Leisha There is a sadness I carry sometimes that is difficult to explain because it does not come only from my personal life but my personal life influences the reality.
I am not a sad person, but I have always experienced the world differently than many around me. I notice things. I feel patterns deeply. I see connections between people, land, food, health, emotion, and the living systems around us in ways that are hard to turn off once you become aware of them.
Sometimes I feel as though I am watching creation through a different lens entirely.
In many ways, I love life profoundly. I love growing food, watching seeds emerge from the soil, making products and ferments, harvesting herbs at sunrise, listening to frogs sing through the night, cooking meals for people, and building something tangible with my own hands.
I do laugh often and still find beauty almost everywhere I look.
Yet alongside that beauty, I also feel a deep sadness when I look at the world around me and see how disconnected so many people have become from themselves, from each other, and from the living systems that sustain us.
Part of it comes from seeing how disconnected we have become from the systems that actually sustain us. We live in a world where people can spend hours debating politics online while never growing a single leaf of food, never touching living soil, never learning how their body works, and never asking why so many people are exhausted, inflamed, anxious, lonely, and spiritually lost.
We have become highly informed in some ways and strangely unconscious in others.
I feel this sadness when I look at the land too. Here in Ecuador, I am actively helping create spaces where the soil is becoming alive again. We are building succession systems where plants, microbes, insects, fungi, birds, water, compost, and human participation all interact together. Compost is created on site and returned back into the land. Pioneer plants prepare the way for the next layers of succession. Flowers attract pollinators. Insects arrive to play their role. Birds scatter seeds and help move life across the landscape. Fungi begin connecting root systems underground while organic matter slowly rebuilds structure, moisture retention, and vitality in the soil.
I can walk through these spaces and feel the difference. The land begins responding when the conditions change. Food carries more life. The air feels different. Sound feels different. There is movement, diversity, and relationship returning again.
Then I can drive twenty minutes away and see exhausted land stripped down to compacted dirt and chemical dependency, where almost every natural process has been interrupted or replaced. The same thing is happening in people. I see exhausted nervous systems, exhausted immune systems, exhausted relationships, and exhausted minds trying to function inside environments that no longer truly nourish life. are no longer truly nourishing life.
Over the past years, many of our conversations at Living Ground have revolved around rebuilding something different. We talk about microbial diversity, fermentation, herbs, wild plants, soil biology, terrain, and food preparation, but underneath all of those topics is really one deeper question. How do we become human again in a world that keeps pulling us further away from ourselves?
I love serving people. I love creating meals from the gardens, walking outside to harvest herbs minutes before they enter a dish, and watching people genuinely enjoy what they are eating. There is something deeply meaningful to me about feeding others, not just physically, but emotionally and energetically too. I do not think this is always fully understood because for me it is never just about food. It is about care, creativity, nourishment, beauty, and connection all meeting together in one experience.
Before preparing a meal, I walk through the gardens and harvest as I move. I pick leaves, herbs, flowers, and greens along the pathways, often using whatever feels vibrant and abundant that day. Fresh tulsi, lemon balm, watercress, calendula petals, purslane, chickweed, or handfuls of mixed herbs become part of the meal almost naturally. I love those walks more than I can explain. They reconnect me to the land and remind me how fortunate I am to live this way. There is something deeply grounding about touching the plants directly, smelling the herbs on my hands, and realizing that nourishment is growing all around me.
Those moments feel important to me because they reconnect food back to relationship. The meal is no longer just ingredients purchased from somewhere unknown. It becomes connected to the soil, the weather, the microbes, the insects, the season, the people preparing it, and the land itself.
I think people feel that, even if they cannot fully explain why. I hope.
At the same time, I also see the resistance.
I see it online constantly, but I experience it personally too. Human beings become deeply attached to narratives because narratives create emotional safety. If someone has built their identity around a certain belief system, a certain institution, a certain worldview, or even a certain lifestyle, questioning it can feel threatening.
Sometimes people are not resisting information itself. They are resisting the collapse of the emotional structure holding their world together.
I understand that more than people may realize because I am not immune to division either. I have experienced relationships changing. I have watched people drift away. I have seen how difficult it can be to communicate across different realities. Sometimes I want to shake people awake, not because I think I have all the answers, but because I can see so clearly that something is deeply out of balance.
The strange thing is that I do not feel hopeless. Sadness and hopelessness are not the same thing. Sadness often comes from caring deeply. If I truly did not care, I would probably feel nothing at all.
What gives me hope is that beneath all of our conditioning, I still believe people recognize truth when they genuinely encounter it. I see it when someone eats real food after years of processed diets and suddenly remembers what nourishment feels like.
I see it in small moments too. People sit down to eat and you can feel the nourishment reaching them. Sometimes the conversation slows, faces soften, and there is a kind of quiet satisfaction that fills the space. I think many people are far more depleted than they realize, not only physically but emotionally too. When food is grown with care, harvested fresh from living soil, prepared slowly, and shared in a meaningful environment, people feel the difference even if they cannot fully explain it.
That is something I witness often, and it reminds me how deeply nourishment affects us on every level.
Nature knows this too. Nature does not carry human emotions the way we do, but nature responds continuously. Soil responds to care. Water responds to contamination. Forests respond to destruction. The microbiome responds to stress, food, chemicals, rhythm, and touch.
Everything is in communication all the time.
I think part of my sadness comes from watching how disconnected modern life has become from real participation in life itself. So many people spend their days consuming information, reacting to noise, chasing distractions, and moving through environments that leave very little room to actually listen. Not listen to a screen or an expert or a narrative, but listen to themselves, to nature, to the body, and to the quiet signals constantly moving through life around them.
What I am deeply grateful for is that I have slowly created an environment where I am afforded more of that listening now. The gardens, the food, the land, the slower rhythms, the work we do here, all of it has created space for observation and reflection. I notice things more deeply because life around me invites that awareness constantly. And when I do notice, I find myself responding with care and love. Whether it is through preparing food, tending the soil, planting something new, listening to someone’s story, or simply paying attention to what the land itself seems to need, I feel a responsibility to respond thoughtfully to what I am seeing and feeling around me.
There is also a strange tension in trying to share any of this publicly.
I have no desire to become famous or become some kind of guru figure. Honestly, much of modern culture feels performative to me, and I often find myself pulling away from that world rather than toward it. I understand that if ideas are going to spread, visibility becomes part of the process whether we like it or not. There is a certain game that has to be played to get people’s attention today, and I wrestle with that constantly because I never want to become disconnected from the very thing I am trying to protect.
I do not want Living Ground to become branding detached from reality. I want it to remain lived experience. I want the gardens to stay real gardens, the food to remain connected to the soil, the workshops to remain honest conversations, and the books to come from direct observation and lived practice rather than performance.
Because of that, I think meaningful change is probably a much slower process than most people want. Slow and I do not always agree with each other. I often want to move faster, build faster, teach faster, and create faster because I feel an urgency inside me when I look at the world. Yet nature keeps reminding me that real systems take time to establish. Soil takes time to rebuild. Trust takes time to return. Communities take time to reconnect. Even the human body takes time to respond when nourishment finally returns.
Maybe that is why I continue building instead of simply arguing. We continue planting gardens. I continue writing books. We continue hosting meals, freeze drying flowers for herbal drinks, making products from the land, teaching workshops, restoring soil, harvesting herbs, and creating spaces where people can slow down enough to reconnect with something real again.
I do not think the answer is forcing everyone to agree. In fact, the deeper the division becomes, the more impossible that seems. Sometimes I genuinely question whether people can still come together in meaningful ways within a world that feels increasingly fragmented, reactive, and emotionally divided. Yet despite that, I still believe there is value in creating visible examples of another way to live. Small ecosystems of sanity, care, nourishment, participation, and relationship within a culture that often feels disconnected from all of those things.
Deep down, I believe most people already know something is wrong, even if they cannot fully articulate it yet. They feel it in their exhaustion, their loneliness, their anxiety, their loss of meaning, and their longing for something more grounded and real.
Perhaps the sadness many of us feel is not weakness at all. Perhaps it is evidence that some part of us still remembers what it means to truly be alive.
Maybe that is also why I have had to learn some difficult lessons about people, relationships, and perception itself.
I have learned that we cannot control the narratives other people create about us, no matter how deeply we may want to explain ourselves or be understood differently. People often see through the lens of their own experiences, wounds, fears, beliefs, and conditioning. Sometimes they create stories that have very little to do with who we actually are. That has been one of the more difficult lessons for me.
There are relationships in my life where I have had to learn this painfully and slowly. Relationships where love still exists, yet distance, misunderstanding, time, and different narratives have created separation. I think many families experience this now in one form or another. Modern life pulls people apart emotionally, geographically, ideologically, and spiritually in ways that are difficult to fully explain. Yet even through that, I do not believe care disappears simply because connection becomes complicated.
At the same time, I have also learned that the way we live still matters deeply. The way we care for people, the energy we bring into a space, the food we prepare, the soil we build, the conversations we hold, and the environments we create all leave an imprint over time. Nature itself works this way. A forest does not argue its value. Healthy soil does not convince anyone to exist. A garden simply responds to the care, attention, diversity, and conditions surrounding it. Over time, life either flourishes or declines depending on those relationships.
Living Ground has taught me this constantly. The land responds to intention, observation, patience, and participation. When we compost, succession plant, restore biodiversity, and create healthier conditions, life begins returning naturally. Insects arrive. Birds return. Soil softens. Water holds longer. Food becomes more vibrant. The response is not forced. It emerges from relationship.
I think human beings are not so different.
That is why I will not surrender myself simply to fit more comfortably inside the expectations, narratives, or projections of others. I have worked too hard to become fully myself, and that includes all of me. The parts that question deeply, feel deeply, create, nurture, grieve, love, build, and continue showing up with care even in a world that often feels divided and disconnected. Living systems thrive through diversity, complexity, and authenticity, not through uniformity and suppression. Perhaps human beings do too..
