Leisha There was a time, once upon a time, when human beings lived in much deeper relationship with the living world.
I do not care whether your ancestry traces back through French villages, Corsican mountains, Scottish highlands, African grasslands, Andean valleys, or migrations so layered you can barely untangle them anymore. I have often asked “what is my ancestry” and it is some blended and mixed it is hard to know.
Before industrialization, before conquest and empire reshaped both land and culture, before rivers were dammed and forests were cut into property lines, people understood themselves as part of life rather than separate from it.
There was a time when people knew the land not intellectually, but relationally. They knew the smell of rain before it arrived. They understood what certain birds meant when they changed their song patterns. They watched the stars not as decoration but as guidance. They knew which plants emerged after disturbance, which roots carried people through winter, which trees marked underground water, and which flowers opened only when certain insects returned.
People once carried the seasons inside themselves. Grief had ceremony. Birth had ritual. Death belonged to the community. Food was sacred because survival depended upon relationship with the Earth itself. The land was not scenery or property. It was identity, responsibility, memory, medicine, and belonging woven together.
Then somewhere across centuries, something changed. Not all at once, but slowly enough that the forgetting itself became normalized. Empires expanded. Forests disappeared. Traditional knowledge was mocked, criminalized, or erased. The old ways became associated with primitiveness instead of wisdom. People were separated from land, from local food systems, from ancestral memory, and from direct participation in the ecosystems around them.
Eventually the rupture became so complete that many people no longer realized something had been lost at all. Yet beneath the surface, I think many still feel it. There is a kind of ache running through modern life that cannot be solved simply through productivity, entertainment, or self-improvement. It often appears as exhaustion, anxiety, inflammation, loneliness, spiritual restlessness, and the feeling that something essential is missing even when life appears full on the surface.
I have been reflecting on this deeply lately, especially around grief, faith, uncertainty, and the strange terrain life sometimes asks us to walk through. May 7th was Jim’s birthday, and I moved quietly through the day carrying memories and that familiar ache that still rises unexpectedly. Grief changes over time, but it does not disappear. It becomes woven into the landscape of your inner world. Some days it feels close and immediate. Other days it rests quietly in the background like distant weather that still shapes the atmosphere around you.
Over time I have stopped trying to outrun grief or solve it as though it were a problem waiting for resolution. Instead, I have slowly been learning how to let it soften me rather than harden me. I have been molding that experience into something gentler and more meaningful, allowing it to deepen my understanding of people, suffering, love, and the fragile nature of being human.
At the same time, I have also come to a place of acceptance regarding the estrangement from my daughter and not knowing my growing granddaughter. There is still sadness there because love does not disappear simply because relationships change shape or distance grows between people. Love remains even when communication fades, even when outcomes unfold differently than we once imagined they would.
For a long time I fought internally against what I could not fix. I wanted understanding, reconciliation, and some form of certainty about how things would unfold. Yet eventually I realized that peace cannot exist while we are trying to force life to move according to our own longing. Every person walks their own path and carries their own lessons, choices, wounds, timing, and consequences. I cannot live another person’s journey for them, no matter how deeply I love them.
What I can do is tend my own heart honestly and continue learning how to release attachment to outcomes I cannot control. That release is not indifference, nor is it the absence of love. In many ways it feels like the deepest expression of love because it allows another person the dignity of their own walk through life while also allowing ourselves to remain rooted instead of emotionally collapsing beneath circumstances we cannot change.
These experiences have also reshaped my relationship with faith. There have been seasons where I have sat inside complete unknowing, almost like standing in a cloud where the road ahead disappears entirely. Old certainties no longer fit neatly, and easy answers feel hollow. There are moments where I question everything and wonder whether faith itself is simply another form of human reaching toward mystery.
Yet beneath all of that questioning, there remains something quiet that I cannot deny. I still feel held somehow. I still feel that God watches over me even when I do not understand what is unfolding. I still feel guided toward the gardens, toward the soil, toward the work, toward service, and toward the people who arrive carrying many of these same invisible aches.
I see this ache everywhere now. People come to Living Ground exhausted in ways sleep cannot fix. They arrive spiritually restless, emotionally overwhelmed, physically inflamed, disconnected from themselves, from each other, from meaning, from rhythm, and from the living systems that once shaped human life so completely. Many are searching desperately for healing, yet the modern world often responds by offering more abstraction, more information, more stimulation, and more separation disguised as progress.
Yet something changes when people reconnect with living systems again. I have watched it happen quietly through simple moments that modern culture often overlooks. Hands entering living soil. Harvesting food directly from the garden. Watching fermentation transform food through microbial life. Sitting outdoors with a bowl of broth while rain moves across the valley. Learning the names of plants and beginning to recognize that food is not merely fuel, but relationship.
Something ancient begins to soften awake inside people during those moments. I believe the body remembers relationship even when the mind has forgotten it. The deeper I work with the soil microbiome, plants, fermentation, and human health, the more impossible it becomes for me to separate physical healing from ecological belonging. Healthy soil functions through relationship, diversity, reciprocity, death, renewal, and cooperation, and the human body functions the same way because we are ecosystems ourselves.
Nothing healthy exists in isolation. Forests do not survive independently from fungi, microbes, insects, moisture, and decay, and the human body does not thrive independently from food, community, rhythm, touch, biodiversity, and meaningful connection either. Perhaps this is why so many people feel fragmented. We have been taught to live as disconnected individuals while every healthy living system around us functions through participation and interdependence.
Years ago I read a line from Martín Prechtel that has remained with me ever since. He said that every person carries an indigenous soul struggling to survive inside the modern world created by the human mind. I think many people feel this even if they do not have language for it. I do not believe this longing is necessarily about romanticizing the past or imitating another culture. I think it is about remembering how to belong again.
Perhaps the healing so many people are seeking is not about becoming something new. Instead, it may be about remembering something ancient that still exists quietly underneath the noise of modern life. The nervous system remembers rhythm. The microbiome remembers biodiversity. The soul remembers participation in the living world even after generations of separation from it.
Maybe faith itself is part of that remembering. I no longer believe faith means having every answer or standing firmly inside certainty. For me, it has become something quieter than that. It is the willingness to keep walking through uncertainty while still sensing that something sacred moves beneath life, gently guiding our hands and hearts even when we cannot fully see where the road leads.
