Common Ground | Issue 005| Summer 2026 Tending
🌱 ROOT AND GROUND
This year marked my first attempt at a porch garden, and it has been a great success. I’ve learned a few important lessons along the way, such as the need for patience when it comes to growth, the reality of sharing my plants with local critters, and the importance of setting up a reliable watering system for next year to ensure consistency when I’m not around. With all the recent parasite madness and eggs being recalled, I’ve been reflecting deeply about food sovereignty. As a woman of convenience, it’s evident that this has become the nature of our world, but that nature is just as real as a customer service AI bot. Our actual nature is that we can grow something in most places, whether it is a herb garden in the home, a container garden on a balcony or front porch, or a bigger garden if you have the land and space. Food is our birthright, so I often find myself questioning why we’ve been taught otherwise
How do we reconnect with our fundamental nature of growing food? How do we bring this process back into our nervous systems? Putting our hands in dirt, watching our seeds grow, eating the fruits of our labor. I believe that true and profound experiences of freedom await us when we eat our first home-grown vegetable. To know that freedom is to unlock something these current systems intentionally keep from us. I wonder why.
🌿 THE PLANT ALLY · Rosemary / Rosmarinus officinalis
For the person who needs to come back to themselves — in body, in home, and in heritage.
Rosemary is an evergreen shrub with woody stems, needle-like leaves, and small flowers. Her scent is earthy, deep, and cleansing. In southern Black culture, she has long been used as a protective and purifying herb. She clears stagnant energy. She marks a threshold.
Her medicine is wide. As a spice, she deepens food. As a scalp treatment, she stimulates growth and soothes dandruff. As a tea, she supports recovery from illness, easing sore throats, moving congestion, and providing respiratory support. She also eases a bloated stomach and moves around what has been sitting too long.
To make rosemary hair oil at home: simmer one cup of carrier oil with half a cup of crushed fresh or dried rosemary on low heat for twenty minutes. Cool, strain, and store in an amber glass bottle in a cool, dark place. Simple. Ancestral. Yours.
A note from your clinical herbalist in training: Rosemary may not be a good option for those who are pregnant or who have been diagnosed with seizure disorders or bleeding disorders. People on blood thinners, diuretics, or blood pressure medication should speak with their care provider first. Consult your care provider when in doubt.
💡 THE GROUND TRUTH
The full special issue is live on the Ground Work blog. What follows is the heart of it.
Something in that sentence I do not want to rush past. It’s crucial to understand that this is not just about food safety; it is about what it means to know your food. To have a deeper connection to our food sources. To have watched it grow. To have watered it yourself and fed the soil it grew in and decided what went into that soil and what did not. The feeling of harvesting from my own garden is not pride exactly. It is older than pride. It is something my nervous system recognizes as safe in a way that goes deeper than logic.
The recognition is inherited. The story of how so many of us lost access to it is worth naming directly.
We were told a story about convenience. That packaging was progress and also a sign of financial stability. The idea that growing our own food indicates poverty has been particularly thrust upon Black communities, many of whom have historically cultivated and shared food among themselves for generations. This disconnection arrived cloaked in the language of modernity, losing the vital aspects of care, healing, and sovereignty.
A good life, in my great-great-great-grandfather Papa Mack's telling, was not about an amount of money, convenience, or productivity over presence. It was a bowl of collard greens and neckbones. It was a meal that came from somewhere you trusted. It was gratitude practiced not as a spiritual discipline but as a natural response to having enough and knowing where it came from.
The whole lesson lives right here.
Read the full special issue at the link in bio.
📋 THE PRACTICAL
For birth workers and doulas:
Food sovereignty and body sovereignty are interconnected. The same systems that disconnected Black and Brown communities from their land and food knowledge have also shaped the conditions doulas navigate every day in birth rooms. Understanding that connection is necessary for the political education this work requires. The La Via Campesina food sovereignty framework, linked in What's Moving, gives language to that connection across communities globally. Read it as context for the broader systems argument this newsletter has been building.
For investors and capital allocators:
Food and agriculture is one of the most underfunded and intersectional areas in impact investing. CapShift's food and agriculture investment primer, linked in What's Moving, maps the landscape: what is investable, where the gaps are, and how to build a portfolio that addresses environmental, human, and animal wellbeing simultaneously. For investors already thinking about reproductive health and care economy, the food sovereignty thread is the same argument made in a different sector. The people closest to the land are the ones least resourced to protect it. That pattern is worth knowing before your next check.
✨ THE ENERGETIC READ
Right now there is a deep pull toward understanding the macro and micro of our lives. Without that recognition, life can start to feel like one long automated routine, almost as if we are Sims characters walking within the automation.
It is time to evaluate the micro. What in your daily life brings you some version of joy? It could be making tea, spending time with children, the way you care for yourself by staying hydrated, calling a friend, or stretching your body before bed. Then there is the macro. What is your bigger mission? Some people have that figured out. Most do not, though the world would like to sell us something different.
Stick with the micro. The rest will figure itself out.
What does it feel like to let yourself just be present and hold on to the macro without pressure to know everything?
🔗 WHAT'S MOVING
Three things worth your attention this cycle:
Canada's National Farmers Union is pushing their government to center food sovereignty in the next agricultural policy framework. The argument they are making is the same one this newsletter has been making all issue. [viacampesina.org — Canada: The Next Agricultural Policy Framework Must Centre Food Sovereignty]
An Indigenous food pyramid developed in response to new federal dietary guidelines names 27 food sources rooted in tribal sovereignty and land practices. Food as medicine. Food as identity. Food as resistance. [nativenewsonline.net — The Indigenous Food Pyramid to Make Native America Healthy Again]
For investors thinking about where capital can go beyond reproductive health, CapShift's food and agriculture primer maps the landscape of sustainable and regenerative food systems investing. [capshift.com — How to Invest in Sustainable and Regenerative Food and Agriculture]
🤝 THE INTRODUCTION
Food is reproductive justice.
The right to decide whether, when, and how you bring life into the world cannot be separated from the right to feed that life well. The right to decide when and how you bring life into the world is intertwined with the right to nourish that life. This right includes knowing the origins of your food, growing it yourself, and passing that knowledge on to future generations. Southerners on New Ground has been building LGBTQ liberation across all lines of race, class, ability, age, culture, gender, and sexuality in the South since before most people had language for what they were doing.
SONG builds, sustains, and connects a southern regional base of LGBTQ people in order to transform the region through strategic projects and campaigns developed in response to actual conditions in actual communities. Their work is grounded in leadership development, intersectional analysis, and organizing that names the South as a site of liberation rather than a place to escape from.
This is an organization that understands something this newsletter has been trying to say from the beginning: the ground has always been here. The people closest to it have always known that. The work is building enough collective power to protect what we know.
Learn more, become a member, and support their work at southernersonnewground.org.
🕯️ THE DISCERNMENT
Find a quiet moment. Place both feet on the floor. Feel the ground beneath you.
Breathe in through your nose for four counts. Hold for four. Release through your mouth for six. Do that twice.
Now ask yourself:
What would it mean to tend your own life the way a garden tends itself meaning not perfectly, not without interruption, but consistently, with attention, and with trust that something is growing even when you cannot see it yet?
Let the question be enough. You do not have to answer it today.
From the ground where care grows,
Sabia
Ground Work publishes every Tuesday. The Ground Work essay and the Common Ground newsletter alternate each week so something is always in your inbox. Subscribe and find the full archive at ground-work-1.ghost.io