Leisha With my new lights, I can see….
I’m excited right now… and I want to say that out loud, because it’s been a while. For three years I’ve come to the end of most weeks wondering how on earth I was going to make payroll and get done all that needed to be done. Every Monday, same question. Can we make it this week?
I don’t pay myself. I have a personal way to make my own income, and it has always gone to support the project. So basically, I worked to pay others! And, I put everything into Living Ground. My money, my time, my energy, and plenty of nights lying awake doing the math.
With much relief and happiness, that pressure is finally starting to ease, and I can feel it in my body. And something else too… a feeling that good things are just around the corner. It is like I can taste it…smell it and own it.
Living Ground started as a rebuilding of a destroyed land to make a garden. We grew a café, apothecary, hang out areas, a hostel and now a spa. These were sprouted because I could see the future workshops. But, we need content to fertilize the workshops, the books, the manuals, the workshop room and the tools required to share with others.
It just kept growing, the way a garden does. The garden feeds the kitchen, the kitchen feeds people, the scraps go to compost and the compost feeds the soil. Round and round it goes, and I’m somewhere in the middle of it with dirt under my nails and an intense focus of what is required.
The past 3 years has been all about structure. Payroll, staff, systems, rooms, manuals, who does what, what we agreed to and what got assumed along the way. It was about learning and growing myself. How to deal with culture differences, where I assume wrong and how to grow a strong team that will one day own and operate this Project without me.
Not the most glamorous season, I’ll admit. Nobody throws a party for a well-organized storage room. But I’ve come to see it as building the vessel. You build something strong enough to hold more, and then you let it fill. I can feel that shift starting now.
The question used to be “Can I build this?” Well… I did. The new question is “What does this need so it can live without me holding every single strand?”
And yes, here I go with the soil again. I know, I know. I’ve said it over and over, and anyone who knows me is probably rolling their eyes. But it’s my muse, and I keep going back to it because it keeps teaching me something new. This time it’s showing me that in healthy soil, nobody carries the whole load. Nobody is in charge down there, and somehow it all works. Every time I think I’ve learned what the soil has to teach me, it hands me another lesson. Right now the lesson is about sharing the load and being clear with people about who carries what. I suspect there are a few more lessons waiting for me in there yet.
So my role is changing. I know how to start things. I’ve been doing it my whole life with homes, businesses, gardens and retreat spaces. Now I’m moving from the one doing all the work to the one who sets things up so the work can keep going.
Builder to steward, maybe. A lot of my days lately go into turning everything I’ve learned into something I can hand on. Manuals, slides, recipes, workshops, courses. Decades of soil, plants, fermentation, food and healing, finally getting written down so someone else can pick it up and run with it. My upcoming Plant & Kitchen Alchemy workshop feels like the first taste of that.
A friend asked me this week, “How do you take care of Leisha?” Well. That stopped me for a minute. I don’t feel stressed anymore like I have the past years. I feel so blessed, I really do. I’ve never felt I needed more than I have.
But I’ve made sacrifices to give this my all, and I haven’t always put myself on the list. Now we’re in a different flow. Living Ground has money coming in, which means my own income can go somewhere else for a change. I can even save a little… for a rainy day, for a possible vacation (imagine that!), for the house, and for all the little things that were left undone and loose.
It started with lights. We never finished the lighting in the house. My kitchen lights were dull, so I treated myself to new ones. Finally, with the lights on, I could see! Oh gosh, I could see…..the counters, drawers, corners and crevices. I consider myself a clean and organized person, and I had no idea about the dirt. Apparently the old lights were being very kind to me. So, that set me into another realization that I need to make other changes.
When Jim and I built the house six years ago, we got to the end completely exhausted. That’s when Jim fell ill. We’d been through so much emotionally that we just stopped. There were no kitchen cupboards, so I made some curtains to cover the shelves. Temporary, of course… for six years. They worked. And the lights were never installed in a lot of the rooms. The wires just hung out of the walls, a constant reminder of “one day.” Finishing the house always felt like a luxury. It came second to keeping things going and making sure payroll was met every week.
So, under the new lights, and seeing those filthy curtains hiding rustic wooden shelves, I treated myself to a real set of cupboards, with drawers that actually open so things can be organized. And they look great, if I do say so myself. And, I was surprised how inexpensive they were too. So, I kept this home improvement going to fix those dangling wires in my bedroom, the front living room and the back laundry area. I can now see in these spaces when the sun goes down at 6:20 pm
It’s a little embarrassing how exciting that is. I don’t regret putting Living Ground first for a second. But it’s time. You can’t pull a plant from the top and make it grow faster. You look after the roots, the water, the light. Turns out that goes for me too.
There is this phrase I keep coming back to: invisible relationships becoming visible through their effects. It grew out of my preparation for the next workshop on Alchemy of Nature. It seems very potent to me at this time.
This phrase describes the soil perfectly. You never see the microbes trading around a root, but you see the leaf, the fruit, the strong healthy plant. Lately it describes my life too. All these things I’ve been building for years, that seemed so separate, are starting to show me how they belong together.
If you could climb inside my brain for a day, you might need a lie down afterward! It never really stops. I wake up from dreams where I’ve been calculating, problem solving, working something out… the night shift, apparently, with no overtime pay. It’s a loop that just runs inside me. For a long time a lot of that loop was about survival and how to make the numbers work. Now it’s turning toward new ideas and odd little connections, and I’m not brushing them off anymore. Some of them might just be the next chapter.
Something is opening up. I can feel it, especially in these next couple of weeks (I just Saturn returned Oct 14 and entering a Jupiter return on Oct 23 … pretty auspicious). I don’t know exactly what shape it will take, and honestly, I’m okay with that. I’m paying attention to new people, unexpected invitations, conversations that spark something, and whatever shows up at the door. The roots are ready, the lights are on, and I’m curious to see what grows from here.
Invisible relationships becoming visible through their effects. I think that’s how most good things work. A kind word to a stranger, a seed saved from last year, a conversation that seemed like nothing at the time… they go quiet for a while and then turn up years later as something you never could have planned. I don’t always know what I’m planting. Most of the time I only find out when it comes up. So I’m learning to trust the part I can’t see yet, the people I haven’t met, the connections still forming somewhere underground. Something is already growing down there. I can feel it, and I’m curious to see what comes up.
