practical options.

• Who is admitted matters.

• What is valued matters.

• Where limits are placed matters.

• Whose history is remembered matters.

• What counts as fulfillment matters.

• Who can contest the record matters.

• What happens after failure matters.

A technically functioning pool can still be unjust. A ledger can preserve a mistaken account. Software can execute an oppressive rule perfectly. A steward can favor friends, discount care, impose arbitrary limits, or make exit impossible.

Protocol correctness does not create moral legitimacy.

I develop this distinction more fully in Commitment Pooling and Moral Life:

The practical moral test is whether affected participants can question, correct, revise, refuse, repair, or end the arrangements shaping their lives.

The cultural reasons

Communities are not empty spaces waiting for someone to install an economy.

They already coordinate through kinship, rotating labor, savings groups, councils, religious institutions, reciprocal care, ecological knowledge, ritual, hospitality, social memory, land relations, and shared work.

In Kenya, practices such as Mweria and related rotating labor associations coordinate farming, construction, domestic work, communal infrastructure, and ecological care through participation, memory, timing, trust, and reciprocity.

These practices do not need to become money or called money in order to be economic.

A digital record may help selected commitments become more visible. It did not create the tradition.

A complementary currency may accompany renewed participation.

That does not prove that the currency created the values.

This is an important epistemic distinction.

A program may include grants, facilitation, meetings, resource mapping, mediation, technology, leadership, training, and a currency.

If reciprocal practices become more visible during that program, transaction data alone cannot identify the currency as the cause.

The social relations may have made the currency possible.

The currency may have created an occasion or additional instrument.

Neither claim should be smuggled in as causal certainty.

When community currency becomes monetary colonialism

In practitioner conversations, I have heard folks describe token-first community-currency or tokenized UBI deployment as a new form of colonialism. That is a serious claim and should not be used as a slogan against every currency experiment.

1. A locally issued token is not automatically decolonial.

2. An externally developed technology is not automatically colonial.

The relevant questions concern authority:

• Who named the problem?

• Who decided the community lacked money?

• Who chose the unit?

• Who wrote the rules?

• Who controls issuance and suspension?

• Who owns the infrastructure?

• Who interprets the data?

• Who receives funding and reputation?

• Who bears the administrative burden?

• Who remains responsible when the project ends?

• Can participants refuse without losing support or standing?

A project can reproduce colonial relations when outsiders arrive with a monetary category, translate local practices into that category, ask people to adopt a token designed elsewhere, measure them through externally selected indicators, and then blame them when circulation fails to meet expectations.

The same pattern can occur internally when a local elite claims to represent a whole community while controlling issuance, information, and exit.

Colonialism here is not about the passport of the software developer. It is about the direction of authority, visibility, burden, value, and extraction.

Commitment pooling does not automatically solve this. A pool can also be captured.

But I believe it gives us a better starting discipline:

• Begin with existing commitments and practices.

• Keep issuers and terms visible.

• Allow different pools to maintain different boundaries.

• Require accountable authority over admission, valuation, limits, evidence, repair, and exit.

• Do not force every form of value into one unit.

• Do not treat culture as an adoption strategy.

The historical reason: local money can reproduce the form of centralized money

The Roman lineage of the word “money” offers a useful warning.

The English word money descends through Old French from Latin moneta. It became associated with coinage through the Roman mint connected to the temple of Juno Moneta. A concise historical account is here: https://antigonejournal.com/2021/05/short-history-roman-currency/

Roman coinage became connected to state authority, law, taxation, military expenditure, trade, and imperial administration.

Later states and colonial regimes often used taxation, legal tender, debt, licensing, and restrictions on local subsistence or commons to draw populations into centralized monetary systems.

A community currency may resist those systems. It may also reproduce their institutional form at a smaller scale:

• one official unit;

• one issuing authority;

• one territory;

• one ledger;

• one value language;

• one adoption campaign;

• one central story about belonging.

Localizing the token does not necessarily decentralize the protocol.

A small monetary sovereign is still a sovereign. The alternative may not be a better local currency.

It may be many overlapping, bounded, stewarded agreements.

This is where Linares’s challenge remains vital for me. Decolonizing money requires more than replacing the dollar with a local token.

It requires confronting the institutions, debts, privileges, and coercive powers that make some promises enforceable while rendering other forms of life invisible.

But I would take the argument one step further.

We should not only democratize the power to make money.

We should also challenge the assumption that every shared commitment must become money in order to matter.

What a commitment pool is

A commitment pool is a governed institution or contract suite that performs four basic functions.

• Curation determines which commitments or assets may enter.

• Valuation determines how they are compared or related.

• Limitation protects finite capacity, inventories, participants, and the commons.

• Exchange and settlement determine how accepted claims move, what fees apply, what inventory is available, and what closes or repairs an obligation.

Governance determines who may change these rules. Memory and receipts help make actions inspectable. Routing connects pools without requiring uniform governance.

At the smallest scale, a pool may be stewarded by an individual or household.

At larger scales, it may be governed by a cooperative, community group, company, public body, multisignature process, or another accountable institution.

This framework can describe more than community trade.

The formal route-graph work examines how the same operational interfaces can represent selected mechanics of deposits, secured lending, clearing, rotating savings, rotating labor, grain banks, guarantees, and reserve support without claiming that these institutions are legally, culturally, or morally identical.

https://ssrn.com/abstract=6606438

That is one of the principal benefits of moving beyond the currency frame.

We no longer ask every institution to become money. We ask what it actually does.

Governance does not disappear

Commitment pooling does not eliminate governance costs.

It makes them more visible.

Someone must evaluate commitments, maintain listings, review values, set limits, manage inventory, monitor fulfillment, resolve disputes, maintain software, respond to emergencies, and document changes.

These costs may be borne through:

• reciprocal or voluntary stewardship;

• member contributions;

• grants or endowments;

• cooperative or public budgets;

• pool usage fees;

• routing and clearing fees;

• liquidity-support fees;

• insurance or guarantee fees; and

• combinations of these.

The goal is not costlessness. The goal is to make authority, responsibility, and costs visible and contestable.

Conventional money systems also contain governance costs.

They are carried through bank margins, compliance departments, credit scoring, courts, taxation, public subsidies, enforcement, platform fees, and losses imposed on participants with less power.

No coordination system escapes governance.

The question is who governs, according to which values, with what evidence, under which limits, and with what possibilities for correction and exit.

Pools can include money without centering it

Moving beyond community currency does not require excluding national currency, bank deposits, stablecoins, mutual-credit balances, or existing complementary currencies.

Any of them can be listed in a pool where law and policy permit.

A mixed pool could contain:

• member vouchers;

• national-currency-linked assets;

• cooperative credits;

• mutual-credit balances;

• grant-funded reserves;

• food commitments;

• transport commitments;

• care commitments;

• public procurement claims;

• guarantees; and

• certificates or receipts.

Each can have different values, limits, evidence requirements, and remedies.

Money becomes one resource among others.

It no longer has to be the universal measure of every relationship.

Diana Finch’s warning belongs here.

Creating a token to represent a value does not mean the value has become money.

A pool can recognize kindness, ecological care, contribution, or public benefit without pretending that their full meaning has been captured by a price.

The best way to help a currency may be to build pools that accept it

This is the paradox. Once we stop centering currencies, we may become better able to support the currencies people still need.

The usual community-currency strategy is to persuade more people to accept one unit directly. The commitment-pool strategy is different.

Build more trustworthy pools that accept the currency under explicit conditions.

Each pool can connect that currency to real offers, needs, inventories, obligations, and exit paths. This creates conditional acceptance and settlement reach.

It does not create value by declaration. It creates routes.

A national currency can enter a pool and help someone access goods or settle taxes.

A community currency can enter a pool and be exchanged into issuer-specific vouchers. A mutual-credit balance can connect to a pool holding needed inventory. A stable asset can support working capital against accepted producer commitments.

The key is not universal acceptance.

It is enough overlapping acceptance to make useful paths possible.

How pools can digest currencies

A living system does not worship a nutrient. It receives it, transforms it, routes it, uses it, stores some of it, and releases what it no longer needs.

A commitment pool can do something similar with currencies.

It can:

• accept a currency under declared terms;

• assign it a role and value;

• limit how much it will hold;

• connect it to real commitments;

• route it toward people who need it;

• use it for taxes, imports, external purchases, or debt service;

• provide an offramp;

• prevent it from becoming the only acceptable form of value; and

• retire or release it as other settlement paths become available.

Currencies become nutrients within a wider coordination metabolism. They are no longer mistaken for the organism.

Digesting national currency

National currency remains necessary for taxes, regulated payments, imports, formal debts, and many household needs.

A local pool can hold national-currency-linked inventory and allow trusted participants to access it by contributing accepted commitments.

The pool does not pretend that a maize voucher is Kenyan shillings.

It creates a governed bridge between local capacity and shilling liquidity.

Digesting an existing community currency

Suppose a community-currency project wants to wind down or become more honest and clear commitment for real services. Instead of abandoning balances or launching a replacement currency, stewards can create transition pools.

The old currency can be listed with:

• a published value;

• exposure limits;

• disclosed reserves;

• redemption windows;

• routes into issuer-specific vouchers;

• routes into national currency where inventory permits;

• dispute procedures; and

• a clear sunset policy.

As balances return, they can be redeemed, converted, retired, donated, written down, or otherwise settled. The relationships hidden inside one token can gradually become visible again. The currency can decline without the community being told that it failed.

Digesting mutual credit

A mutual-credit network may create useful reciprocal balances but struggle to connect those balances to particular inventories, redemption pathways, external assets, or neighboring networks.

A pool can accept a mutual-credit balance under explicit terms.

It can limit exposure, connect the balance to listed commitments, provide routes into other pools, and distinguish an accounting credit from a redeemable claim on a particular issuer.

This does not replace mutual credit. It gives mutual-credit positions additional settlement contexts.

Digesting formal finance

Pools can also receive external finance without turning community commitments into investor property.

The Regenerative Bonds work separates formal bondholder claims from local redeemable commitments. The formal issuer remains responsible for scheduled bond obligations. Local pools retain authority over local curation, values, limits, repair, and exit.

Household, producer, care, and ecological commitments do not automatically become collateral for investors.

The paper is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23922

Formal finance can support a local metabolism without owning it.

A bioregional path forward

The current work offers one picture of this future. Each Chama remains a distinct mutual-aid group. Each pool decides which vouchers it accepts, how it values them, how much it will hold, and what it will offer in exchange.

Some pools contain commitments for food, farming, transport, labor, or construction alongside stable-value assets and national currencies.

Shared vouchers create routes among the pools without requiring the groups to merge or adopt one common currency.

The full visual essay is here:

The visualizer reconstructs public transaction events and places them beside public voucher offers and community reports. It distinguishes economic proximity from physical location, movement from delivery, and gross pool flow from obligation-closing settlement.

The pools retain their own curation, valuation, limits, inventory, and right to refuse a route.

This is what I mean by cosmo-local credit. Commitments remain rooted in named people, places, offers, capacities, and local governance. Shared protocols allow some of them to travel across boundaries.

The objective is not to flatten every form of value into one universal token. It is to keep diverse commitments legible while making them interoperable where communities choose.

What becomes possible beyond the monetary frame

Moving beyond community currency does not make coordination easier in every respect.

It does make several things clearer.

Greater accountability

Issuer-specific vouchers make it easier to identify what is promised, by whom, under which terms, and with what remedy.

Honest limits

Pools can restrict exposure according to capacity, inventory, season, ecological boundaries, trust, and fulfillment history.

Plural value

Care, food, transport, ecological work, national currency, and other commitments do not need to become one homogeneous unit.

Distributed governance

Smaller pools allow authority and responsibility to remain closer to those who understand the commitments.

Interoperability without uniformity

Routes can connect different pools while preserving local rules and the right to refuse.

Better evidence

The system can distinguish issuance, movement, settlement, fulfillment, repair, and social or ecological outcomes.

Transaction volume no longer needs to stand in for all of them.

Stronger repair

Non-fulfillment can lead to mediation, substitution, guarantees, relimiting, deferment, rerouting, restitution, release, or exit rather than only punishment or devaluation.

Inclusion beyond production

People can participate as caregivers, stewards, learners, elders, guarantors, recipients, ecological custodians, and public institutions, not only as market sellers.

Graceful endings

Currencies, pools, and commitments can be paused, migrated, fulfilled, settled, forked, or ended without pretending that every institution must grow forever.

For groups considering a new community currency

Before creating a token, begin elsewhere.

Observe what already exists

What work, care, exchange, savings, stewardship, and reciprocal practices already happen?

What are their local names?

Who carries their memory?

Who has authority?

Identify the actual bottleneck

Is the problem scarce national currency?

Working capital?

Transport?

Market access?

Trust?

Unrecognized care?

An inventory shortage?

A governance failure?

A settlement blockage?

A currency is not the same solution to all of these problems.

Map offers, needs, and capacities

Identify real goods, services, skills, spaces, tools, knowledge, care, reserves, and ecological capacities.

Do not begin with units.

Begin with relationships.

Formalize only what needs formalization

Some commitments may remain oral, customary, or relational.

Others may benefit from a written voucher, receipt, ledger entry, or token.

Formalization should support clarity and accountability.

It should not displace culture.

Start with the smallest coherent pool

Choose a steward or stewardship process.

Declare what is accepted.

Set initial values and limits.

Specify inventories, evidence, fees, remedies, pause conditions, and exit.

Seed real capacity

A pool needs actual commitments, reserves, goods, services, or settlement assets.

Issuance alone is not liquidity.

Test fulfillment before scale

Can people redeem?

Do vouchers reach issuers?

Are limits understandable?

Can disputes be resolved?

Does participation renew or deplete people’s capacity?

Connect through overlap

Once one pool works, identify neighboring pools with shared commitments or compatible assets.

Route where every local rule permits.

Do not merge merely for scale.

Measure what matters

Track fulfillment, reserve alarms, limit utilization, route success and failure, redemption latency, repair outcomes, guarantor performance, participant burden, ecological effects, and governance changes.

Do not let velocity become the headline while obligations remain open.

For groups trying to leave a community currency or any over issued token or UBI

Ending responsibly is also stewardship.

Stop expanding the promise

Pause promotional issuance while outstanding balances, reserves, obligations, and disputes are assessed.

Listen before redesigning

Ask participants what they experienced, what they still value, what burdens they carried, what remains unsettled, and whether they want continuation.

Clarify what the token represents

Does it represent national-currency reserves, member goods and services, loyalty value, a general group promise, or nothing clearly redeemable?

Do not invent a new explanation after the fact.

Create transition pools

List the old currency under explicit values, limits, inventories, routes, and deadlines.

Provide paths into real redemption assets or clearer issuer-specific commitments.

Protect vulnerable holders

Do not let insiders exit first while others remain trapped.

Publish priority, reserve, guarantee, and loss rules.

Separate the relationships from the token

Keep useful networks, meetings, markets, mutual aid, and community memory even if the currency ends.

Retire balances transparently

Record redemption, conversion, donation, release, write-down, or another settlement honestly.

Do not call disappearance fulfillment.

Honor the ending

Document lessons.

Acknowledge labor and harm.

Thank participants.

Make room for grief, relief, and future cooperation.

A currency can end while the community continues.

A request to researchers and authors

When writing about Grassroots Economics or similar work, please preserve several distinctions.

• Do not call every token money.

• Do not call every exchanged promise a currency.

• Do not treat issuance as credit access.

• Do not treat circulation as fulfillment.

• Do not treat transaction volume as welfare.

• Do not treat a blockchain event as proof of delivery.

• Do not treat one group token as proof of community coherence.

• Do not infer that a currency created cultural values merely because reciprocal practices became more visible during a program that included currency.

• Do not describe present commitment-pool systems as unchanged continuations of earlier community currencies.

• Historical currency phases can be studied as currencies.

• Current commitment-pool systems should be described on their own terms.

This is not a request for uncritical adoption of our language.

Researchers should test whether commitment-specific variables explain anything beyond existing monetary, institutional, network, game-theoretic, or transaction models. Critique should go hand in hand with understanding the architecture.

A request to monetary reformers

Please continue studying public money, mutual credit, banking reform, debt, clearing, taxation, payment systems, and monetary plurality.

Please continue exposing concentration, exclusion, fragility, imperial power, and ecological damage in dominant financial systems.

Julio Linares is right to insist that the creation, use, and destruction of money are political questions.

But do not make money larger than life.

• Not every commons needs a currency.

• Not every promise needs to circulate.

• Not every form of care needs a price.

• Not every community needs its own money.

• Not every coordination failure is a currency shortage.

Sometimes people need water, tools, transport, land access, childcare, inventory, mediation, legal recognition, trust, or a credible promise that someone will return.

Money may help.

Sometimes it does not.

Moving forward without shame

To those who still believe community currency or mutual-credit is one of the best available tools, I am not asking you to abandon it because of this article.

I am asking you to examine it carefully.

• Does the community want it?

• Who bears the work?

• What does it make possible that a pool, marketplace, clearing process, procurement agreement, savings group, or direct service network would not?

• Can participants redeem and exit?

• Are you measuring settlement or movement?

• Would the relationships survive if the token disappeared?

To those who have been hurt by this work, you do not have to defend the experiment forever.

• You can name what happened.

• You can settle what remains.

• You can keep the relationships and release the currency.

• You can move forward.

What the two books now mean to me

Decolonizing Money reminds me not to underestimate monetary power.

Money is not merely a neutral medium sitting between people. The dollar, banking systems, debt, public authority, and international settlement structures organize enormous differences in freedom, vulnerability, and political possibility.

To decolonize money is to confront those structures.

Value Beyond Money reminds me not to overestimate monetary design. A local currency can carry hope, identity, exchange, and political imagination. It can also become a burden.

It cannot, by itself, contain the full value of kindness, biodiversity, trust, commons, care, or belonging. To recognize value beyond money is to protect those realities from being flattened into units.

Grassroots Economics now stands in the space between those lessons.

• We do not believe money is irrelevant.

• We do not believe every community needs another currency.

• We do not believe every promise becomes money when someone accepts it.

• We do not believe every reciprocal balance is the same as a commitment pool.

We believe communities need ways to make commitments clear, extend bounded credit, protect finite capacities, connect compatible offers, retain local authority, settle obligations, and repair relationships.

• Money can enter those systems.

• Mutual credit can enter them.

• National currency can enter them.

• Community currencies can enter them.

• Formal finance can enter them.

But none needs to become the center of the whole.

Beyond the age of money

The future may not be one perfect global currency, one perfect national currency, or one perfect community currency.

It may be many overlapping pools, each with clear commitments, local stewardship, transparent limits, real inventories, auditable receipts, repair pathways, and the ability to connect without surrendering autonomy.

• Some pools will hold national currency.

• Some will hold community currencies.

• Some will express mutual credit.

• Some will coordinate labor, food, care, transport, ecological restoration, housing, savings, public procurement, or formal finance.

Currencies will remain useful where currency is useful. They may become less central as other coordination pathways become visible.

Commitment pooling can support that transition without demanding the dramatic abolition of money. It can accept currencies, bound them, route them, connect them to real capacity, provide exits, and allow them to recede where they are no longer needed.

To me that is much more promising than issuing another token and asking the world to revolve around it. It is interoperability without absorption.

Credit without pretending every promise is money. Accountability without reducing every relationship to price. Coordination without compulsory uniformity.

In the bioregional work, I put the lesson this way:

“The economy is the people, places, capacities, promises, limits, and relationships underneath them.”

The circles, arrows, currencies, vouchers, and ledgers are maps.

They can help us see.

They should never be mistaken for the living world they describe.

Last night Aude and I slept for six consecutive hours, the first full six hours we have had in a month! We have been caring for a newborn, and when I woke I felt as though the world had become possible again. A thought could remain intact long enough to meet the next thought, a plan could extend past breakfast, and small difficulties no longer rose into walls. The world had handles again.

In that moment, six hours of sleep felt like wealth. This month has been loved, chosen, and temporary, which places it at a distance from imposed labor, chronic insecurity, or hereditary servitude. The baby is not my employer, and the relationship gives me meanings no economic account could contain. It has also left me tired.

That tiredness has made agency vivid in my own body. I have begun to experience it less as a possession than as a field of available moves. By agency I mean practical options, not dignity or moral worth: the ability to rest or leave, to study or recover, to accept a demand or refuse it, and sometimes to make something whose usefulness is not immediate.

Sleep can widen that field. So can health, mobility, tools, confidence, money, social standing, and attention that has not already been claimed. When those conditions narrow, possibility often narrows with them. This is not the whole of freedom, but it is part of how freedom reaches the body.

The surprise of those six hours returned me to a different scene, one I first entered as a child.

Garages Like Airport Hangars

When I was young, I sometimes went with my mother while she cleaned the houses of wealthy people in California. I remember their garages.

The doors lifted on rooms so large they seemed to me like airport hangars. Jet skis waited beside multiple cars, equipment, machines, and toys whose purposes I sometimes had to guess. Some appeared rarely used, which made them stranger rather than less impressive. They were possibilities sitting still.

As a child, I thought wealth was the objects themselves. Later, I began to notice the choices stored inside them. A car that remained parked was still a journey available on short notice. A jet ski held an afternoon that could be chosen if weather, health, and inclination aligned. An unused room offered space that did not have to justify itself.

A clean house could return an evening to the people who lived there, and part of that evening came from my mother’s paid hours.

I am not going to pronounce every arrangement fair or unfair. Some employers may have paid well and behaved generously. My mother was never reducible to the labor she sold, and the families were never reducible to their possessions.

What I can see, without completing a moral verdict, is the movement. Labor passed from one body into a house, and time reappeared on the other side as an evening with less work in it.

The amount paid, the respect shown, the safety of the work, and the alternatives available to each person all change what that movement means. Even in a decent arrangement, however, the movement remains. One household delegates a necessity; another person performs it, and the exchange changes what each can do next.

As a child, I noticed the cars. I did not yet know to notice the hours folded inside them, or the hours my mother was spending so that someone else would not have to.

The Wealth Inside Things

Over time, my own work became more mental than physical. I began spending more hours with ideas, organizations, software, writing, and institutional design. Mental work can be exhausting, but it has often given me a different relationship to time, including more control over where I work, when I pause, and which relationships I can pursue.

I also lived and worked in places where I sometimes arrived with a car, a guitar, a computer, and enough free attention to learn how to use them. People around me possessed languages, practical knowledge, cultural memory, skill, and forms of cooperation I did not. At the same time, the asymmetry in discretionary equipment and mobility was visible. I could cross a distance on my own schedule, communicate with institutions far away, or absorb a failed experiment without immediately losing food or housing.

Being welcomed into another person’s world did not make that world mine to narrate as though I possessed it. I can describe the tools I carried, the freedoms they gave me, what people told me, and the change those encounters produced in my own understanding.

A guitar is not merely wood and strings; its possibilities also depend on the spare attention through which practice becomes music. A computer can open employment, study, and coordination only when electricity, connection, language, literacy, and time are present. A car can shorten a journey only when fuel, maintenance, roads, and the right to drive are available. Objects matter, but much of their power lives in the conditions gathered around them.

Gradually, wealth looked less like a pile of possessions than an accumulated horizon of “I can.” I can go, wait, recover, learn, and make one mistake without the floor disappearing. Perhaps the rarest option was the ability to spend years becoming good at something that did not feed anyone that day.

My own specialization certainly did not begin with me alone. I eventually found myself in the awkward borderland between community economics, institutional design, and software, trying to translate among field practice, formal models, and code. I could do that because other people taught, corrected, funded, fed, encouraged, and sometimes tolerated me while I was wrong.

Schools, roads, networks, public knowledge, family labor, colleagues’ patience, and inherited advantages kept appearing beneath achievements I had once been tempted to call mine. In my life, an hour released from immediate necessity sometimes became study; study opened a relationship or skill; that skill created income, mobility, or another hour. Small advantages accumulated, not through magic and not without effort, but in ways effort alone does not explain.

I have also watched the reverse pressure. When a household has no reserve, an illness, a broken tool, a missed payment, or a day away from work can consume the margin needed to plan. The least dangerous choice for the week may close a more promising choice for the year. When this happens repeatedly, differences in available room can begin to resemble differences in character.

I have caught myself telling a self-made story about work that depended on education, visas, collaborators, institutions, technology, family care, and the chance to try again. The effort was mine, but the conditions of effort were shared, inherited, and unevenly distributed.

Both Sides of the Door

I have approached institutions from more than one side.

From outside, I have translated complex relationships into proposal language, waited for decisions, and wondered whether the version of a project legible to a funder still resembled the life it was meant to serve. From inside, I have helped make decisions and apply procedures to people who were waiting on the other side.

A request for one more revision can feel prudent in the meeting where it is made. In the applicant’s week, it can mean another month of uncertain payroll, delayed work, or promises that cannot yet be kept. The institution may genuinely be protecting shared resources, while the applicant may genuinely experience that protection as dependency and exposure.

Having occupied both chairs has not made me neutral. It has made the mismatch harder to ignore. The party with resources can usually wait, redefine the category, or end the exchange; the other party may have reorganized months of work around the possibility of a yes.

A grant decision, contract, or hiring choice therefore moves more than money. It changes planning horizons, confidence, staff time, and which future commitments remain credible. I want to remember that whenever a process looks tidy from the inside.

When I notice these asymmetries, explanations arrive quickly, including from me. The contract was voluntary; the wage was agreed; the applicant knew the rules; the successful person took risks; the committee followed its process. Each statement may contain something relevant, yet none tells me how wide the alternatives were, who could afford delay, what had already been inherited, or what refusal would cost.

I am not trying to condemn every unequal arrangement or imagine a world without specialization, delegation, hierarchy, or risk. I am trying to delay the comforting explanation long enough to see what a particular arrangement does to the next round of choices.

After the Exchange

The question that remains for me is not how to give everyone the same possessions or ask everyone to perform the same work. It is whether our arrangements can leave more people with usable possibility after the exchange than before it.

For paid domestic work, that might mean asking whether the wage, schedule, security, and voice leave the worker enough rest and room to cultivate a life beyond the task. For care, it might mean sharing nights, money, and recovery without pretending that love makes exhaustion imaginary. For an institution, it might mean accounting for the months of attention it asks from applicants, not only the funds it eventually distributes.

In my own work, these concerns have drawn me toward commitment pooling, an attempt to make certain relationships visible without pretending that visibility settles their justice. A pool can ask what commitments it is willing to recognize, how their value will be understood, which limits protect finite capacity, and how exchange, failure, or repair will be handled.

Behind that technical language are ordinary questions about who relies on whom, what has been promised, how much can reasonably be asked, who may revise the terms, and what happens when a life changes.

I know that a ledger can preserve a mistaken account and that transparent rules can apply an inherited inequality with admirable consistency. A pool can discount care, reward the loudest steward, or make leaving too costly. I do not expect a protocol to detect grief, coercion, or dignity merely because a transaction cleared.

The hope I am testing is narrower. Alongside asking whether work, funding, care, or exchange occurred, I want to ask whether participants still have enough capacity to rest, refuse, revise, recover, and enter another cycle without becoming more trapped or invisible.

I do not want a world in which nobody serves anyone else. I want the cooking, teaching, carrying, cleaning, repairing, listening, and protecting that can bind lives together to enlarge more than one person’s future. When service repeatedly enlarges one horizon by shrinking another, I want the arrangement to become discussable, revisable, and easier to leave.

Last night, nothing in my bank account changed. The baby still needed care, the work still waited, and the structures I have spent years trying to understand remained stubbornly complicated. What changed was the amount of rested attention in my body, and with it came enough room to write one sentence and then another.

This essay exists because six hours returned part of the world to me. That small fact does not explain other people’s lives, but it has made me less willing to treat thought, creativity, discipline, or success as though they float free of sleep, care, tools, and time.

What I want from the systems I help build is modest to say and difficult to arrange. After the work is done and the promises are settled, I want more of us to retain enough time, health, trust, and room to reach for the next necessary or beautiful thing. I would like “I can” to sound less like a boast than like the world growing handles again.

One of my more persistent economic thoughts began in a diaper, which already gives it an advantage over most economic theory.

While our daughter was breastfeeding, I noticed that something ate sometimes seemed to be followed by a change in the color or texture of our daughter’s poop. I was not conducting an experiment, and the diaper could not tell me what physiological process had produced it. I only knew that something happened upstream, disappeared into a living relationship I could not see, and something different appeared downstream. (chunky stuff!)

That was enough to make me curious.

I have slowly started looking at consumption in much the same way. When I buy a phone or coffee, I experience a tidy little event: payment goes one way, object comes the other way, and we all pretend the story has ended. Yet the thing in my hand also arrives downstream of land, labor, extraction, finance, standards, transport, energy and maintenance that have mostly disappeared by the time it reaches me.

… one useful word for that disappearance: horizon. What I see carries more with it than is presently given. I am borrowing the idea rather than recruiting Husserl into supply-chain management. The coffee comes without its soil attached, and the phone arrives without the cobalt mine dangling underneath it.

I am going to let Gwen explain ….

Knowing all this does not give me (or Gwen) much sovereignty or agency. I am writing this on a device whose actual supply chain I do not know, through infrastructures I did not design, using currencies I cannot simply stop using. My awareness can get much larger while my practical menu remains annoyingly similar.

So I have become less interested in being a “conscious consumer” and more interested in a stranger question: once I notice something downstream, does the relationship have any way to respond?

That question was already bothering me when I read Michel Bauwens’ Understanding the importance of the P4P moment in the long evolution of the commons and Kevin Mears’ response, A Seed Form Can Stay a Seed Forever.

Bauwens is looking back over decades of commons experiments and asking what happens after people get rather good at making alternatives. Digital commons showed that shared knowledge and software could be produced in remarkable ways, but somebody still has to grow food, maintain buildings, find land, finance machinery and keep the lights on. His P4P turn shifts the problem toward community-to-community infrastructure, where autonomous projects might become capable of provisioning and federating without being scaled into one giant organization. The question in his essay that keeps following me around is simple: who controls the feedback loops?

Then Bauwens writes that “a seed form can remain a seed indefinitely,” and Kevin Mears quite reasonably refuses to let the sentence remain small. A seed sounds as though the tree is already hiding inside the calendar. Mears points out that a cooperative, regenerative farm or community currency can remain useful and beautiful for decades without becoming part of another economic ecology. Demonstration is not reproduction.

Both essays end up circling the same fungal problem. Bauwens, following Michael Haupt, describes excellent nodes without the mycelial network between them, and he explicitly places Commitment Pooling among the things that might help at this community-to-community layer without declaring it the answer. Mears asks why the connective work stays weak even after everybody notices it.

His answer is that relationships are awkwardly illegible. A project photographs beautifully. A maintained interface does not. A grant attaches easily to something with a name and a launch, while the translator, steward, standard, archive or relationship that quietly helps several projects cooperate can disappear precisely because nothing dramatic happened.

This feels very familiar to me.

I moved to Kenya in 2008, and community economic work slowly changed what I noticed. In parts of coastal Kenya I heard Mweria used for locally organized collective labor, although I use the word carefully and do not treat my experience as a description of the diversity of Kenyan or Mijikenda practice.

What changed was that I began paying more attention to what remained after the visible work was over. Who had shown up before, whose capacity had changed, who could rely on whom later, and what happened when someone could not do what had been expected? Could the relationship remember without becoming a prison, and could it bend without pretending nothing had happened?

Commitment Pooling grew out of those questions before it became software.

That experience also makes Mears’ “retention comes before federation” feel a little too tidy for me. I agree with the leak: a project that steadily consumes the people, land, buildings or money keeping it alive is clearly in trouble. I am less sure that what needs to be retained is mainly surplus.

Sometimes what survives a cycle is money. Sometimes it is good soil, working tools, knowledge, care, health, trust, memory or the believable expectation that somebody will still answer next season. A wider network can consume those capacities or help renew them.

My preferred test has become almost embarrassingly simple: after participating in a relationship, is there enough capacity for another round?

That is also where I think the fungal metaphor needs a better verb. Infrastructure can be built, but mycelium grows.

I can build software, contracts, registries, communications systems and meeting places. I cannot install trust, reciprocity or repair. I can prepare substrate and make some relationships easier to enter, but the living part has to develop through actual use, fulfillment, disappointment, adjustment and time.

That is how I now think about Commitment Pooling too. I do not think it is the missing mycelium. At best it can help prepare some substrate on which particular relationships might grow, while leaving the living relation to the people and communities actually carrying it.

Mears’ comments beneath his essay add some good nuance. He says maybe routing was never the deepest problem. Asking for something exposes you. Need risks refusal and judgment. He starts imagining infrastructure that lets people hold their own boundaries and discover possible overlap without submitting themselves to public trial.

Yes, .. a person is not an inventory. I want enough recognition for a relationship to become possible without requiring total legibility of the person who needs something.

The same issue appears for me at a much larger scale in supply chains. I keep noticing how beautifully some signals travel forward: orders reach producers, products reach me, and money makes its way through astonishingly complicated systems. What feels much weaker is the signal trying to come back.

A worker becomes exhausted, but can that alter the purchasing decision? Soil deteriorates, but can that change a production limit? The one maintainer holding everything together leaves, but can that fact reach the budget before the interface breaks?

That is what I mean by reverse answerability. I do not mean merely that somebody can report what happened. I mean that what happened can travel back into a place where the next decision might actually change.

This is also why Bauwens’ question about feedback and Mears’ question about recognition fit together so well for me. A system can contain immense amounts of information while remaining unable to learn from the information that hurts.

And now, for the dignity of this essay, we are back to my daughter’s poop.

The diaper could not explain what had happened through Aude’s body, breastfeeding and our daughter’s digestion. It simply presented something at the other end that made the upstream relationship newly interesting. Because I cared about the relation, I could notice, remember, talk with Aude, perhaps change something, and then watch what happened next.

It was a tiny feedback loop held together by care rather than a dashboard.

I keep wondering what economic relationships would feel like if they could do more of that. A damaged river or an exhausted worker would not have to arrive carrying a complete causal model before becoming a reason to look. A maintainer disappearing would not need to become a catastrophe before the maintenance itself became visible. Evidence could accumulate, responsibility could become more specific, and something downstream might eventually become consequential enough to alter what happens upstream.

I can build tools that help with this. I can prepare substrate, connect records, write protocols and try to keep the plumbing from becoming the landlord.

But the mycelium itself has to grow in the awkward space where people and communities actually notice what comes out the other end, remember it, care enough to trace where it came from, and decide that next time something should be different.

💩🌈🌱

I have been thinking about a strange word lately … stigmergy.

Thanks to Francis Heylighen who describes stigmergy as coordination through traces left by previous activity. Something happens, it changes the environment, somebody else encounters that change and responds to it … so part of the intelligence of the system is carried by the shared environment rather than sitting inside any one individual.

Honey bees give us an easy picture of this. A bee does not need a complete plan of the hive before doing something useful. It encounters signals, responds to what is already there, changes the environment a little, and that changed environment helps guide what happens next.

When I look around my village, this feels very familiar … except that instead of pheromone trails, we have unfinished roofs, unharvested fields, broken fences, stray goats, blocked water channels, and houses where something obviously needs doing. You can look across the village and think, “Ah … that roof,” or, “Those crops need to come in before the rain,” and that visible imbalance helps call forth a response.

This is one reason I have come to think of Mweria, and rotating labor associations or mutual aid groups more generally, as partially stigmergic. Note that Mweria is much more than signals in the environment. We call one another, remember who helped before, talk, laugh, argue, negotiate, forgive, prepare food, and maintain relationships … but a surprising amount of coordination can still begin with simply being able to see what needs doing.

What happens when we stop seeing?

I worry that we have weakened this ability, not because people became less intelligent, but because we changed the signals around us.

Many people from my village must travel far to the city to clean houses, and there are very good reasons to seek that money. School fees, medicine, transport, rent, phone credit, and many other things may still require cash. What troubles me is that there can also be plenty of useful work right beside us that does not produce the signal our wider economy rewards.

An unfinished roof may be more urgent than a clean house in the city … yet only one of those jobs may produce the money needed for everything else.

So instead of looking around and asking, “What needs doing?”, we are increasingly pushed toward another question … “Where can I get money?”

How we could make the important imbalances in our own communities visible again?

The ledger remembers … the bar chart makes you look

People often react strongly when an imbalance feels unfair. We might sometimes call part of this inequality aversion, but fairness does not mean everybody must always have exactly the same amount. Need matters. Contribution matters. Illness matters. Timing matters. Relationships matter.

Still … when one person has received much more support than everyone else, or another person seems never to receive a turn, we tend to notice.

Some of those patterns are obvious in village life. Others are hidden in memory.

This is one place where commitment pooling becomes useful.

For this example, think of a commitment pool as a shared record of promises that people can exchange, so support can move around a group over time. Someone might promise money, labor, roofing work, food, transport, childcare, or another useful service. The pool helps remember which promises are still outstanding and allows members to exchange them.

Community savings groups already understand the value of a ledger … but a ledger is not the same thing as standing outside and seeing a roof with a hole in it.

Numbers can hide surprisingly well inside rows and columns.

In this simple example, the pool is holding commitments from seven members. The figures are expressed in a common value unit, but imagine that what lies behind them is labor. Will has 50, Aude 50, Njambi 100, Kahindi 300, George 150, Amina 0, and Joyce 50. The total is 700, so the average (=700/7) is 100.

Note: These names are made up from close friends but do not reflect our actual debts today.

You can read that from the ledger … but now look at the same information as a bar chart.

Suddenly, Kahindi is impossible to miss. The community is holding far more of his labor commitments than anyone else’s. His bar is at 300 while the average is 100.

That is not an accusation … perhaps Kahindi had a major need, perhaps his roof collapsed, perhaps his family had an emergency, and perhaps helping him was exactly what everyone wanted to do. The chart simply tells us that Kahindi has received substantial support and that many of his promises remain outstanding.

Then there is Amina … with zero.

That zero is not a diagnosis. It does not prove that Amina needs help, and it certainly does not say she has done anything wrong. It is a visual signal saying, “Why is Amina absent from this pattern?”

So I would go and ask her.

If Amina wants a Mweria, she could place some of her own future labor commitments into the pool and take out some of Kahindi’s commitments. She can then ask Kahindi to fulfill those commitments by working at her Mweria. When Kahindi comes and does the work, his promise is settled … Amina has received support, Kahindi’s outstanding commitment has moved toward fulfillment, and Amina’s own commitment is now available to support somebody else later.

The bars change because people acted. Then the changed bars influence what people notice next.

That feedback loop is the stigmergic part: the chart helps provoke action, the action changes the pool, the changed pool redraws the chart, and the new chart becomes another signal.

Balance is a direction, not a command

At the end of a full Mweria cycle, we do our best to bring everyone back toward the average … n.b. we use a healthy band around the average rather than demand exact equality.

If the average is 100, perhaps 70 to 130 is reasonably balanced for a group. Someone may need three times as much support for a while. Somebody else may be sick, traveling, caring for children, or simply unable to contribute at the same moment.

The chart should invite curiosity, not punishment.

And the average is only one part of pool health. A perfectly even chart could still be unhealthy if everybody’s bar were enormous and nothing was actually being fulfilled. We therefore also need to watch how much is outstanding altogether and how long those commitments remain unsettled.

That brings us to flow.

When commitments stop moving

Some promises sit in a pool for a long time. A labor commitment may remain unused, roofing materials may accumulate because nobody needs them yet, or maize may simply be waiting for harvest.

This is where I find the idea of settlement velocity useful. Settlement means actual fulfillment or redemption … not merely passing a promise from one person to another.

A simple settlement-velocity measure is:

value of commitments settled during a period ÷ average value of commitments outstanding during that period

If the pool has roughly 700 units outstanding during a month and 350 are actually fulfilled, the settlement velocity is about 0.5 for that month.

That tells me more than saying, “We made 46 transactions.”

Transactions can move promises around … settlement closes the loop.

But I do not want maximum velocity. A roof repair might reasonably settle next week, mangoes may wait for mango season, and tree stewardship may unfold over years. Healthy flow means commitments are moving toward fulfillment at a rhythm that makes sense for what they actually represent.

So an old commitment only becomes interesting when it is old relative to its expected rhythm.

If labor normally settles within a month and one promise has been waiting three months, circle it. If maize is waiting for harvest, leave it alone. If Kahindi says he is free Wednesday and Thursday, write that beside his outstanding labor … suddenly a stagnant promise has a visible path toward fulfillment.

Now backlog, capacity, and opportunity begin leaving traces too.

Try this with a pencil

You do not need software for any of this … in fact, I would strongly suggest not beginning with software. Note … I go over creating a commitment pool using the Visionary Approach to Community Action Planning without software in Part 2 of the Book:

Even if you haven’t read the book you can start with people, paper, and something simple enough that everybody can understand it.

1. Choose one kind of commitment. Start with five to twelve people and track only one thing, perhaps mornings of labor. Agree on one simple unit so the bars are actually comparable.

2. Write the ledger. Put every person’s name down and record how much of their commitment the group currently holds. Add the total and divide by the number of members to find the average. If division is awkward, use piles of beans or stones and simply find a rough middle level together.

3. Draw the bars. Keep everyone in the same order each time so movement is easy to see. Use the same pen for everybody. The point is not to turn Kahindi red like a warning sign or make Amina disappear as missing data … write a clear zero where the value is zero, then draw the average line.

4. Ask before acting. Look at the chart together and ask, “What do we notice?” Who is high? Who is low? Who is absent? What happened? Who actually wants support? The graph directs attention, but people provide the meaning.

5. Choose the next useful action. If Amina wants support and Kahindi has outstanding labor, perhaps the next Mweria happens at Amina’s. Let the need and the available commitment find each other.

6. Redraw immediately. After the work, change the ledger and redraw the bars while everyone is still together. Watching collective action change the picture is part of the experiment.

7. Add time. Beside each bar, write the age of the oldest outstanding commitment. Circle anything that has exceeded the rhythm the group expected for that kind of promise.

8. Ask three flow questions. At each gathering ask, What is piling up? What is settling well? What could we do next to unblock something?

One more thing matters … the group should agree who is allowed to see the chart. Visibility should support care and coordination, not turn someone’s commitments into public shame. A chart hanging in a meeting place can be powerful, but only if the people represented there have agreed to that visibility.

That is enough for a first experiment.

No app … no blockchain … no special accounting system.

Just a pencil, some paper, and perhaps a few beans.

Making the commons easier to see

For me, the deeper pattern starts to become simple:

• Visible imbalance invites support.

• Visible backlog invites settlement.

• Visible capacity invites movement.

• Visible completion encourages more completion.

The ledger remembers … but the visualization creates the trace.

I do not want commitment pools to replace Mweria, and I certainly do not want a computer telling us who deserves help. I want our tools to help us recover some of the intelligence that comes from being able to look around and notice what is happening.

In village life, we do not need a dashboard to notice an unfinished roof … and perhaps we should not need sophisticated software to notice an unfinished economic relationship either. n.b. The software helps when it allows use to scale out while preserving integrity.

Sometimes a pencil, a piece of paper, and a few crooked bars are enough to start helping us see each other again … and to make the next useful action surprisingly hard not to notice.

places a tile in the garden and takes her hand away.

I look at the tile. Then I look at her.

We are playing Niwashi, a two-person cooperative game in which we build a garden while direct communication is restricted. Each of us carries objectives the other cannot see. We can place garden tiles or use a lantern to offer a limited indication of what we might need. The garden becomes our shared language, although neither of us knows exactly how the other is reading it.

We try to learn a new game every few months or as often as we find them. The first evening usually begins with pieces spread across the table, instructions being read aloud, and a growing suspicion that we have misunderstood something important.

For a while, the game is only rules.

Then the rules settle into our hands and a small world gathers on the table.

In Niwashi, Aude’s tile has at least two lives. It changes the garden itself, closing one possibility and opening another. It also changes what I think she may be trying to do.

My mind supplies an explanation almost immediately.

She must be pursuing this objective. She must have understood my previous move. Surely she wants me to continue the path beside the water.

The explanation arrives with a small pleasure. The pieces fit. I know what is happening.

Then Aude plays again, and I discover that I had been responding to my theory of her garden rather than to the garden she was actually trying to make.

The game corrects me gently. Nothing terrible happens. We laugh, reconsider the arrangement, and continue.

Still, I have begun to notice the brief interval before my explanation arrives, when her tile is simply there and I do not yet know what it means.

That interval has become the real subject of this essay.

A Theory I Can Move Through

Cooperative play is much older than the modern board game. People have always danced, sung, carried, built, improvised, tended, and created shared imaginary worlds.

The formal history of simulation often begins elsewhere.

One influential ancestor of modern games is the Prussian Kriegsspiel, introduced into the Prussian army in 1824. It used maps, hidden information, written orders, uncertain outcomes, and adjudication to let officers rehearse military decisions before encountering their consequences in war. Conflict had been made small enough to repeat, examine, and learn from.

I find this history fascinating and unsettling.

We learned to take conflict seriously enough to simulate it.

Much later, explicitly cooperative board games emerged as a recognizable design tradition. Family Pastimes began publishing cooperative games in 1972, constructing games around shared problems rather than mutual elimination. Modern cooperative games have since explored partial information, specialist abilities, collective memory, restricted communication, shared construction, survival, timing, and the governance of scarce resources.

What interests me is not a clean progression from bad competitive games to good cooperative ones.

It is the widening range of agency that designers learned to make playable.

A game can ask me to trust knowledge I do not possess. It can give another player the only ability capable of resolving the next crisis. It can restrict our speech until placement, timing, and hesitation become meaningful. It can make us share a risk without giving us the same perspective upon it.

Niwashi needs no common enemy. Aude and I are trying to make a garden before we run out of resoucres.

That feels closer to many of the economic questions that now preoccupy me. I am less interested in how we defeat the same monster than in how partial visions become capable of inhabiting one shared world.

C. Thi Nguyen gives me language for this in Games: Agency as Art. His argument is that games are unusual artworks because their medium is not primarily paint, sound, narrative, or sculpture.

Their medium is agency.

A game designer gives us goals, abilities, obstacles, permissions, and a world in which those things matter. For a while, we step inside that form of agency. We temporarily care about something with remarkable intensity because the game has made it matter. Nguyen describes games as a kind of library of agencies, preserving different ways of acting and striving that players can inhabit.

Niwashi lends me an agency organized around restraint, inference, patience, and shared construction. It teaches my attention to rest upon placement, sequence, and the traces of another person’s intention.

The game does not give me Aude’s mind.

It gives me a structured way to encounter the fact that I do not have it.

I have written elsewhere about Nguyen’s work on scoring and value capture in The Score, the Soil, and the Games I Want to Play. Here I am interested in an earlier moment.

Before a score can capture value, someone has already decided what the game is.

A rule is not a theory in the scholarly sense. Yet every designed game embodies a theory of agency.

The rules identify who can act, which actions are possible, what information is available, how the shared situation changes, and which consequences will be recognized. The victory condition offers a theory of success. The turn structure offers a theory of time. The player roles offer a theory of relevant difference.

A board game states these assumptions openly enough that I can hold them in my hands.

In that sense, a game is a theory I can move through.

The Economic Question

There is an image I often use in workshops.

On one side, people describe their current reality. On another, they draw the future they hope to reach. Between the two is a space for action steps, responsibilities, and timing.

Above the image is a question:

How do we use our resources together to achieve our visions?

I have long thought of this as the economic question.

After playing Niwashi with Aude, I began to see the image differently. A game was being brought into view.

There was a starting situation, although nobody understood all of it. There were possible futures, although the people in the room might not imagine the same future. Knowledge, time, materials, land, relationships, practical abilities, and authority were distributed across the group.

The action steps in the middle depended on more than planning. Someone had to recognize a request, trust an offer, remember what had already occurred, and act at a time that left another person able to make the next move.

Economic theory often formalizes situations in a similar way. It identifies actors, strategies, preferences, constraints, information, and outcomes. Mechanism design makes the relation to games explicit by asking which rules or mechanisms can produce the best attainable social outcome.

The theory selects what matters.

When the theory informs a market, policy, credit system, digital platform, or public program, those selections may return to the world as operative rules. The actors become recognized account holders. The possible moves become permissions and transactions. Payoffs appear as prices, scores, interest rates, benefits, or penalties. Constraints become limits, eligibility conditions, and boundaries.

The movement can therefore run in both directions.

Experience is abstracted into a model. The model becomes a mechanism. The mechanism reorganizes experience.

Even my workshop image participates in that movement. It divides what people bring into current reality, vision, and action. It invites some things to appear as resources and others as obstacles. Someone will decide when an aspiration is concrete enough to become a task, whose offer is credible, and what will count as completion.

The image does not merely discover a game that was already waiting there.

It helps compose the game people may begin to play.

This is not necessarily a problem. I continue to use the image because its categories can help people make a complicated situation discussable.

What matters is whether those categories remain open.

Who belongs inside the word we? What can appear as a resource? Which visions are safe to express? Whose work is absent from the page? Can the participants redraw the board?

Before Theory Speaks for Experience

These questions became sharper for me during a recent exchange about a multipolar trap.

The model was familiar and compelling. Several people may sincerely prefer a cooperative outcome while facing immediate incentives that punish whoever cooperates first. The collectively better summit is visible, but every nearby path slopes away from it. Binding commitments can change the terrain, making cooperation safer rather than self-sacrificial.

Climate change offered an intuitive example.

A person may oppose catastrophic warming and still choose to fly. The trip is vivid and near. Its purpose may involve family, work, love, rest, curiosity, or responsibility. The environmental consequence is distributed through time, institutions, geography, and millions of other actions. The offered carbon offset may appear doubtful, while the practical value of the trip is immediately present.

The multipolar-trap model reveals something important about incentives.

I still wanted to interrupt it. (I am enjoying allowing for interruption)

Before accepting the actors, the payoffs, the terrain, and the distinction between cooperation and defection, I wanted to know how the decision was actually being lived.

How did the trip appear to the person considering it? How did the ecological consequence appear? At what point did hesitation give way to booking the ticket?

I was not yet trying to decide whether the person was rational, selfish, or trapped.

I wanted to understand what the theory was a theory of.

There was an irony in my response.

I asked the other person to describe his experience. Then, almost immediately, I began explaining that experience for him.

I filled the opening with concepts about bodily anticipation, distant consequences, absent others, and failures of shared attention. Those distinctions may have been useful.

They were also mine.

I had sincerely tried to make room for experience, but my theoretical fluency rushed in to occupy that room.

I felt embarrassed when I noticed this. I also recognized the pleasure involved. A complicated situation suddenly acquires form. Concepts line up. Something cloudy becomes intelligible, and I feel that I can see.

That fluency is a real capacity. It helps me connect experiences and notice patterns.

It can also outrun receptivity.

I am not trying to replace theory with empiricism. An experiment, survey, transaction record, or dataset already depends upon decisions about what will be observed, how it will be classified, and which difference will count as meaningful.

Nor is lived experience simply a softer kind of data.

A transaction record might show that someone bought a ticket and declined an offset. It would not show how the trip, its ecological consequences, the offered remedy, and the imagined actions of others became near, distant, trustworthy, doubtful, or practically compelling.

I wanted both theory and empirical inquiry to remain answerable to that lived situation, partly because experience might show that I had selected the wrong players, the wrong move, or the wrong boundary.

The flight itself, for example, is already an astonishing cooperative achievement. Pilots, mechanics, airport workers, air-traffic controllers, manufacturers, fuel systems, public institutions, payment networks, scientific knowledge, and passengers coordinate across enormous distances.

The climate problem is not an absence of cooperation.

It arises inside a highly capable cooperative arrangement whose operative rules make some consequences immediate and precise while dispersing others beyond the frame in which the immediate decisions are made.

What I had called failed coordination began to look more like destructive coordination.

The system coordinates very well around producing flights. It coordinates much less effectively around recognizing, limiting, and repairing the ecological harms distributed elsewhere.

The trap is still there.

But the game now looks different.

When My Theory Becomes a Rule

This problem is not external to my own work.

When I moved to Kenya in 2008, I arrived with privilege, assumptions, and economic categories that made money, prices, formal employment, and institutions relatively easy for me to see.

Through community work, friendships, mistakes, and correction, I encountered recurring forms of cooperation those categories had placed in the background.

I remember households gathering to prepare fields, repair roofs, build granaries, cook, care for children, or complete work that exceeded one household’s capacity. In parts of coastal Kenya where I worked, I heard Mweria used for forms of locally organized collective labor. I use the term cautiously because its meanings belong to the people who carry the practices, and my analytical language cannot replace theirs.

A later gathering might concentrate effort at another household. The relevant history did not always sit in a written ledger. It could be carried through memory, testimony, emotion, reputation, custom, bodily participation, and the remembered sequence of turns. I describe this field experience more fully in Grassroots Economics: Reflections and Practice.

These experiences taught me not to call an absence defection too quickly.

Someone might be ill, caring for another person, lacking transport, exhausted by work the visible account had ignored, or refusing a demand they experienced as unfair. Each possibility changes what the absence means and which response might be appropriate.

A model cannot distinguish among them until someone has decided which actions, histories, and forms of evidence belong inside the account.

This is one origin of my work on commitment pooling. I have explained its mechanics elsewhere. The only point needed here is that it began as an attempt to notice how future undertakings become consequential in the present, and how several such undertakings can become interdependent.

If I promise to help repair your roof next Tuesday, nothing has yet been repaired. Even so, you may begin collecting materials, arranging transport, or releasing another person from the task.

My possible future action has entered your present planning.

The moment I formalize that relation, however, I begin writing rules.

I decide what can be recognized as a commitment, whose promise is admissible, which evidence matters, how much reliance is safe, and what will count as fulfillment, incapacity, failure, repair, or release.

In my technical language, some of these decisions become curation, valuation, limitation, and exchange. The names are less important here than the transformation.

A way of seeing becomes a theory.

The theory becomes a rule-world.

The rule-world alters what people can do.

A record may preserve memory while changing who controls memory. A voucher may make a promise visible and transferable while narrowing it into terms a registry can recognize. A receipt may show that a transaction occurred without showing whether the underlying work, care, or delivery was adequate.

Commitment pooling can help make interdependence legible.

It can also misread, narrow, or reorganize the relations it claims to reveal.

This is why I no longer treat building something as proof that my theory is sound.

Practice does not prove my theory. It is where my theory becomes exposed.

It becomes exposed to consequences I did not predict, to categories people reject, to authority accumulating where I hoped to distribute it, and to evidence that another explanation fits better.

I now find myself separating three questions.

Credibility concerns whether my account survives evidence, disagreement, and comparison with rival explanations. Legitimacy concerns whether the people whose options are being organized can shape the categories, contest the record, revise the terms, refuse participation, and leave. Integrity concerns whether I allow the theory to place material demands upon my own role, institution, privileges, and conduct.

These questions overlap, but they do not substitute for one another.

A theory can be intellectually credible and still lack the authority to govern a particular community. An institution can follow its published rules and remain unjust. A protocol can execute flawlessly while protecting insiders, discounting care, or making refusal unbearably costly.

I also worry about receiving moral credit without material commitment.

I can gain recognition by naming reciprocity, care, local sovereignty, or regeneration while other people carry the risk, labor, patience, and vulnerability required to make those words real. I can turn other people’s practices into intellectual material while keeping my own authority outside the field of transformation.

My practical involvement does not remove that danger.

It gives the danger somewhere to become visible.

When I bring a diagram into a community, can people change its categories? When a pool is proposed, can participants refuse it or alter its rules? When evidence contradicts my interpretation, can that contradiction change the tool, the institution, and my own position within the work?

The practices that helped me perceive commitment pooling do not become mine because I developed a vocabulary around them.

The people sustaining those practices retain the ability to name them differently, reject my map, or show that another account fits better.

Another Move

Later in the evening, Aude places another tile.

I feel the explanation beginning to form.

I think I know what objective she holds. I can already imagine the response that will prove I understood her. My hand begins moving toward the piece I intend to play.

Then I pause.

Niwashi does not ask me to become empty of interpretation. I could not play without interpreting. It asks me to act while remembering that my view of the garden is incomplete.

The rules of this particular game make that incompleteness gentle. Aude and I chose to play. We can inspect the rules, question them, stop the game, and put it away. Our livelihoods do not depend on my interpretation of her tile.

Outside the box, I cannot assume any of those conditions.

People may not have chosen the economic rule-world they inhabit. Its boundaries may be difficult to see, its scores may be controlled elsewhere, and leaving may carry the loss of food, shelter, land, care, status, or belonging.

This is why the movement from theory to rule requires more than intelligence.

It requires legitimacy.

At the end of Niwashi, Aude and I reveal our objectives. Some of her earlier moves suddenly make sense. Others remain surprising. We laugh about the moments when each of us had constructed a confident story about what the other was doing.

The garden was cooperative, but not because we shared one plan.

We had partial visions, limited signals, a history of earlier moves, and another person whose understanding neither of us could possess.

When I now return to the workshop question, I hear another question inside it.

How do we use our resources together to achieve our visions?

Before I begin improving the rules, I want to learn what game the other people believe we are playing. I want to know what they can see from where they stand, what they have already contributed, what they are being asked to risk, and whether they can change the board I have brought into the room.

Aude is waiting.

The paths are still incomplete.

I look once more at the garden between us. I let my explanation remain a hypothesis for a moment longer.

Then I place my tile.

There is a moment when a ledger stops looking like a ledger to me.

For years, I have looked at rows of transactions: an address, a token, an amount, another address, a timestamp. Each row is precise, but the economy around it remains difficult to see.

• Who is contributing to a local economy?

• What kinds of value are entering and leaving?

• Are local commitments circulating among people, or only accumulating?

• When national currency enters a community, does it replace local exchange, support it, or move alongside it?

• How do separate savings groups begin to form a wider economic network without giving up their own rules?

This Cosmo-Local Credit Visualizer is an attempt to make some of these relationships visible.

Five Chama Pools

This video follows five Chama pools near Kiriba and Takaungu, Kenya:

Kiriba Chama
Mnyumbuni Chama
Neema Chama
Nguvu Kazi Chama
Upendo Kiriba Group

The visualizer reconstructs 4,606 public Celo transaction events from 9 January through 13 August 2026. It connects these transactions with public information about pools, community vouchers, marketplace offers, and field reports.

A Chama (mutual-aid group) is not only an account holding money. It is a group of people making commitments to one another.

Each pool can decide which vouchers (commitments for goods and services) it accepts, how it values them, how much it will hold, and what it will offer in exchange. These decisions create a curated marketplace rather than an unrestricted pool of interchangeable assets.

One pool might hold commitments for food, transport, farm work, construction, or other goods and services alongside stable currencies. Another pool can make different choices.

The five pools remain distinct, but some of their vouchers can move between them. This begins to look like a cosmo-local federation: local groups keeping their own boundaries while sharing enough infrastructure for value to travel.

Reading the Visualizer

Each circle represents an active participant account or pool.

The colored ring shows its reconstructed digital holdings at the selected moment. The size of each slice represents its relative value using current KSH valuation metadata.

A participant may have a public marketplace image in the center of the circle. This connects a token balance to the actual goods, services, or commitments publicly associated with that voucher.

Pools display two values:

1. KSHv is the current estimated value of local vouchers held by the pool.

2. KSHs is the current estimated value of stable or national-currency tokens held by the pool.

The arrows show transaction movements. A swap produces multiple arrows because one asset enters a pool while another leaves.

The soft shapes underneath are recent interaction communities. They show which participants and pools have been transacting with one another during the selected connection window.

Note: The map itself needs careful interpretation. Participant positions are not derived from participant GPS. They are inferred from the public locations associated with the vouchers and reports connected to their holdings.

This is economic proximity, not a claim about where someone lives or where a particular exchange happened.

Deposits, Loans, Repayments, and Redemptions

The Event Explorer gives each observed transaction a behavioral tag.

A member depositing a local voucher into a pool is shown as a Voucher Deposit.

Stable currency entering a pool is shown as a National Currency Deposit. This may come from members, outside funding, grants, or other sources.

When a voucher enters a pool and stable value leaves, I call the pattern a National Currency Loan.

When stable value enters and a voucher leaves, I call it a National Currency Repayment.

When one voucher enters and another voucher leaves, I call it a Voucher Loan or exchange-loan pattern.

When a voucher moves directly between participants, I call it a Direct Redemption.

National Currency value entering the cohort from outside is shown as an Onramp. National Currency value leaving the cohort is shown as an Offramp.

These labels are visual shorthand. A blockchain transaction cannot prove that a legal loan agreement existed, that cash changed hands, that a product was delivered, or that a commitment was fulfilled.

What it can show is the shape of movement.

That shape helps me ask better questions.

Commitments as Shared Capacity

A voucher can represent a community member’s commitment to provide something: food, labor, transport, care, construction, farming, or another locally available capacity.

When a pool accepts that voucher, it is not necessarily treating it as legal collateral. It is recognizing some amount of that commitment as pool-valued capacity.

That accepted capacity may then provide access to stable liquidity or to another voucher in the pool.

This creates a possible bridge between local production and national currency.

A farmer, trader, worker, or service provider does not have to begin with national currency alone. Their capacity to provide something can enter a locally governed pool. Subject to the pool’s limits and rules, that commitment can help them access other forms of value.

The pool does not eliminate trust, judgment, or risk. It gives a group a structure for expressing them.

When Vouchers Travel

Some of the most interesting sequences do not happen in one transaction.

A person may exchange voucher A through one pool to receive voucher B. Later, voucher B may enter another pool to receive voucher C or stable currency.

Another participant may draw a voucher from a pool and then send it directly to the person who provides the associated good or service.

These routes show how separate pools can become connected without merging into one institution.

I call this cosmo-local credit.

The credit remains rooted in named people, places, offers, and community governance. At the same time, shared protocols allow commitments to move across group boundaries.

The goal is not to flatten every form of value into one universal token. It is to let diverse local commitments remain legible while becoming interoperable where communities choose.

Community Reports and the Economy Around the Ledger

The blockchain can show that a token moved. It cannot tell us the complete social meaning of that movement.

Community reports provide another layer.

They show farming activities, meetings, training, repairs, group work, and other public community events associated with particular vouchers. Marketplace offers show what people publicly offer to provide.

When a report is selected, the visualizer looks for related voucher activity around the inferred activity period. It can also follow a voucher entering a pool and examine the possible onward use of the asset received from that swap.

This is contextual evidence, not proof of causality.

A transaction near a farming report does not prove that it paid for the farming. A later transfer does not prove delivery. Fungible tokens do not carry their purpose with them.

Still, placing reports, offers, pools, and transactions together makes the economy more understandable than any one layer alone.

Reading Settlement Flow

The Settlement Flow chart shows gross value crossing pool boundaries.

The green area represents Local voucher flow.

The dotted blue line represents National Currency flow.

The chart can be viewed by day, week, or month. Inbound plus outbound gives gross flow. Inbound minus outbound gives net flow.

A peak does not necessarily represent one enormous transaction.

For example, the large Local peak on 13 January is a collective pool-seeding day made from many deposits. The National Currency peak on 9 March shows stable funding entering all five pools within a short period.

These movements become inspectable and legible. Clicking a peak opens its dominant contributing event while synchronizing the map, timeline, and Event Explorer.

Settlement Flow is not profit. It is not pool inventory. It is not necessarily obligation-closing settlement. The values displayed inside each pool describe reconstructed holdings. The chart describes movement across the pool boundary.

The current chart measures gross pool-boundary activity.

From Village Coordination to Bioregional Infrastructure

What interests me is not simply that blockchain transactions can be animated.

I am interested in whether communities can see and govern the relationship between their productive capacity, their commitments to one another, and the national currency moving through their region.

These five Chamas combine savings-like contributions, external stable funding, reciprocal commitments, pool-mediated exchange, direct voucher movement, public offers, and community activity.

Each pool keeps its own curation, valuation, limits, inventory, and right to say no.

Shared assets make coordination across pools possible.

At a village scale, this can help a group understand its own commitments and liquidity.

At a bioregional scale, connected pools could show how food, labor, transport, care, energy, and national currency circulate among communities.

At a larger public scale, similar tools could help institutions ask whether finance is strengthening local productive capacity or extracting from it.

The visualizer does not answer those questions by itself.

A ledger can preserve a mistaken account. A protocol can execute a harmful rule perfectly. A beautiful map can make weak assumptions look more certain than they are.

The purpose is not to replace judgment.

It is to make relationships inspectable enough that communities, researchers, and public institutions can ask better questions together.

A Working Map

This video is a first working map of a much larger possibility.

I want to continue expanding it across more pools, longer histories, and eventually simulated economies where different rules can be tested before communities depend on them.

I also want to make the distinctions clearer:

• Between value and price.

• Between capacity and collateral.

• Between movement and fulfillment.

• Between gross flow and settlement.

• Between a network that connects communities and a system that absorbs them.

The circles and arrows are not the economy….

The economy is the people, places, capacities, promises, limits, and relationships underneath them.

The visualizer is one way of learning to see more of what is already there.

(If you want access to the visualizer you can use an anonymized dataset from https://zenodo.org/records/20120190 ) Contact me for the source code or a trial.

It is early-ish morning and I am walking along a trail beside a river.

There are blackberries growing along the edge of the path, and I am eating them as I go. I reach into the thorns, find the dark ripe ones, pull them loose, put them in my mouth. The berry breaks. Juice hits my tongue. Sugar! A little acid…

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After three years, I have cut my beard. This is not a small thing for me.

For three years, I have been growing something (no trimming) that began as facial hair and gradually became an independent member of the household.

It had opinions.

It had dietary preferences.

It had, on more than one occasion, attempted to eat my dinner before I could.

I have found my…

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The maize cob catches for a moment in its dry husk, then comes free.

I place it beside the others and reach for another.

I am sitting outside the home of one of the women in our community in Kiriba, on the coast of Kenya. Around me, hands keep moving. Leaves pull away with a soft crackle. Cobs knock against the growing pile. Dust gathers on our fingers.

Th…

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Three movements: formation, strengthening, and release.

When my daughter rests against my chest, I feel her breathing before I understand anything else. Her fingers open and close around my beard. Her eyes turn toward light and faces. Her attention gathers, loosens eyes rolling, and gathers again. Her life seems to arrive through warmth, movement, nouris…

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There is a funny thing about the word pool. It sounds almost too easy. Put several things together and there you are: a pool?

A pool of applicants. A pool of data. A pool of ideas. A pool of commitments.

Suppose a platform lets people make promises/commitments, prove that they kept them, and receive a reward. Is that useful? Certainly. Does it involve com…

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I begin at home which is also the Grassroots Economics office in Kiriba village, with what I can see.

There are homes, paths, gardens, goats, tools, children, elders, and workers moving between households. Women carry water. People leave for paid work and return with Kenyan shillings. Groups gather to farm, cook, repair, talk, drink tea, care for children, and complete work that would overwhelm one household acting alone.

The place feels intensely alive to me. Money moves through it, along with food, labor, care, knowledge, reputation, obligation, and disappointment. Some of these movements remain close to home. Others stretch outward toward plantations, wealthier households, imported food, public institutions, donors, a chief’s office and international funding.

I reach for the image of a social organism. It draws my attention to circulation and interdependence. It also troubles me. Kiriba contains many bodies, histories, perspectives, and needs. The community appears through a plurality of lives rather than through one body or one voice.

I notice how much daily life depends on resources arriving from elsewhere. People travel to earn cash and return to buy flour, medicine, fuel, school requirements, and other necessities. Agricultural knowledge and land remain present, while water scarcity, fragile infrastructure, unequal access, and ecological uncertainty shape what people can produce locally.

So I begin asking what remains after money, labor, food, and obligations move through the community. Do those movements leave behind greater capacity ... or greater dependence on systems beyond local reach?

At the same time, I watch another economic possibility move through rotating labor. A household receives help preparing a field or repairing a roof, then later joins the same group at someone else’s home. People contribute strength, time, food, tools, knowledge, care, and future availability. They also carry memory. They remember who arrives, who struggles, who prepares food, who has already received support, and who may be called upon later.

The exchange remains open across time. Present work rests between percieved past and anticipated future responses.

Commitment pools grow from this same practical question. A participant can issue a voucher representing farming labor, transport, food, repairs, care, currency redemption, or another undertaking. A pool can accept that voucher, assign it a value, set a limit, hold it beside other commitments, and allow people to exchange between them.

The technical structure is relatively simple. The human question keeps opening for me.

What kind of world are we helping to create when people make, recognize, pool, exchange, fulfill, revise, repair, and end commitments together?

Alongside this work, I find myself tracing a particular philosophical lineage. John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, Nel Noddings, Judith Butler, and Francisco Varela approach distinct questions in distinct times. I treasure their agreements and their disagreements. I place their lenses beside my own experience because I see correspondences in the questions gathering there.

This remains a selective path. Proust stands nearby in my mind around memory and time. Bergson, Arendt, Ricoeur, and many others could enter from different directions. I know how quickly I can become carried away by patterns ... how my mind can keep joining points until the whole sky becomes a constellation. I offer these correspondences with care, and I hope their illumination makes sense to you.

A note at the threshold

This is where I place the rest of the essay inside The Guild.

This publication is supported by subscribers, and this piece continues the unpublished Moral Life work I first opened to paid readers in “I Could Feel the Shape Before I Could See It”, a private note on the making of that work.

The pages below bring that inquiry back into Kiriba, the village where I live and work ... into community action, embodied capacity, commitment pooling, stewardship, external finance, and the moral weight of institutional design. I am keeping this continuation with Guild members because it asks for a slower kind of attention, and because subscriber support gives me room to follow these questions while they are still alive and changing.

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I begin with joy... simple, immediate, almost embarrassingly small.

My daughter is in my arms. She has been unsettled... then, gradually, something changes. Her breathing becomes quieter. Her face softens. Her attention rests, just briefly, on mine. Sometimes she falls asleep. Sometimes she remains awake and looks around ... taking in…

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In Welcome to The Guild, I described The Guild as a workshop around the work. I compared a Guild Master to a Dungeon Master: someone who holds a world, its history, relationships, limits, conflicts, and unanswered questions, so that other people can enter it and act.

I also said that I may hold the map, but I do not claim to be the territory.

Today, that map has started to become playable.

I am opening a preview of the Social Soil Guild Master, a custom GPT that can guide one player or a small group through a developing role-playing game (RPG) about commitments, cooperation, ecology, institutions, and social change.

This is part of a larger question for me: if military institutions use war games to examine uncertainty, logistics, power, and consequences, where are our equally serious Peace Games?

I don’t think of a Peace Game as a harmony simulator. As I see it … it should include disagreement, unequal power, scarce resources, broken promises, refusal, failure, repair, and consequences that persist. It should let us explore how to live and work together when nobody controls the whole situation.

Some kind of Real Play. The world is fictional, but the player makes real choices. There is no hidden lesson answer and no reward for simply repeating the designer’s ideas. The game may help us notice commitments, care, knowledge, access, trust, infrastructure, and ecological limits, but it must do so through play rather than instruction.

The first campaign of the Social Soil Guild is Before the Rains. It begins with a returning repairer, an approaching rainy season, a dormant public institution, and a settlement full of conflicting memories and unfinished relationships. What happens next depends on the player - you.

Paid Guild members can continue below for the private preview link, a short explanation of the system, and instructions for beginning a campaign. After the Guild’s feedback there will be an open source launch of the Gaming System rules and Campaign (with attribution to those who help).

Also below is an invitation to our first group gathering.

Note this is only for members because of sensitive content. (If you think you should be a member and can’t afford it - let me know)

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There is a kind of intelligence that speeds ahead. It is like a finger that stretches out to feel the world before the rest of the body can feel, see, taste, or digest.

There is a temptation in that finger to regard the rest of the body as slow, or even stupid, in comparison. That finger imagines other worlds and thinks it could even get there if the res…

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A hand moves toward me. There is a cup in it. Steam, perhaps. A glance. I am sitting in someone else’s home and something is happening .... but what? Is the cup being offered, passed, shown? Am I supposed to take it, hold it, pay for it? The event has already begun. Its meaning has not. Or maybe that is not quite right .... the meaning has begun too. It…

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