Leisha We are living in a time of disorientation. Many are searching for meaning, for answers, for someone to speak truth in a world that feels increasingly synthetic and detached. We’re told to look to the experts, the institutions, the leaders in suits and robes, the ones who speak from marble podiums and digital screens. But what if the answers have always been quieter, older, closer? What if the real power was never up there at all, but beneath our feet?
Soil is not a resource. It is not dirt. It is life. It is memory. It is the microbial, breathing skin of the Earth, teeming with intelligence and ancient knowing. The more we strip it, poison it, and sterilize it, the more lost we become, not just physically, but spiritually. When the soil dies, we forget who we are.
This is not poetic exaggeration. The health of the soil mirrors the health of our gut, our minds, our communities. It is the terrain that makes life possible. And yet, most world leaders, even those claiming moral or spiritual authority, do not speak of it. They speak of climate change, sustainability, and technological innovation, but rarely mention compost, microbes, or the sacred nature of decay and regeneration.
Pope Francis made headlines with Laudato Si’, a document praised for its ecological concern. And now, with the election of Pope Leo XIV, many wonder if the Church will deepen that commitment. But let’s be honest. Neither pope has spoken directly about soil microbiomes, fermentation, seed sovereignty, or the spiritual dimension of microbial life. They reference the Earth as “our common home,” but their solutions remain abstract, policy-driven, and sanitized.
They talk about the poor, but sit at the same tables as the institutions that create poverty, through land grabs, patenting life, and destroying smallholder farmers. They align with global agendas that speak the language of sustainability while pushing centralized food systems, lab-grown substitutes, and digitized agriculture. These are systems that sterilize not just the land, but the culture of life itself.
When you understand how soil works, you see how off-track we’ve gone. You see that life is built on reciprocity, decay, and regeneration. You see that microbes, not men in robes or CEOs in suits, hold the key to our survival. You see that leadership isn’t about power over, but care within.
And so, you start asking different questions. Why doesn’t the Church speak of the sacrament of soil? Why doesn’t any world leader kneel in the compost and mean it? Why is the very basis of all life, microbial diversity, absent from most climate conversations?
Some figures, like Vandana Shiva, once spoke boldly about these things. She challenged the patenting of seeds, the destruction of indigenous knowledge, the chemicalization of the land. But even she now walks in circles connected to the same global forums she once criticized. Her message has been diluted, made palatable to the systems it once confronted. The deeper truth is often carried not by names we know, but by hands we don’t.
Real leadership is not in the spotlight. It’s in the garden. It’s in the mother composting kitchen scraps. The farmer saving her grandmother’s seeds. The herbalist foraging from the hedgerow. The teacher planting with children in red earth. The communities fermenting cabbage and making cheese, carrying on traditions so old they don’t need to be explained.
These people do not wait for permission. They do not need headlines. They are not building brands or careers. They are just remembering. They are holding the living web together when everything else seems to be falling apart.
They are the leaders now.
And so maybe the question isn’t whether a pope or a president will rise up and speak for the Earth. Maybe the question is whether we will. Whether we will stop waiting. Whether we will realize that our hands are already enough, our love of land already sacred, our voices already worthy.
Let’s stop looking up. We’ve been looking up, down, sideways, waiting for someone to tell us what to do or where to go. But maybe that’s the trouble. We don’t know where to look anymore.
Maybe the time for following is over. Maybe we were never meant to be led by titles, robes, or institutions in the first place. Maybe the only true leadership now is self-led, rooted, accountable to life itself. And to the soil that makes it possible.
There is a God. What does He think of us now?
Have we forgotten how to listen? Not to the noise of power, but to the pulse of earthworms, the rhythm of the seasons, the whisper of seeds opening in the dark? Have we traded the sacred for the synthetic and called it progress?
Do we go back? Do we surge forward? Or do we just carry on as if it doesn’t matter?
I think it does matter. I think most of us feel it does, even if we don’t have the words.
So maybe the answer is not a direction, but a stance. One of care. Of attention. Of choosing to live differently, even when no one is watching. Maybe we stop asking who will lead us, and start becoming the kind of people worth following.
Because the real power was never in Rome or in Davos. It was never on the screens or in the slogans.
The real power is beneath our feet. It always was.
No one person or institution or policy is going to make the difference. The difference will come from individuals who act where they are planted. Who pay attention to their own place, their own breath, their own relationship with the land that feeds them.
I hope and pray there are many out there doing this. I believe there are.
I am doing my best. I try to figure it out where I am, with what I have, with what I can touch and grow and love. I listen to the microbes in the soil, the plants that volunteer at the edges, the animals who know the seasons better than I do. This is my offering.
We’re just looking for someone to finally stand up for the ground we stand on.
Maybe that someone is you.
