You wake just before dawn, not to an alarm, but to a pot of tea warming on the rocket stove.
Your neighbor left it, knowing you’d be up early to mend the fence. They didn’t ask for anything in return. They just remembered the windstorm, and how your goats had nearly escaped last time.
You drink the tea slowly. Not because time is abundant, but because it belongs to all of you now.
You head to the garden where a few others have gathered. Today’s task: harvesting herbs for the clinic. One person hums while they snip yarrow. Another is already infusing calendula in oil.
No one’s paid. No one’s volunteering.
It’s just what happens here.
Someone asks if you can help watch their child this afternoon.
You say yes, because someone else will help you fix your roof tomorrow.
Nothing is traded. Everything is offered.
By noon, you’re at the repair tent.
Someone’s brought in a busted pressure cooker. Another, a cracked phone screen. A kid asks if you can teach them how to solder.
You show them. Not because it’s your job.
Because it matters that they know how.
Later, you help clean up the communal kitchen—
the place where no one owns the food, but everyone eats.
A young trans woman you haven’t seen in weeks shows up.
She’s welcomed without hesitation. Someone wraps her in a blanket.
Someone else slides over a bowl of soup.
No ID required.
No means test.
Need is the only credential.
That evening, a small group gathers for the weekly Circle of Needs.
There’s no agenda. No voting. No money. Just voices.
Someone says they’re burning out caring for their parents.
Someone else offers to help take shifts. Another offers to cook.
Someone else says they miss music.
By the end of the night, a band has formed. Not a gig. A gift.
You walk home under stars with a repaired pair of boots, a full belly, and the knowledge that you are held, not indebted.
This is not utopia. This is a system.
It doesn’t eliminate conflict. It doesn’t erase inequality.
But it moves differently. It flows like water instead of contracts.
It asks not what can I get, but what can I give.
Not who owns this, but who needs it.
Not what is it worth, but how does it care?
The gift is not a symbol. It is the infrastructure.
Care is not a cost. It is the currency.
This is how the system runs:
Not on extraction. But on relationship.
Not on ROI. But on Rituals of Interdependence.
