Leisha Today is Jim’s birthday. Happy heavenly birthday!!!
I woke up with him on my mind in a way that feels close. I wish he was here everyday.
Sure, there is a weight to this day, but there is also something steady and present that I carry inside me. After 5 years, I am feeling a change in the grief. I celebrate him. I love him. I adore him, and that has not faded. It has settled into something quieter, yet it has also become stronger. That may not make sense to everyone, but it is true for me.
Most of you did not know Jim. He was my partner, a powerful, steady man who met life fully. He was taken by an aggressive and devastating form of cancer over 5 years ago and I stood beside him through it.
I watched a strong body move through something that slowly took it piece by piece, and there is no way to soften that experience. It is something that reaches into every part of life and changes how you see the body, how you understand strength, and how you hold someone you love while they move through something you cannot control. Jim did not pay attention to himself until it was too late.
That experience has never left me and it shapes me in ways I did not expect. It cause me to ask a lot of questions I had no answers for.
I questioned this world, God, myself, and everything I thought I understood. It is likely why something I read yesterday stopped me in my tracks.
A woman was sharing that she has been living with an aggressive cancer for many years, something she was once told would take her life much sooner. It is a story of hope. After years of harsh treatments that felt like they were killing her, she chose to step away, focus on her inner healing, and live her life, and she is still here, fifteen years later, with clear scans.
What struck me more was reading through the responses and seeing how many others quietly shared similar experiences. People who have lived far beyond what they were told to expect, who are still here, still living, still continuing in ways that were never predicted. Despite the statistics and everything we are told, there are many people doing it their own way.
One in three people will face cancer in their lifetime, and in some places the number is even higher. Whether it is one in three or one in two, the exact number matters less than what it represents. This is not rare and it is everywhere and it is epidemic.
What I see, through my own experience and through working with soil, plants, food, and the human body, is that we are approaching disease in isolation rather than as part of a much larger system. The focus has become about fighting, removing, and eliminating, and in doing so, the body itself becomes the place where that battle is carried out.
But the body is not separate from the environment it lives within. It is a living ecosystem, constantly responding to what we eat, what we breathe, what we are exposed to, and what is living within us. The microbiome, the terrain, our emotional body and the internal conditions all influence how the body functions over time.
I have never spoken about my own situation publicly before, and I am aware that even writing this is a step into something I have kept private. This is something I now walk with in my own body, and it feels fitting to share this on Jim’s birthday. I do not want it to define me, but it has been part of my life for longer than most people know, and it has shaped how I see life and how I live today. I am not fighting it. I am studying it.
My experience has not been simple or linear. I have been in observation mode, paying attention, listening, and learning how to support my body.
I look at soil. I see the same pattern repeated. That is how I am wired to think, to look at systems, to question what is actually happening beneath the surface rather than only responding to what is visible. I am always asking what created the conditions, what shifted, what changed, and why.
When life is pushed beyond its limits, depleted, exposed to inputs that disrupt its balance, and stripped of its living diversity, problems begin to appear. Those problems are often treated as isolated issues, but they are not. They are signals of a system that has lost its balance.
You can try to control those problems directly, or you can step back and ask what created them in the first place. If we are going to ask what is going on, then we also have to ask a more honest question about how the body actually works.
The body is not a collection of separate parts that can be managed in isolation. It is a system that depends on relationships. Every function relies on communication between systems that are constantly adjusting to one another. The immune system is not separate from digestion, digestion is not separate from the nervous system, and the nervous system is not separate from the environment.
At the center of this is the terrain, the internal environment that everything depends on. It is not an abstract idea. It is the condition of the blood, the movement of fluids, the delivery and use of nutrients, the ability of the body to move waste out rather than hold it, the balance of minerals that allow cells to function, and the living communities of microbes that are part of every one of those processes. It is also about our emotional health, our traumas and the conditions of feelings held in the body. When this environment shifts, everything shifts with it.
What I have seen, both through Jim and now through my own experience, is that we are not fully paying attention to this. We are responding to what shows up, but not to what allows it to show up in the first place. The body is being pushed, suppressed, and managed, but it is rarely supported at the level where it actually functions.
And so the pattern continues. More people are affected, and more aggressive intervention is used. The cycles may look different on the surface, but they are coming from the same place underneath. There comes a point where we have to stop and ask why this is happening in so many bodies, across so many lives, and why the answers continue to stay at the same level.
It is about looking deeper than where we have been taught to look. Because this is where it matters.
If something is affecting this many people and becoming this common then it is not random or isolated. It is telling us something about how we are living and how far we have moved away from the conditions that allow the body to remain in balance.
There is more happening here than what we are being told, and I cannot unsee that.
And today, as I sit with all of this, I come back to Jim.
To the man he was, to what he moved through, and to what I witnessed up close. I come back to the questions that were never answered and the moments that stripped everything down to what was real. I lean into the presence of God that held me when there was nothing else to hold on to.
I trust that Jim is with God.
This way of seeing and questioning, and the refusal to accept surface answers is something I carry forward from Jim. It is in how I work with the land, how I grow food, how I look at my own body, and how I live my life now.
In that way, he is not gone. He is here in the questions, in the work, in the soil, and in the life I continue to live and experience.
