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
Accepting Our Nature
Are we Nature? There is something deeply human about pretending we are exempt from the rhythm we see everywhere else. Are we in this alone? Can we actually learn from observing nature and how she works? The trees do not protest autumn. The river does not argue with the ocean. The soil does not panic when something…
Building What Outlasts Me
There comes a point in any serious endeavor when energy and vision are no longer enough. What carried something through its early years, instinct, drive, and determination, must eventually give way to structure, clarity, and deliberate design. This is that point. The work has grown, the land has responded, the systems have taken shape, but growth without…
Protected: Leisha’s 30-Day Terrain Protocol
No one gets out alive.
That is not a dark statement; it is simply ecological truth. We are born into matter and microbes, we move through seasons of growth and decay, and we return what we borrowed. The illusion that we can engineer permanence, sterilize risk, or purify ourselves out of vulnerability is one of the great fantasies of modern life. We…
Lessons of the Trees
In Ecuador we do not experience winter in the way I once understood it. There is no snow settling into silence, no frozen ground insisting that everything withdraw. And yet the seasons still speak here, only in a different dialect. The land moves between dry and rain, between dust and saturation, between restraint and overflow, and if…
Growing Pains
This is not the article people see when they scroll past a photograph of green gardens, bright salads, ferments bubbling in glass jars, or smiling faces around a Gratitude table. This is the part that sits behind it, the part where creation is not curated, but carried. Living Ground did not arrive fully formed. It did not…
The Ecology of Blood Sugar
Modern blood sugar dysfunction did not appear overnight. It developed alongside the rise of refined foods, concentrated sweeteners, processed carbohydrates, sedentary lifestyles, and the increasing separation between humans and the living systems that once regulated metabolism naturally. Today, millions of people are moving toward pre-diabetes and metabolic dysfunction without realizing it. Many are not eating what would…
Carrying Living Ground
Most people do not see what happens behind the scenes at Living Ground. They see gardens, food, quiet beauty, and perhaps a vision they can touch for a moment. What they do not see is what it actually takes to hold this together. They do not see the layers of confusion, disappointment, emotional labor, and ongoing struggle…
Our Work
What It Actually Takes to Build Living Ground
Personal reflections, in this moment, as I sit inside the unfolding reality of creating Living Ground and living inside the obstacles that come with it, both visible and invisible, practical and emotional, internal and external. I find myself feeling more emotional than usual right now, not because something dramatic has happened in a single moment, but because…
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
