Leisha This is a follow up on my recent sharing Living Ground Shift and Change of View. Paradigm Shift. These sharings are my daily muses, the questions, the actions, the musings on what the f**k am I doing.
My intention is to tell a story of the process of Living Ground from a human, flawed, fragile perspective. It is me sharing the personal triumphs and failures. And, this week is a holy week here in Catholic Ecuador so I muse on faith mixed in and rendered down a bit.
This is not a polished story, and it is not meant to be one. It is not a conclusion or a teaching, but a record of being inside something while it is still unfolding, while it is still uncertain, while I am still questioning it. I am not standing outside of this project reflecting back with clarity, I am inside it, living it in real time, feeling the pressure, the doubt, the moments of alignment and the moments where everything feels like it could collapse. If there is anything of value here, it is not in having answers, it is in the honesty of staying with the questions while continuing to walk forward anyway.
There was a time when faith for me had a place I could step into, something shared, something spoken and held collectively, something that gave structure to both the visible and invisible parts of life, and I knew how to move within it because I was not carrying it alone, it lived in conversation, in community, in something that felt anchored outside of me. It was what was gifted to me in childhood. A way to see the world and God.
I can see more clearly now the issues that exist within religion as it is often expressed today, and I find myself increasingly weary of the arguments, the debates, the need to define and defend positions that seem to pull people further apart rather than bring any real understanding. It feels less like something rooted in truth and more like a reflection of the human tendency to divide, to assert, to be right, and I recognize that this is not a failure of faith itself, but something within the human psyche that distorts what might otherwise be experienced more directly, more quietly, and with far less conflict.
Most of my current friends do not know where I came from in this part of my life, because when I moved to Ecuador (15 years ago) something shifted inside me that I did not fully understand at the time, and I found myself stepping away from what most people would call normal life and moving into something far more raw, far more direct, far more exposed.
For four years I lived in the forest, (called the Magical Forest) not visiting it but living in it, breathing with it, building within it, creating everything with my own hands without walls, without separation, even my bedroom held up in a tree with fabric for shelter, open to the elements, open to the rhythms of the land, open to a way of living that stripped everything back to what was real. I literally had no money and was looking to withdraw from the head-noise of the world and life I had experienced.
It was both wonderful and demanding, because there is nothing romantic about that kind of life when you are inside of it every day. Tt requires effort, attention, resilience, and at the same time it teaches in a way that nothing structured ever could, because you are not learning through theory, you are learning through direct relationship with nature.
During that time I was also walking with the Thirteen Grandmothers in their walking ministry of prayer course. I took that super seriously because it shaped how I understood what prayer actually is. However, it also taught me that new agism can be a disguise of reality in a world where evil exists. That perhaps is another story and sharing.
There is a place for contemplative prayer and I do honour that, but what I came to understand is that prayer is not complete without action. At least for me. For me, prayer must move through the body, through the work, through the way you show up in the world, through the way you build, create, and respond.
Prayer became less about asking and more about walking, about aligning what I was doing with something deeper than thought, about finding purpose not as an idea but as something lived, something that required participation even when I did not know where it would lead.
Since Jim passed five years ago, something shifted again in a way that did not break cleanly but instead unraveled slowly, and what I once experienced outwardly began to turn inward. This is not because I rejected it, but because it no longer had the same place to land. I could not make it fit into spaces that no longer reflected what I was actually living through.
What I had known as faith did not disappear, but it became private, quieter, something I stopped trying to explain or align with anything structured. There was a dissonance that I could not ignore, a sense that the language of organized belief did not know how to hold what grief actually does to a person.
And alongside that inward turning, life itself began to reflect something else entirely. I felt less like stability and more like a continuous shifting of ground, as if the concept of home had been replaced by something provisional, something always just beyond reach.
There have been too many moments where what I thought was stable dissolved without warning and where plans that made sense one day no longer applied the next. Systems changed without logic, The effort to build something rooted was met with forces that seemed to pull it apart just as quickly.
I began to understand what it means to live in a state of displacement that is not just physical, but internal.
The question that has begun to rise in the middle of all of this is not only about faith, but about purpose, about whether what I am doing is actually meaningful or whether I am simply feeding some quieter part of myself that needs to be seen or acknowledged. It is not an easy question to sit with, because it does not come with a clear answer, and it does not disappear once it is asked.
And yet, when I sit with it honestly, I do not feel delusion in what I am doing. I feel the opposite, because the path I am walking has asked for more than it has given back in any obvious or immediate way. There has been too much sacrifice, too much letting go, too many moments where choosing something easier would have made far more sense if the goal was simply to feed an ego. If that were the case, I would have shaped this into something more comfortable, more predictable, something that brought approval instead of resistance.
Instead, what I feel is something that resembles a walking prayer. This is not in the way I once understood it, but in the sense that my life itself has become the place where intention meets action and where what I am building is not separate from what I am asking for. It is the expression of it.
Living Ground is not just a project, it is something I am actively walking inside of, something that asks for presence, for attention, for trust in moments where there is no clear outcome.
I wake in the mornings with an intention that something beyond my own thinking guides me. I have not resolved what that something is and my rational mind tells me I have reached the limits of what I can control through effort alone.
And still, there are days where I feel worried, where concern sits close to the surface. I do question whether I am actually capable of carrying this forward in a way that Living Ground sustains itself and where I feel I am not alone in the responsibility of it. I know I am not. And, I know I am too.
And now there are new layers present, quieter but deeper. I have concerns within my own body that I am not yet ready to fully speak into the world, but that are strong enough to shift how I am seeing everything. It is a new and different level of reflection and discernment and a questioning that moves beyond logistics and into what truly matters.
When something enters at this level, it changes everything. It is no longer only about what I am building or whether I can sustain it. It becomes about time, about energy, about where I place what I have left to give, and why. It becomes about taking care of me.
And in the middle of all of this, I still find myself speaking and acting outward.
There is something about that act that changes the quality of what I am carrying, not by removing it, but by shifting how it sits within me, because the spiral slows, the breath returns, and the weight spreads out just enough for me to continue.
Nothing in the natural world carries itself alone, and this is something I see every day in the soil and the microbial life, where life is sustained through relationship, through exchange, through networks that are constantly communicating beneath the surface. When the system becomes closed, when everything is held too tightly, it begins to strain, and eventually something must open for life to continue in balance.
What I am doing when I speak outward feels like that kind of opening.
A release from a closed system and a vulerable act of sharing it all, good, bad and ugly. This is a way of allowing something beyond my own thoughts to enter into what I am carrying.
Faith, for me now, is not something I belong to outwardly, and it is no longer something I can place within organized structures that require alignment. For me, it is something that lives in this movement between inward and outward, in the quiet space where I allow what I am carrying to open rather than remain contained.
I still have more questions than answers, and I still feel that dissonance when I look at forms of faith that once felt like home, but I no longer feel like I have lost something.
It feels more like it has changed form.
And within all of this, the uncertainty, the responsibility, the quiet fear, the questions about purpose, and the awareness of my own body, there is still something that meets me there, not with answers, not with certainty, but with space.
And for now, that is enough. I feel God is working through me.
