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
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
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…
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
