Empowering Self-Reliance and Sustainable Living & Microbiomes
Empowering Self-Reliance and Sustainable Living & Microbiomes
When I started to really understand microbiology, I quietly moved many of the strong germ-fighting herbs and foods out of my apothecary. I had become uncomfortable with the idea that health meant constantly trying to destroy microorganisms. Those tools began to feel like blunt instruments that did not particularly care …
There once was a little, beautiful microbe who decided to go alone. She had lived her existence within a vast and intricate field that was coded ancestrally and environmentally, shaped long before her and sustained by forces she did not create yet depended upon completely. Water moved steadily through mineral …
Pilgrimage usually brings to mind sacred paths across continents, places where saints left traces of miracles behind them. My pilgrimage has stayed closer to the ground. It has taken place in the living experiment of the Project site, a journey fueled by a clear vision and an unclear route. I …
Bougainvillea grows where it pleases. It climbs, weaves, and stretches upward toward the sun, wrapping itself around trees, fences, and walls in search of light. Its branches are lined with thorns that protect and anchor it, yet from this fierce defense bursts a brilliance of color that softens the landscape. …
The pomegranate’s outer skin is a universe of medicine that most people throw away. Most people who know me know that when I began to study the soil, my whole way of seeing health changed. Once I understood how the soil food web functions, I saw how every part of …
Every cell in the body is like a tiny garden bed. Within its walls live small, ancient symbionts called mitochondria, descendants of once free microbes that learned to live within us. They are our breath, our fire, our living engines. Their task is simple and sacred: to turn oxygen and …
Coffee blossoms are a brief candle of the coffee tree. They open after the first good rains, bright white, breathing out a perfume that sits somewhere between jasmine, citrus, and honeyed vanilla. Inside those petals are the same energetic signatures that move sap through the plant, guide bees to nectar, …
As a child I never thought of the pomegranate tree as medicine. For me it was play. I would crush the red seeds and paint my lips and cheeks with their juice, pretending I had lipstick and blush. It was silly, but I remember how the color stained my skin …
Horseradish is one of those plants that carries memory in its roots at least it has for me. The ones growing here in my Ecuadorian gardens at home and the Project Site actually came from my old land in Canada. Fourteen years have passed since I left that soil, yet …
There is something deeply moving about working with plants in their most concentrated form. To distill their essence into a small bottle is like capturing the soul of the garden. Each drop carries not just aroma but the story of the soil, the care of the hands that tended the …