Leisha Sometimes life is so perfectly strange that you really couldn’t make it up, and this is one of those stories. We have been getting the little casita here on the land ready for whatever comes next, whether that’s friends, family, guests or a new tenant. A dear friend had been living there, and once we’d moved him into his new space, the cleaning began in earnest.
And then we found the blue barrel. You know the kind, one of those enormous blue plastic water drums, and this one had apparently been pressed into service as some sort of water compost. Now, I love compost. I spend a ridiculous amount of my life talking about microbes, decomposition and the extraordinary things that happen when biology gets to work, so you would think I’d have been delighted. I was not delighted.
We lifted the lid and looked in. Worms, bugs, things moving, things bubbling, and a layer of sludge I’d rather not describe in any more detail than that. And the smell. I have smelled compost piles, manure, ferments, stagnant ponds and things under the microscope that should never have been left sitting around, and this was in a category entirely its own. Nobody, myself very much included, had any enthusiasm for siphoning it, bucketing it out or spending the afternoon getting intimately acquainted with whatever civilisation had established itself in there.
So I looked at the boys and said, “Dig a big hole beside it.” The plan was beautifully simple: dig a hole, tip the whole revolting mess in, cover it with soil and let the earth take it from there.
And Then the Earth Changed
They dug, and they dug, and the hole kept growing until it was somewhere around a metre and a half deep and a metre and a half wide. Then, partway down, what was coming out of the hole changed. Instead of ordinary brown soil, the boys were lifting out shovelfuls of something pale, smooth and incredibly silky. Clay. Not a little seam mixed through the soil, either. We had hit a proper deposit.
Suddenly I had completely lost interest in the barrel. I was crouched beside the pile rubbing this stuff between my fingers like a child with a new toy, and it was so fine and smooth it almost felt like cream. I took a sample back and started testing: the water test, the finger test, the pH, and a methylene blue test (more on that wonderful little blue dye in a moment). Everything kept pointing in the same direction. Kaolin.
And here’s where it became almost comical. We are in the middle of creating our new spa at Living Ground. I’ve been working on the treatments, gathering herbs, making blends and dreaming up body wraps, and clay was right at the top of my list of materials. I had been looking at kaolin prices here in Ecuador and finding it at around $10-15 a pound. I looked at the mountain we’d just dug out and figured there had to be 200 pounds of it, maybe more. Our horrible hole was starting to look suspiciously like a little gold mine.
We recovered around 200 lbs more of less: 200 lb × $5 (low) = $1,000.
If I use the Ecuador MercadoLibre product I found: 200 lb × $9.06 = $1,812. And the Green Harmony retail equivalent I found: 200 lb × $13.43 = $2,686
Holy shit! Yes, white gold!
So What Actually Is Kaolin?
Let me geek out for a minute, because the science of kaolin is honestly as lovely as the stuff itself. Kaolin is a clay made mostly of a mineral called kaolinite, a layered aluminium silicate. Each tiny particle is a stack of incredibly thin sheets, a layer of silica bonded to a layer of alumina, repeated over and over like the pages of a microscopic book. Those flat little plates slide over one another, and that is exactly why it feels so silky between your fingers. What you feel on your skin is the shape of the crystal.
Kaolin is born from rock. When granite and other feldspar-rich rocks sit for long ages in warm, wet conditions, water slowly works on them, dissolving and carrying away the potassium, sodium and calcium until what remains reorganises itself into soft, pale clay.
Geologists call this kaolinisation, and it is one of the reasons kaolin is so common in tropical and subtropical soils like ours here in southern Ecuador. Hard stone, patient water and an enormous amount of time, and you end up with something you can smooth across your face.
The methylene blue test is a perfect little example of seeing something invisible through its effects. Clay particles carry electrical charges on their surfaces, and those charges let them grab and hold onto other molecules. Methylene blue is a positively charged dye, so the more charged surface a clay has, the more dye it soaks up. Swelling clays like bentonite gulp down huge amounts of it. Kaolin, with its tightly bonded layers that don’t open up to water, takes up very little. You can’t see the charge on a clay particle, but you can watch what it does to a drop of blue dye, and that tells you who you’re dealing with.
That low charge and non-swelling nature is really kaolin’s whole personality. Bentonite is the intense one, pulling hard and drying fast, whereas kaolin is the gentlest of the cosmetic clays, mild, soft and kind. That makes it beautiful for sensitive skin, dry skin and anyone who finds the stronger clays too much.
Kaolin and the Body
People have been putting kaolin on (and in) their bodies for a very long time, and modern medicine never really stopped. Kaolin is recognised as a skin protectant ingredient in over-the-counter products , and it turns up in baby powders, nappy creams and soothing powders. For much of the twentieth century it was the “kao” in Kaopectate, the classic remedy for upset stomachs, because of the way it binds things in the gut. I would have to do further testing on this to ensure this clay is suitable for internal use.
Kaolin also activates blood clotting. When blood touches kaolin’s surfaces, it sets off the first steps of the clotting cascade, which is why kaolin is used in hemostatic gauze for serious bleeding injuries, and why laboratories use it as an activator in clotting tests. As someone who spends a great deal of time looking at blood under the microscope, I find it wonderful that the same clay I’ll be spreading on skin in the spa is quietly at work in emergency rooms and labs, revealing how blood behaves.
On the skin, kaolin does a handful of lovely things. It absorbs excess oil without stripping the skin the way harsher clays can, and it gives a soft, gentle exfoliation as it’s rinsed away. It lifts surface grime and leaves skin feeling clean and smooth. And as a wet clay wrap dries, the evaporation draws heat away from the body, which feels wonderful on hot, inflamed or tired skin. I want to be honest here, because there is a lot of exaggeration in the clay world. Kaolin isn’t a miracle cure, and claims about “detoxing” the whole body through the skin go well beyond what the evidence supports. What it does do, it does gently and beautifully, and it has done so for thousands of years.
It is also a wonderful carrier for herbs. Because clay surfaces hold onto molecules, kaolin can be mixed with herbal infusions, powders and oils to keep plant goodness resting against the skin. This is where I start to get really excited about the spa.
How We’re Going to Use It
Wild clay! I have filtered it and there is no grit, not sand. I’ve let it settle in water for 7 days and pour off the water and attempted to separate the finest particles from the heavier sand, an old technique called levigation that potters have used for centuries. There was no sand. It was silky, clean and incredibly soft.
I’m imagining facial masks of kaolin mixed with calendula and chamomile tea for sensitive skin, and body wraps blended with herbs from our gardens, perhaps rosemary, lemon verbena or cooling mint for tired legs. Soothing powders, gentle cleansers and clay poultices too.
Earth from the land and plants from the gardens, laid onto the people who come here to rest.
The Alchemy of It
Now let me take you somewhere a little deeper, because I’ve been chewing on this all week. In early eighteenth-century Germany there was a young alchemist named Johann Friedrich Böttger who boasted he could turn base metals into gold. Augustus the Strong, ruler of Saxony, took him at his word and essentially locked him up until he produced it.
Böttger never made gold, of course. But he unlocked something Europe had been desperate to make for centuries: true hard porcelain, a secret that had belonged to China. The crucial ingredient was kaolin. The Meissen porcelain works was founded soon afterwards, and porcelain became so prized that Europeans called it white gold. The alchemist failed at the thing he was searching for and found something extraordinary in the attempt. Even the word kaolin comes from Gaoling, a hill village near the great porcelain city of Jingdezhen in China.
I laughed when I read that because there was my own pile of white clay, found while looking for somewhere to dump sludge.
Alchemy has always been about transformation, and at its heart is an idea I love: the treasure is hidden in the thing everyone else throws away. The old alchemists spoke of the prima materia, the raw, chaotic, often foul starting material with which the whole Great Work begins. The first stage, nigredo, the blackening, was literally about putrefaction and decay. Rot was not a failure in alchemy. Rot was the beginning. Out of the black, stinking mess came the whitening, albedo, and eventually something of real value. Honestly, I can’t think of a better description of this experiecne. Nigredo was the barrel. Albedo was the clay.
Biology runs on exactly the same principle. The sludge we buried is full of organic matter and the microbes that break it down. The funny thing is that kaolin, for all its beauty, is not a great holder of nutrients on its own. That same low charge means it can’t cling to much calcium, magnesium or potassium, which is why tropical soils rich in kaolinite depend so heavily on organic matter and a living microbial community to stay fertile. So the clay came up for the spa, and the rot went down to the clay. The soil down there now has exactly what it was missing. Each half needed the other.
The other piece of alchemy I keep coming back to is how invisible relationships become visible through their effects. You can’t see the electrical charge on a clay plate, but you can watch it pull methylene blue out of the water. You can’t see clotting factors in blood, but you can watch kaolin set them in motion. You can’t see the microbes in a ferment, but you can smell the tang, watch the bubbles and smell the change. In the garden you’ll never see the fungal networks and bacteria trading with plant roots, yet you see their work in every healthy, vigorous plant. Most of the important relationships in the living world are like this. We only know them by what they do.
This is exactly what we explore in the Plant & Kitchen Alchemy workshop here at Living Ground. We spend a week in the gardens, in the wild and in the kitchen, learning to recognise useful plants (especially the weeds everyone else pulls out), fermenting, sprouting and turning what grows around us into food and medicine. The weed becomes the tea. The cabbage, handed over to the microbes, becomes something alive and better for you than it was before. Again and again the “useless” thing turns out to be the doorway, and the invisible relationships between soil, plants, microbes and our own bodies start showing themselves in what happens in the jar, on the plate and in us. Our next one runs this November, and if this kind of thing makes you smile the way it makes me smile, I would love to have you here.
I don’t need to make this story into a grand spiritual lesson, and I think I like it best exactly as it happened.
We had a disgusting barrel of sludge, we dug a giant hole to get rid of it, and we found a kaolin mine. The compost went down, the clay came up, and soon that clay will be mixed with herbs grown on this land and spread on the bodies of people who come here to rest. Earth, plants, minerals, microbes and people meeting each other again, round and round. You really can’t make this stuff up.
