Ecology of The Heart

How Commitments held in Relational Memory Sustain Emotional Commons

We’re currently visiting an intentional community focused on permaculture and sociocracy. Aude lived here for seven years and it reminds me of the places I lived before leaving the US 16+ years ago. There's a palpable rhythm here - a flow of resources, care for people, and love for the land. It feels like a sibling of Kenya’s Mweria and Kaya systems, where collective labor and sacred gathering sustain life. Here, the Mweria practice is called a Perma Blitz, a rotating group labor ritual rooted in the permaculture movement.

In this space, Commitment Pooling feels natural. Its logic lives in relational memory, not servers and spreadsheets.

For Aude, this place is not just familiar.. it’s formative. She lived here seven years, and over ten in the region. She feels this is where her mind and heart learned to melt into each other. A place of compost and emergence. The deep rhythms of community life taught her to become human again, to expose herself, to love, to grieve, to grow. It is more than memory, it is felt presence. Returning here after some time away, she describes the invisible thread of commitments seeded long ago, still alive in the soil, in the glances, in the quiet “Welcome home” she receives. It’s a relational ecology. A memory of who she is.

So let’s pause and re-ground ourselves in what care truly looks like when it flows without external technologies…. where we are the ledger. Our memories are the network. And care, given freely, is the strongest form of bond we’ve ever known.

What Holds the Space of Pooled Commitments and Trust Without an external Ledger?

In an emotional commitment pool, the information is held not in ledgers or tokens, but in relational memory, a distributed, embodied, and social system that includes:

• Witnessing: Acts are seen, named, or felt by others; visibility creates shared awareness.

• Ritual and Rhythm: Circles, meals, and workdays form containers for remembering and rebalancing.

• Narrative and Story: Contributions live in shared memories: “Remember when she stayed with you after the storm?”

• Embodied Memory: The nervous system stores felt care or absence; bodies recall what the mind may forget.

• Field Dynamics – Subtle shifts in tone, presence, or energy reveal unspoken needs for attention or repair.

The "ledger" here in relational memory is living, social, and rhythmic. It is updated through rituals, repaired through acknowledgment, and made resilient by community presence.

Aude shares - Our workdays, our shared meals, our late night discussions, the unspoken rituals of showing up … these became the architecture of care. Over time, they shaped my nervous system. My landscape design practice also deepened here, hand-in-hand with emotional restoration. Learning to harvest water and regrow forests wasn’t separate from learning to hold grief or joy with others. We tended both land and hearts, side by side.

The Center is the Commons

In every circle of commitment pooling, there is a center space, not a person, not a tool, but a relational field where care converges. It is the overlap of individual commitments: Carlos’ welcome, Maria’s presence walks, Pedro’s silent repairs. No one owns this space, yet everyone draws from it. It is Ubuntu in action — “I am because we are.”

This commons is not abstract. It is where:

• Grief is held by more than one.

• Joy spreads across many bodies.

• Work becomes ritual, and ritual becomes repair.

It’s also a hyper-efficient coordination engine. No scheduling software or tokens are needed, when the center senses the whole. Needs surface. Offers ripple. Attention moves organically toward where it's most needed.

This is what fungal networks do beneath forests. This is what ancestral Mweria systems do in villages. The center becomes conscious, not because it is programmed, but because it is relationally alive.

In such spaces, humans don’t just survive … we become people again: responsive, interdependent, whole. This is the radical gift of commitment pooling: not just a model for care, but a map for being people together.

Aude reflects: This center space was never fully defined, yet everyone felt it. It was where we met each other with curiosity, respect, and a lightness of being — even in the midst of conflict or sorrow. It meant different things to each of us, carried different flavors. For me, it was where coherence emerged between the ecological and emotional, the individual and collective.

In such a space, roles dissolve. You offer what you can, and receive what you didn’t know you needed. I also remember so many acts of kindness and presence, they were part of an unspoken ledger of care, kept alive in the body.

A Commitment Pool of Emotional Agreements

Let’s explore a real-feeling example:

Carlos wants to deepen trust and mutual care. He offers what he has in abundance: welcoming space and time. He opens his home once a week for a “care circle” , a shared rhythm for meals, stories, silence, grief, and joy.

This hospitality is Carlos’ seed offering. He becomes a co-steward of an emotional commitment pool.

Maria, a coach burned out from caregiving, joins the circle. She needs to be witnessed. During check-in, she offers:

“If anyone ever needs a slow walk, I offer that.”

Pedro, a woodworker grieving a recent loss, joins later. He hears about Maria’s walks, and she holds space for him in a quiet walk. Later, in gratitude, Pedro repairs the bench in Carlos’ garden fence.

Hi gratitude is the memory of the heart, acknowledging the kindnesses received and the love shared.

Carlos, touched, tells Pedro’s story at the next circle, honoring the gesture. Pedro weeps. His sorrow is seen and held.

“The simple act of caring is heroic.” - Edward Albert

The Pool as Conductor of Care

• Maria receives emotional grounding and a space to practice.

• Pedro receives peer-based support.

• Carlos receives care for his space.

• The group becomes more connected.

“Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.” - Pema Chödrön

No one keeps score on paper or digitally. Yet all witnessed, gave and received. This is cross-clearing of emotional commitments through presence and appreciation, not financial accounting.

Pooling here shared and flexible, value flows through a commons, not just between two people. Unlike barter (1:1 trades and 1:1 loans and debts), pooling lets care circulate where it's needed, not where it's matched.

It’s trust-based, not transaction-based.

When emotional agreements become pooled, we move from private reciprocity to collective resonance.

This is commitment pooling at its truest:
A system where care flows, presence is the proof, and community is the ledger.

When Do We Need an External Record or Ledger?

As our networks grow, the temptation to reach for external accounting systems, ledgers and code comes so fast. Lets really think about it. As communities grow or overlap, sometimes relational memory (in our brains) alone isn’t enough. That’s when we can think about introducing ledgers, records, or even blockchain. But only when necessary.

Key Thresholds for Record-Keeping:

• Scale – When group size exceeds our ability to truly know each other.

• Duration – When commitments stretch over long timespans.

• Complexity – When many pools interlink or commitments cross networks.

• Fragility – In low-trust contexts or with histories of harm.

• Delegation – When people act on behalf of groups.

Aude reflects here: The emotional landscape of community life can sometimes blur moments, and with them, the clarity of spoken agreements. Emotions can color interpretation, especially when wounds are triggered or care is stretched thin. In these moments, relational memory may need gentle support, not to replace it, but to anchor it.

Simple tools, a shared note, a board with agreements, an exchanged voucher for promises, can become more than checked lists. They become the place where we look when we forget, to go back to a moment in the past where our feelings might have been hurt and we stopped listening.

For me, this is also when administrative tasks transform into storytelling. When lists become art. When the web of information, knowledge, and processes begins to breathe. Records, when held with care, can carry the voices of those daring to redefine systems. They become visible, teachable, and accessible.

In such cases, records aren’t about control, they’re about continuity. A rhythm of remembering. A way to honor what was said, and how it was felt, so that mutual care can continue with clarity.

A Vital Caution on External Ledgers

Records/ledgers should never replace relationships. They support trust, they don’t create it.

Tools like community tokens or blockchains can help map commitments, but they should reflect care, not reduce it to metrics.

Use ledgers when relational memory needs help.
But remember: care, not code, holds the system together.

A Vital Caution on Money and Relationships

Think about what it means to introduce foreign commitments (like money) into your relationships. The overlapping commitments of myself and Aude should not always be dependent on money or foreign ledgers. That would be like putting a 3rd party between us for each interaction. Yet when we put money in between our interactions as a society - It’s like placing a stranger between every hug, every shared meal, every promise. We lose our identity as partners, neighbors, friends, Kaya - and end up pulled into a monoculture of control where each interaction must depend on that foreign commodity.

When every act is measured or passed through foreign value - like money - we forget how to feel it in love, kinship, or shared song. If we no longer pool our commitment, care, resources - we lose our humanity. This level of colonization of society is extreme! Yet here we are deeply inside dependency and addiction to money. It is hard to even approach our collective wound. Yet, I can hear Rumi echoing in my head: “The wound is where the light enters you.”

Our offering here is largely a re-framing - a way to look below the surface of our socio-economic heritage and current home. Commitment Pooling seems to be the basic functional mechanism to build commons - and reveal where they are broken.

Another offering is 10+ years of open source software that people can use to articulate their commitments and pool them together. It’s not a solution. It’s a way to re-establish relational memory - so we can remember how to be people, together.

We Remember in Order to Care

As I sit with Aude in this beautiful permaculture community, I see clearly that the most durable systems are those woven through presence. Whether called Mweria, Perma Blitz, Chore cycles, or Care Circle, what sustains them is not an external tool, but a truth:

We are the ledger.
Our memories are the network.
And care, pooled freely, is the strongest form of cooperation we’ve ever known.

Let’s not forget it.

Aude reflects: For me, this place isn’t just familiar, it lives within me. Returning here reawakens a web of connections: the soil, the trees, the conflicts, the reconciliations. But these are not only external, they mirror and reactivate connections within myself. Each element touches an embodied knowing, woven through my thoughts, my feelings, my understanding of this land, and my deep relationships with others.

I remember each swale: who helped dig it, how we laughed or cried together in the process. I remember each tree: who planted it, who watered it, the intentions whispered into its roots. I remember the meals: prepared by different hands each day, each one a quiet act of care.

Though I now live elsewhere, I carry this ecology of the heart with me. I long to bring this way of being into every place I touch, where care is not rare, not conditional, but the ground we walk on and grow from.