Leisha It is raining tonight, a gentle, real rain. It isn’t the quick passing kind, but the kind that settles in and stays, and I think it is making me reflective. I love the rain. I love the sound of it trickling and pattering on the roof and the leaves, and I love that earthy smell rising from the ground, the geosmin. Most of all, I love knowing what is happening underneath, where the microbes come alive once real rain saturates the soil. After months of dryness everything is waking up. The land is drinking, the life in the soil is moving again, and I can feel it.
Maybe that’s why I’m sitting with all of this tonight, because a lot is moving in my life too. And then there are the ants. For the past week they have been all through the house. Today I swept the bathroom floor twice, and when I went in to pee later, it was covered with them again. I wish they were outside, though I understand why they aren’t. The ants tell a story. They are moving, preparing, and getting things together, because they know the rains are coming. I’ve been trying hard to convince them they belong outside, and I am not winning that conversation. Still, I’m not going to war with them. I make a ferment of clove, cinnamon, and peppermint, sometimes with a little cedar essential oil or rosemary vinegar, and add some soap and a little bleach. I spray it at the entrances and anywhere they can get in, because I know they don’t like it and won’t cross it. The trick is persistence, since the mixture evaporates and has to be sprayed again and again. My home is part of the natural world, so I clear up their debris and do what I can so we can live side by side, the same way we do at the Project site.
With the ants handled as best I can, I turn my focus to preparing for the Plant and Kitchen Alchemy workshop, which is intense in itself. It is fully booked, and that amazes me. I want every participant to have a personal experience and to leave with a real sense of self-reliance. At the same time we are getting the spa ready, and I’m working with clients and doing my best for each of them. Things are crazy and intense right now, but life also feels really good.
For years my home has been a gathering place, and my work and my life have centered around my gardens and my kitchen. For three or four decades I have brought the garden into the kitchen, because I have never seen the two as separate. My home has been my apothecary, the place where I did the sprouting and fermenting, the oils and the brewing, all of it.
I’ve been slowly bringing things over to the Project site as they’re needed, one step at a time, because training people and teaching takes patience. We have been building up everything I once did in my kitchen, the sprouting and the fermentation, and we’ve reached the point where all of it belongs there. So today we moved the last of it: the wines, the KitchenAid, the oil extraction machine, and the gadgets and tools I collected over the years at a cost that sometimes made me question my sanity. These tools are hard to find here, and they are dear to me because I have used them for so long. We even moved the wine carboys, some still brewing wine and some slowly turning into vinegars that take years to mature. It was time to bring them to a place where I can share them.
Part of me is sad, because these things are me. Another part of me is celebrating, because without these tools we can’t be self-sufficient or share what we know. I know I’m intense, and I know these things take time, like wine. Now they belong at the Project, where they can serve others. The Project has its own identity, separate from my home, and the intensity of who I am now lives there, where it can be shared. That leaves my little home as mine.
I’m also feeling the Virgo in my chart. I’m in a season of clearing out, simplifying, getting organized, and making things work, and my life’s work is now being organized at the Project site. It is time for me to make this real.
My home is a special place, and I am so friggin’ blessed and grateful for where I am. I have always opened my home, sometimes to my own detriment. My ex once told me no one was allowed over after 6 pm, and my mom used to say I brought home the riffraff. I did, and I still do, but now the riffraff has a home at the Project site, where it can be beautiful and inclusive. For the first time in my life I am nesting in appreciation of myself. I am the Living Ground, but I am also Leisha, living in a special space and place. I still have the tools and my home seed garden to cook the same gourmet meals we create at the Project, except now I’m cooking to feed just me, and that is a beautiful experience. My home is my greatest gift, and I feel so incredibly blessed, but who I am and what I do lives at the Project.
In the middle of all this preparation, there is the reality of Ecuador, where you are always running behind. Everything is “no problem, we’ll get it done,” and then it doesn’t get done. So I brought in the whole team, seven community members, the girls and the boys, all working hard to paint, put in the ceiling, hang the lights, and lay the floor. As a team, a project, and a community, we have to be ready for what we are presenting next. It might not all get finished, but we will be ready.
I know I’m doing the right thing, and that feeling is new for me. I know I’m doing my best, that my best is good enough, and that it is needed in this world. What I have always known is that life is about giving back, about what you offer rather than what you take. I meet so many people who are in survival mode, and in some way we all are. When people feel that insecure, they take, and they often take too much.
By the end of the day, the rains did come, just as the ants predicted. It was a gentle rain, but it fell all night long. The river is high now, and the ants are on the move, all of them, including the marching ants that arrive by the billions and carry off every bee, wasp, moth, and cockroach in their path before moving on. They never stay. When the marching ants come through, it is a clear sign that the big rains have arrived, and that is good news. There has been a lot of fire around us, with locals burning their fields to prepare for planting season and some of those fires getting out of control. So we are glad for the rain, and we are glad for the ants.
Tonight I hear the trickle and patter of the rain, I hear the frogs, and I watch the land around me turning green after three or four months of dryness. To be rooted in this and to understand it is the most beautiful, sacred experience. I am so full of gratitude, even with everything in my life feeling so crazy right now. And on nights like this, I think about a special little girl I wish to be connected with. I share this so that maybe one day she will know me.
