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
Preparing for the Live Blood Workshop and the Second Edition
I am getting ready to release the second edition of Live Blood Analysis for the Lay Person, and I wanted to share why this edition felt important to me. The timing is meaningful because I am also preparing for the upcoming Live Blood Analysis workshop at Living Ground, taking place June 29 to July 6. https://livingground.art/live-blood-analysis-retreat This…
The Silkworm Enzyme and the Intelligence Hidden in Nature
How a tiny organism led to one of the most fascinating discoveries in natural medicine, and why the real lesson may be about observation, ecology, and the living systems beneath our feet Many years ago, I came across something that genuinely stopped me in my tracks. It was not simply the idea of the silkworm enzyme itself…
At What Point Does It Finally Tip?
There are moments in history when change appears impossible right before it suddenly becomes inevitable. There is an old idea often referred to as the “100th monkey effect.” The story suggests that once enough individuals within a group learn a new behavior, the knowledge somehow spreads rapidly through the whole population, almost as though consciousness itself reaches…
Returning to What Is Real
There is a sadness I carry sometimes that is difficult to explain because it does not come only from my personal life but my personal life influences the reality. I am not a sad person, but I have always experienced the world differently than many around me. I notice things. I feel patterns deeply. I see connections…
The Living Ground We Build
I have been thinking a lot lately about love. Not romantic love necessarily, although that is part of life too, but deeper than that. What does it actually mean to love a life? To love what you are doing? To love the process even when the process hurts sometimes? And how do you know the difference between…
Tulsi, Fluoride, and the Living Ecology of Water
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…
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
