We are the Ken family — James and Braylynn, our seven kids, and Grandpa — and this is the story of ground becoming a home.
In October 2026 we took deed to five acres of high desert in Costilla County, Colorado — San Luis Valley, 7,700 feet up, under a young volcano and an old sky. Raw land. No buildings, no well, no road in. Just dirt that nobody had ever built on, and a plan.
The plan is a book. Sikata Siddhānta is the complete build record of our project, LFA-42-SLV-2026 — written from lived practice, tested against our own lives before a word of it was printed. Everything we are about to build is in it, in order, with its materials lists and costs printed in the open: the main vault and the pods the family will sleep in, the bathhouse and kitchens, the sheep barn and the fenced acre, the cisterns and the power buried safe in the earth, the fences, the road, the workshop, the apothecary workspace — and the swales and terraces that begin giving the land back its water. Twenty-two structures and systems. We are building all of it.
The family is the crew. That is not a slogan; it is the book's own design. Every structure is engineered to be raised by the people who will live in it — one man, his wife, and their children, learning by doing, the way families have always actually built. Our kids will know how their home stands because their hands are why it stands.
The land is the goal. Our five acres are the core. Around it, piece by piece, we are gathering the parcels that complete the picture — a second five acres already under contract, more in view — because a family's safety in a changing world is measured in ground that can feed it, water it, and shelter it. And as each piece joins, the work on it is regeneration: water caught and held instead of lost, gravel and earth laid so floors stay dry and roads hold, sheep grazing the way this valley was grazed for two hundred years, soil built instead of spent.
The sheep are coming home to their own country. The flock at the center of this build is the Navajo-Churro — the oldest sheep breed in North America, descended from the flocks the Spanish brought up this very valley centuries ago, when this plain was the shared sheep commons of the villages. They are in the book with their barn, their fenced acre, and their water, in that order: fence the acre, raise the barn, bring the water, then the sheep. Hardy, double-coated, made for high desert and hard winters — the flock feeds the family, clothes the family, and grazes the land back toward health, the oldest partnership this valley knows.
And it passes on. Nothing here is being built for one lifetime. The land is deeded ground, held by a family, worked by children who are learning every system with their own hands as it rises — so the knowledge doesn't leave when any one of us does. The pods, the fences, the water, the flock, and the book that holds it all: built by this generation, taught to the next, and left standing for the ones after that. That is the real structure under every other one.
The knowledge is free. The ebooks are free — the entire system, readable by anyone, anywhere, at no cost, forever. Nobody has to pay to learn what we learned. That is deliberate: this project was published openly so it can never be locked away from the people it could help.
So why a campaign? Because people keep asking how they can help — and because our core process stays what it was designed to be: self-funded and currency-free. This campaign is the working arm beside it. It does not buy the work, and no gift buys a piece of the project. What a gift does is put a named thing in our hands at the moment it's needed:
• $30 buys a ton of gravel — and gravel is under everything: an 8-inch washed-gravel break beneath every buried floor, the bed of every drain, the crown of the road, the apron around every structure against fire.
• $100 is tie wire, pipe, and sheeting for a pod.
• $291 is every stick of rebar in Pod #1.
• $400 is its cement.
• $900–$1,200 fences the compost field.
• $1,654 is Pod #1 complete — the book's own printed start list, to the cent.
• $1,800 is the wire for the sheep acre. $1,500–$3,000 brings the starter flock home.
• $3,600 fences five acres. $2,699 is the power station at the heart of the system.
Every phase will be documented — photos, receipts, build days — the same open record the book began. And when you give here, you are not the end of it: the homage passes on. What our family proves on this ground, another family can pick up and build from, because all of it is published. Help given to us becomes a road for them.
You can also help by holding the work in your hands: the printed books are the other door — every copy bought above print cost carries its gift inside a book you keep. And the teas from our apothecary store already tell their buyers the same story: every purchase supports this land.
Spring 2027, when the Valley thaws, the work begins the way the book orders it: water first, always. The road unlocks delivery. Water unlocks mixing and living. The vault unlocks winter. We will be out there — all of us — and we'll show you everything.
— James & Braylynn Ken, Saint Paul, Minnesota ·
thelivingflow33@gmail.com · www.thelivingflowapothecary.store · Project LFA-42-SLV-2026
Support the build:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/the-land-the-book-the-family-building-lfa42-in-slv-f4wv8
The store:
https://thelivingflowapothecary.store
All our links:
https://linktr.ee/livingflowapothecary
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