A Chronicle of Liberation

By Omar-VgWs - October 2026

A chronicle of a garden cultivated in hostile ground#

‘Can I pay someone in stones, when I ought to have paid in seeds?’

I. The Question#

The question was born on an ordinary Tuesday, when I opened a bank transfer that was incomplete, late, in a currency that melts between the fingers. A third partial salary. A payment that arrives the way dirty water arrives through a broken pipe: enough to survive by, too little to feel that someone, on the other side, honours the agreement.

And so the question: ‘Can I pay someone in stones, when I ought to have paid in seeds?’

Stones are heavy. They pile up. They take up room. Germinate — and I use the word loosely — is not in their nature. With stones one can raise a wall against the cold, yes. With stones one gets by. But sowing a future with stones is an impossible task.

Seeds, by contrast, are promises. Time condensed. The possibility that something living may rise from nothing, multiply, and hold up others.

I asked for seeds. I was handed stones. And the deepest part of it is that the one who hands them over cannot tell the difference.

II. The Garden in the Jungle#

Six years ago I planted a garden from afar. A garden of ideas. A property called Avalon Tulum, on a stretch of coast the world knows as Tulum, though those of us who live it from the inside know it for something else: a jungle dressed up as paradise, where everything grows fast and everything rots just as fast.

The project was more than a roof. It was a node. A point on the map where the circular economy, decentralisation, and the philosophy of my own manifesto — the Bucéfalo Manifesto (it will open in this window)— would cease to be words on a document and become living practice. Seeds, quite literally. Digital seeds, seeds of sovereignty, seeds of community.

In the early years the garden held. There were storms, there were blights — a previous managing agency that left debts and wear — but the soil answered. The balance, however fragile, was there.

Until the soil itself began to turn poisonous.

III. The Keeper Who Speaks Another Language#

Towards the end of February 2026 a new keeper arrived. We call him the manager, because administrator sounded too cold, and owner would have been out of place. Six months on, we signed an agreement before witnesses. A document that, in theory, granted him full use of the property in exchange for renovating it, managing it and — an unavoidable condition — settling the rent in seeds. In the currency that gives the project its meaning.

But the keeper speaks another language.

The first attempt at an agreement remained on paper. In it, I appeared as a co-creator, with a voice and a vote in the garden's evolution. The keeper wanted open field. We chose, then, a clearer path, one that would preserve what had already been built. We signed a second agreement, a conventional one. A tenancy. Simple. Clear: monthly rent, payment in seeds, the occasional possibility of stones.

Today, months after that signature, I receive stones. Partial. Late. For the second time running. And the manager administers in his own fashion, aloof from co-creation, from the map, from the book that sets out the pillars of what we are attempting to build here. My intuition — that voice one learns to heed after six years of swallowing dust — keeps me watchful.

Perhaps there is merely a different language. I speak in seeds; he only knows how to carry stones.

IV. The Curse of the Land#

To lay the blame on the keeper alone would be unfair. The land itself is unwell.

Tulum. To pronounce that name today is to invoke a broken spell. What was a bohemian dream, a refuge of backpackers and seekers, has become a theatre of economic and ecological war. Sargassum arrives by the tonne, rotting along the shore, frightening off those who came for sun and peace. Criminality filters through every crack: extortion, violence, disappearances. The social fabric frays beneath the weight of an obscene inequality.

And from above, the campaigns of disrepute. Narratives that batter the place's image, that frighten the visitor, that devalue every brick, every palm, every square metre. The property market fell by thirty-four per cent. What was once worth gold is now sold off as scrap.

To this is added a whole country where justice is a hollow word. Where the courts are labyrinths designed to wear the honest man down. Where collusion is the method. Faced with that, my wager has always been a different one: to build upon my own rules, written in a manifesto and backed by seeds. A ground no court can dispute.

The place is wounded. By the sum of unchecked ambition, institutional neglect, and a nature that presents her bill.

V. The View from Above#

Six years. Six years of contemplating this garden from the distance that perspective alone can give. Six years of calls, of messages, of recording each season, each crack, each promise kept.

Distance, here, is height. From this vantage one sees the whole garden: what it was, what it is, and what it is called to be. Whoever walks among the furrows knows the soil up close; whoever watches from on high takes in the full design. The keeper tends the ground. The owner keeps the blueprint.

And it is the blueprint, in the end, that decides where everything grows.

The figures arrive at their own pace, in whatever currency each chooses. From above they are read calmly, recorded, weighed. The serenity of one who holds the whole vision is an advantage that no one below can contest.

VI. The Price of Freedom#

The property has been in transition for some time. The market has drawn in, interest has cooled, and each season brings its own weight. Even so, the decision to release it is serene, considered, and mine.

This property was conceived as a pillar. Over the years it has gradually become a drag, pulling against the direction of the vision. My life's project can no longer keep sustaining an asset that, in turn, wears it down. It is like swimming with lead tied to one's ankles: it keeps one afloat, yes, but it prevents one from reaching the shore.

Selling today carries a cost. It hurts to accept the devaluation. It hurts to see what took so much to raise handed over for less than it would be worth in another time. But it hurts more to stay. It hurts more to watch the manifesto I wrote in hope turn into a dead letter on ground that rejects it.

A friend — a true one — is out there. Promoting. Showing. Persisting. To him I entrust the transition and, above all, the closing of this cycle. A closing I choose myself, on my own terms, at whatever pace the vision sets.

VII. The Last Seed#

The day will come — it has to come — when the buyer signs. When the keys change hands. When Avalon Tulum ceases to be my name, my weight, and my cross.

That day, the money I receive will be modest. It will be stone. It will be currency that melts.

But that day, for the first time in six years, I shall have the freedom to turn those stones into what they were always meant to be: seeds. Sovereign. Digital. Mine. Far from the sargassum, far from the corruption, far from the keeper who speaks another language.

And then, at last, I shall be able to sow elsewhere. Or simply, to rest.

For a garden is measured by what one learns before letting it go.

<small>Note on Transparency and Voluntary Support</small>
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