Field Notes from my journey creating Living Ground, Ecuador.
“If I want people to care about the Earth itself, about the land and soil that feed us, about the way our food, medical, political, and religious systems are shaping us, and about how divided and dysfunctional we have become, then I need to plant those concerns inside stories that are wide enough and deeply connective enough that others can recognize themselves within them.” Leisha of the Living Ground Project.
Living Ground Recent Posts
Remembering Jim, Living Forward
Today is Jim’s birthday. Happy heavenly birthday!!! I woke up with him on my mind in a way that feels close. I wish he was here everyday. Sure, there is a weight to this day, but there is also something steady and present that I carry inside me. After 5 years, I am feeling a change in…
The Ecology of Modern Disease
What I keep coming back to lately is how much modern medicine resembles industrial agriculture. The parallels are becoming difficult for me to ignore. In both systems, something unwanted appears, spreads, or becomes destructive, and the response involves increasingly aggressive intervention. Companies develop stronger chemicals. Doctors prescribe more suppressive therapies. Researchers target narrower pathways. Yet despite all…
Walking Through Understanding
There is a point where living naturally, thinking independently, and learning to trust your own perceptions can become something deeply beautiful. It can reconnect us to intuition, observation, the body, the land, and the quieter intelligence woven through life that modern culture often trains us to ignore. I know this personally because much of my life has…
Are the Kidneys Filtering?
In live blood analysis, one of the first things I notice is that the body is never still. Even when someone feels tired, stuck, or unwell, their cells are working constantly. Energy is being produced every second. Metabolism never stops. And just like any engine, energy production leaves behind exhaust. This is something we are rarely taught…
The Law Beneath Life
There is a principle I was raised with that never left me, even when I questioned everything else around it. It was simple in its wording, but not simple in its depth. What you do to others is done to you. In my younger life as a child, this was not taught as something abstract or philosophical,…
Between Holding and Letting Go
I have been sitting with something growing inside me, and I have chosen not to call it a disease. I will not give it that word, because I understand how language shapes perception, and I am not willing to hand over that kind of power. What is happening in my body feels more like a process, something…
Food, Law, and Common Sense: How Did We Get So Disconnected?
There is a strange disconnect in the modern world that becomes impossible to ignore once you begin to follow anything back to its source. We speak about energy as if it comes from outlets, fuels, labels, or measured quantities in capsules and powders, yet none of that reflects where energy truly begins or how it actually moves…
Protected: What I Am Carrying, What I Am Releasing
The Hidden Work of Vetiver
What We Notice, and What the Soil Is Actually Doing There is a moment on land that comes before explanation, before theory, before formal science, when something shifts and you feel it. If you watch how your gardens grow, you begin to see things and how plants seem to respond to its’ surroundings. A crop grows stronger…
soil → plant → microbe → gut → immune → kitchen → growing
There is something essential missing from most of the food people are eating today, and it is not listed on any label. It is not a vitamin, not a mineral, not protein or fat. Those are all there, at least on paper. What is missing is the living layer that allows those nutrients to actually function inside…
What is Living Ground
,The Living Ground Project is a living classroom in southern Ecuador, built from soil, food, plants, microbes, and community.
Here, we grow much of what we serve and teach. The gardens feed the café, the apothecary, the workshops, the books, and the people who come here to learn a different way of living. Everything begins with the soil, because healthy soil grows stronger plants, stronger food, and stronger people.
Living Ground is a place for practical self-reliance. We teach gardening, soil regeneration, fermentation, herbal medicine, food preservation, natural health, and the connection between the human microbiome and the soil food web. Our work is not theory. It is lived every day through the gardens, the kitchen, the store, the café, the animals, the workshops, and the land itself.
The vision is simple. Restore the soil, grow real food, preserve knowledge, create local work, and help people remember that health does not begin in a bottle. It begins in relationship with the land, the microbes, the plants, the food, and each other.
Living Ground’s Online Courses in Self Reliance
