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
Becoming the Expert of Your Own Body
Understanding what is happening inside the body during chronic illness is both a scientific question and a deeply personal one. Modern medicine often relies heavily on laboratory data to tell the story. Blood tests measure enzymes, hormones, minerals, immune markers, and metabolic byproducts. Imaging technologies reveal structures inside tissues. Genetic testing searches for inherited patterns. These tools…
Zooming Out and then Prayer
When I find myself in the middle of a problem, it can feel enormous. An unexpected bill arrives or a wall suddenly needs repair; the heavy rain, the soil slips and the reminder that the land still moves in its own way; a project takes longer than I planned or someone misunderstands something I said; a day…
The Sulfur Bridge: The Chemistry That Connects Soil, Plants, and the Human Body
Dimethyl sulfoxide, better known as DMSO, is one of the most unusual compounds ever explored in biology. For decades it has appeared in thousands of scientific papers and has been studied across many areas of physiology and medicine. Most of us don’t know about DMSO and I am not sure why science didn’t continue deep research based…
Living Ground in the Red
Our Gratitude Meal this weekend was about the color of Red. Not by accident and not really intended Sales have been down lately. I have been showing the team the real numbers, the relationship between income and expenses, so they understand what it takes to sustain a place like this. Right now those numbers are in the…
The Pathways of the Human Terrain
In nature, nothing suddenly collapses without a long chain of shifts that come before it. Forests decline slowly before trees fall. Rivers change direction before they dry. Soil loses life before crops fail. The human body follows the same pattern. When roughly one in three people will face cancer during their lifetime, it should stop us and…
Flowers Become Medicine
I have been working on a small book about flower essences. It feels natural for me to say that because so much of what I do already circles around plants and medicine. I love making natural remedies. I love watching how plants work with the body. I have always had a deep respect for homeopathy and the…
The Work After the Work
There are seasons when everything appears stable from the outside. It seems solid, productive, visibly rooted, and yet, internally, something is shifting. It is quiet but insistent so that it cannot be ignored. I can not ignore it. I am in one of those seasons now. It not in crisis but in a deeper, more discerning kind…
Protected: Team Meeting Feb 28
Metamorphosis
The wild thing, I imagine is that the butterfly remembers when it was a caterpillar even though its brain dissolved into liquid and formed again into something entirely new, the wonderous miracles of life. I have been thinking about that a great deal lately, about dissolution and about how life so often requires something to crumble, to…
Protected: Estrangement
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
