I Built the Thing I Used to Coach People Toward
On cacao, income sovereignty, and what it looks like when the work becomes the life
For years, I helped people think through the gap between the work they were doing and the work they actually wanted to do.
Not in a quit-your-job-and-follow-your-dreams way. In a more honest way. The kind that starts with: what do you actually need to survive, what do you actually want your days to feel like, and is there a version of those two things that can exist in the same life at the same time?
I called it income sovereignty. The idea that you don’t have to choose between financial stability and building something that’s actually yours. That the path between those two things is long and unglamorous and worth walking anyway.
And then, quietly, I started walking it myself.
How a farmers market table became the thing I’d been talking about
I didn’t set out to start a cacao business. I set out to make something with my hands.
I’m a first-generation Salvadoran-American woman. My ancestry is 47% Indigenous Mesoamerican — the people who cultivated cacao before it was a commodity, before it was candy, before it was a wellness trend. When I started learning about cacao’s actual history — not the Hershey version, the real one — something clicked that I didn’t have words for yet.
I started making small-batch cacao blends. Not because someone asked me to. Not because I’d identified a market gap. But because something in me recognized the plant, the plant recognized me back.
I brought those blends to a farmers market in Arlington, Virginia. Set up a table. Stood there.
And people came.
Not because I had a massive following or a polished brand. Because Eat Local had already built a community of people who wanted to support small, local, intentional makers — and I showed up inside that community with something real.
That’s the demand-signal filter I used to teach people about, applied to my own life. I didn’t create demand. I stepped into a demand that already existed. I just had to be willing to show up and be seen.
What I noticed at the table
The conversations at a farmers market table are different from the conversations that happen online.
Online, people consume. They read, they scroll, they sometimes share. But at the table, people stop. They smell things. They ask questions. They ask if I grow the cacao myself — and I tell them no, I source it, and then I tell them why that’s actually a more honest relationship with the plant than pretending I did something I didn’t.
These conversations are the most alive I feel in a professional context. Not because I’m selling something — though I am — but because there’s genuine reciprocity happening. They bring their curiosity. I bring what I made. Something real gets exchanged.
That reciprocity is what I spent years trying to articulate when I talked about income sovereignty. It’s not just about making money outside of a traditional job structure. It’s about finding work that meets you back. That gives something to you in the giving of it.
The farmers market does that. The cacao does that.
The thing I didn’t expect
I thought the cacao business and the income sovereignty writing were two separate things.
I thought one was my livelihood project and one was my intellectual project, and they happened to coexist in the same person.
What I discovered at the table — and in the months of making blends in my kitchen before dawn, and in the long conversations with people who stopped and stayed — is that they’re the same thing expressed in different forms.
The writing says: you don’t have to earn the right to build something that’s yours. The cacao says: here is what something that’s mine actually looks like, feels like, smells like, tastes like.
One is the argument. The other is the evidence.
If you’ve been reading this Substack for any amount of time — if you found me through the income sovereignty work, or the podcast, or something I wrote about the in-between — you’ve been reading the argument. Now you know what the evidence looks like.
It’s a 4oz tin of small-batch cacao blend, made by hand in Northern Virginia, rooted in 5,000 years of ancestral lineage, sold at a farmers’ market table by a first-generation Salvadoran-American woman who finally stopped coaching toward the thing and started building it.
What comes next
On August 8, I’m opening the Sands & Semilla founding subscriber circle.
This is a small, intentional group of people who want to receive a monthly bundle of what I make — cacao body care products, starting with a candle, a body scrub, and a body oil, all made with the same intentionality as the blends.
It’s not a big launch. There’s no countdown timer, no limited-time discount, no urgency manufactured from nothing. It’s an invitation to the people who already know what this is — which, if you’re reading this, might be you.
If you want in, the link is below. If you want to stay connected and see where this goes, keep reading. Everything I build, I build in public — slowly, honestly, and with as much reciprocity as I can manage.
That’s the only strategy I’ve ever actually believed in.
Share with Friends :)
Miriam Raquel Sands is a cacao producer, culture writer, and clarity guide based in Northern Virginia. She makes small-batch cacao blends and body care at Sands & Semilla, hosts The Clarity Shift podcast, and writes weekly about nourishment from the inside out — for the body, the mind, and the financial life.