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
When Healing Threatens the System – The Business of Dependency
Many systems in modern society are no longer built around creating healthy, independent, resilient human beings because independent people eventually stop feeding the system financially. Over time, systems drift toward dependency because dependency becomes extraordinarily profitable. What happens when entire industries quietly profit from keeping people stressed, searching, consuming, medicated, distracted, exhausted, insecure, lonely, and biologically disconnected…
What Mother Earth Teaches about Love
Today is Mother’s Day, and for some women, it is not a day filled with flowers, phone calls, grandchildren climbing into their laps, or family gathered around a table. For some mothers, it is a day of silence. That silence echoes loudly because the world often assumes mothers and children naturally remain connected forever. There is a…
The Living Ground of Ecuador Book Has Arrived
The book is now available on Amazon. Digital Copies are available too After years of writing, walking the mountains and forests of Ecuador, sitting with plants, listening to local knowledge, building gardens, studying the soil microbiome, and witnessing how deeply connected human health is to the living world around us, I have finally released my newest book….
Ecological Memory
There was a time, once upon a time, when human beings lived in much deeper relationship with the living world. I do not care whether your ancestry traces back through French villages, Corsican mountains, Scottish highlands, African grasslands, Andean valleys, or migrations so layered you can barely untangle them anymore. I have often asked “what is my…
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…
When the Brain Thinks the Body Is Starving
Understanding Leptin Resistance and Restoring the Metabolic Conversation For many people, losing weight feels like an endless battle. They eat less, exercise more, and try one diet after another, only to find themselves constantly hungry, craving food, and eventually gaining the weight back. After enough failed attempts, it becomes easy to believe the problem is a lack…
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,…
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
