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
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…
Inflammation Is Not a Discovery
Hey, I am not a scientist, but I do carry a kind of lived understanding that comes from watching the body closely over time. So when I read that inflammation is now being brought forward as a possible cause of heart disease, presented almost like a new discovery, I pause. According to Scientific American, research is now…
Live Blood Workshop Interview
https://livingground.art/live-blood-analysis-retreat/
Self Reliance, or Something Like It
When I was around thirty, living in Canada, I felt something I couldn’t really explain. It wasn’t loud or dramatic; it was just a quiet pull that kept returning. I felt a steady urge to get out and get closer to something real. At that time, I had no skills. My family had just sold everything, including…
What Remains When Everything Shifts
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…
Protected: I Was a Mom Who… Tried
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
