Leisha Lately I have been doing a lot of sorting, and I do not mean closets, drawers or old papers. I mean sorting through the pieces of my life and the pieces of Living Ground, looking at what still belongs, what is working, what is asking for more attention and what may have already given everything it came here to give.
There is a lot to sort through because Living Ground has never fit comfortably inside one category. It is soil, plants, food, microbes, books, workshops, the café, gardens, medicines, guest rooms, teaching, community and now the spa growing into the picture too. People often want to know what it is, and sometimes I still find myself trying to squeeze it into a sentence that makes sense to someone who has never stood here and experienced the whole thing.
I had a friend and mentor when I first arrived in Ecuador, Susan Moora. She had this crazy, amazing life in business and finance and later turned her attention toward helping people find what they were really here to do. One of her exercises was to create a personal mission sentence, one sentence that somehow encapsulated the whole thing. Susan called it a “bird call.”
We worked on mine while I was living outdoors in that magical forest, and when something landed she would let out a big “woo hoo,” high-five me and get completely excited about it. I am still working on mine all these years later, but I think I am getting closer: “I follow the living thread from soil to human, finding the connections in what we have been taught to separate, and teach those connections so others can carry them forward and make a difference.”
Susan might still make me work on it a little more, and I can almost hear the woo hoo when it finally lands. Maybe that is fitting because Living Ground has always grown in the spaces between things, and I think I have too.
For me, everything seems connected. That is how I see things. The soil work is not separate from the plants, the plants are not separate from the kitchen, the kitchen is not separate from the microbiome, and the microbiome is not separate from the health of the person eating the food. Then somehow it all finds its way back to the soil and begins again.
That connection is probably what has held my attention through everything I have studied and built. I have this inner drive to know what sits underneath and beside something, what feeds it, what changes when one side becomes weak and what happens somewhere else when one part becomes stronger. I do this with systems, with people and with myself.
A problem in one place rarely stays neatly in that place. This is true in soil, in the body, in relationships, business, money, teaching and community too, and I have learned to look sideways and sometimes backwards when something is not working. The cause may be sitting somewhere completely different, perhaps somewhere behind the blinders where we have not been willing or able to look.
I am seeing more clearly that my own challenges and Living Ground’s challenges have never really been separate either. When I grow and remove some of my own blinders, something here usually changes with me, and when Living Ground reaches a limitation, it almost always asks something of me personally. Sometimes it is uncomfortable, but there is usually potent information sitting inside that discomfort.
This work has asked me to become better with money and clearer with people. It has asked me to stop carrying things that were not mine to carry and to notice the difference between somebody who genuinely stands beside me and somebody who is simply standing close enough to benefit from what I am building. Through all of this I also find myself moving deeper into gratitude for life and what is happening around me, even, and perhaps especially, because of some of the difficulties.
There are people who reciprocate, contribute, encourage, challenge, participate and bring something of themselves into the relationship. Then there are people who take, criticize, observe from the edges, misunderstand what they are seeing or seem determined to reduce something complicated into a very small judgement.
And yes, there are haters too. I have given far too much energy to being understood by people who had already decided not to understand. I would feel this compulsion to explain more, clarify more, show more, soften more and somehow make them understand, only to end up wondering why I was doing all that work in the first place.
That personal query is an important one for me at this time. Why am I explaining this, who am I explaining it to, and are they genuinely curious enough to meet me somewhere in the middle? If they are not, am I simply doing emotional work for somebody who has no intention of seeing beyond the story they have already created?
That is part of the sorting too, and the same thing is happening inside Living Ground. I am looking hard at what works and strengthening it, while becoming much less attached to something simply because we have been doing it for a while.
A good example has been our internal systems. I recently spent about six weeks at the computer rebuilding our inventory, ordering and café flow, and somehow found myself learning enough PHP coding to make the pieces work the way I wanted them to work. I am not a coder, so I expected the coding to be the difficult part, but that turned out to be easier than changing the human habits around the system.
Training the staff was a challenge. People do not necessarily like change, even when the old way is clearly not working very well, and changing the flow created frustration and discomfort for all of us. It pulled up a deep need in me to hold patience while we used it, made mistakes, adjusted it, used it again and kept going until the unfamiliar started becoming normal.
There was a lesson for me inside that whole process. Changing the structure does not instantly change the behaviour inside the structure, and improving something can create a messy period where the old way no longer fits but the new way has not yet become natural.
If something works, why does it work and can it be strengthened? If something is draining energy, money or attention, what is it actually contributing and why am I automatically feeding it again?
I feel it is time for the strongest parts to support one another more intelligently. I want to see energy circulating through the Project, not continually leaking out of one area while another is struggling to be fed. I see the whole feeding the whole, with the café supporting the gardens, the gardens supporting the teaching, the teaching supporting the workshops, the workshops supporting the Project, and the books deepening the workshops while carrying the knowledge far beyond this property.
That is where Plant & Kitchen Alchemy, the creation of my new book and the planning I am doing for the workshop have become especially important to me. We offer other Living Ground workshops, including Live and Dried Blood Analysis and the Soil Microbiome, but Plant & Kitchen Alchemy feels like the heart of Living Ground because it pulls so many of these relationships together.
Plant & Kitchen Alchemy is bringing pieces into one living conversation that I have wanted to connect for years. Soil, microbes, plants, food, fermentation, medicine, the kitchen and the human microbiome can finally follow the same thread without being divided into separate subjects.
As I come toward the end of writing the book, I can see that it is not simply another workshop topic. It is an integration of so much of what I have been doing, learning and trying to communicate, and perhaps it is also an integration happening inside me. That, for me, is alchemy, because separate things are meeting and creating something that could not have existed in quite the same way on their own.
So I come back to the bird call and wonder how I explain in thirty seconds why somebody would want to spend a week here, beginning in the soil, following the microbial world into the plant, moving with that plant into the kitchen and then discovering what happens when that food meets their own internal ecosystem. How do I explain the gardens, meals, hands-on work, fermentation, medicines, teaching, books, accommodation and the experience of actually living inside the Project without turning it into another list of workshop activities?
As we enter this alchemy, I am also being asked to question the value of what we are doing and creating. Where am I undervaluing something, and where might I be overvaluing something? What is the actual value of living here for the week, eating the food, walking through the gardens, being around the Project and continuing conversations outside the teaching hours compared with arriving for a class and leaving at the end of the day? I also have this tendency to give things away for the sake of helping people, so value is not always an easy thing for me to calculate.
So much of what I know has grown slowly over decades, and when something becomes part of your everyday thinking it is easy to forget that another person has not spent thirty years gathering all those pieces. You stop seeing the years underneath the knowledge because you are standing on top of them.
There is another kind of value here that is even harder for me to calculate. In building Living Ground literally from the ground up over the past three and a half years, I have personally put more than $100,000 into the Project, yet I was never sitting on an investment account with $100,000 waiting to be spent.
The money came from working, taking jobs, doing the work, putting the money back into Living Ground and very often not paying myself at all. There were Monday mornings when I honestly did not know where Friday’s payroll was going to come from, yet somehow I found the work, the money came, payroll was paid and we carried on.
It has felt a little miraculous at times, but there has also been a tremendous amount of trust involved. I gave Living Ground everything I could give it for a long period without asking whether it was giving anything directly back to me, and now I find myself wondering how that gets counted when we talk about value.
The interesting part for me is still not any single piece. What fascinates me is seeing how one thing affects another, where the connection runs and what moves on the other side when I change something here.
Conventional structures seem to like clean categories. Soil belongs in agriculture, food belongs in the food system, medicine gets placed somewhere else, business gets another box built around sales and profit, and personal development gets its own little enclosure where everything can become focused on the needs of the individual.
I do not experience life that way, and Living Ground certainly has not developed that way. If the soil changes, the plant changes, and if the plant changes, the food changes. If the food changes, the organisms receiving it change, and if the people inside a Project become exhausted, confused or disconnected, the Project changes too.
Everything touches something else, and finding those connections is probably the thread running through my entire life. It is also why consolidation has become so much more interesting to me now than simply adding another thing.
Growth inside the container is much like fermentation. A ferment can look very quiet from the outside while inside organisms are multiplying, sugars are being transformed, acids are forming, compounds are changing and an entirely different environment is slowly being created.
There is still plenty happening where it can be seen. I am writing, teaching, promoting workshops, meeting new people, working with clients, building the spa, running the café and continuing to grow the gardens, but some of the deeper work is happening underneath all of that where it is harder to photograph or explain.
That is the incubation I have been feeling. Preparation, development, integration and refinement do not always look like growth from the outside, yet an enormous amount can be happening inside the container before anybody fully understands what is forming there.
Success, for me, is becoming less about how much I can build myself and more about what continues beyond me. If I can help another person see a connection they did not see before, understand it deeply enough to use it, teach it in their own way and carry it forward into their family, soil, community or work, then something has moved beyond the original container.
Maybe that is where Susan’s bird call finally comes back around. “I follow the living thread from soil to human, finding the connections in what we have been taught to separate, and teach those connections so others can carry them forward and make a difference.”
Living Ground has always grown in the spaces between things, and perhaps my work has too. What matters to me now is finding and strengthening those connections, teaching what I have learned and holding enough trust to know that other people may carry the living thread forward in ways I will never even see.
That, too, is alchemy.
If this living thread calls to you, Plant & Kitchen Alchemy is where we bring it into practice, moving from soil and microbes through plants, food, fermentation and into the human microbiome. Come spend a week inside the whole cycle with us and experience how the pieces connect.
Explore Plant & Kitchen Alchemy →
You can also explore all Living Ground workshops here.
