Food for thought from "Awakening Beauty the Dr. Hauschka Way" by Susan West Kurz...
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The skin care products you use, the food you eat, and the clothing you wear - just to name a few of your beauty-related choices - can have a rippling effect: on one hand, they give you many personal rewards, but on the other, they affect the entire planet.
True beauty - that is, beauty that arises from a loving heart and youthful, radiant skin - is based on health. The more you use substances that injure your skin or adversely affect the health of your body, the more you will be forced to hide yourself behind elaborate clothing, makeup, or extreme makeovers, all of which are illusions of beauty.
True beauty arises when you rely primarily on skin care products and foods whose ingredients were grown organically or biodynamically. These foods and products can restore the beauty of your skin, give you more energy, protect you from illness, promote optimal weight, and create within you a deep sense of well-being. These are reasons enough to eat healing foods and utilize high-quality products. And they seem like rather small steps - so small, in fact, that virtually every one of us can do them. Remarkably, the foods and skin care products that have the most enhancing effect on our beauty also heal the environment and sustain the earth.
We have only just begun to think about sustainability, which is the capacity to meet our society's current needs while providing for the needs of future generations. Right now, most of the ways we grow food, conduct business, and run our economy are unsustainable, meaning they are robbing future generations of the resources they will need to survive and thrive. We can however, work to change this behavior and restore our world.
One of the simplest places to start is to understand the vast difference between fertilizer and fertility. Fertilizers are chemicals used to support one generation of plants. These chemicals allow us to produce food today, but they weaken our ability to produce food in the future.
Fertility, on the other hand, is a condition that allows plants, animals, and humans to reproduce. Fertility meets our immediate needs - it creates nutritious, hardy, and healthy plants - and, at the same time, provides for future generations.
Biodynamic and organic farmers use natural and organic compost and crop rotation to restore the earth's humus content and support its fertility. The earth grows stronger and healthier as these methods are employed. This is sustainable agriculture. These methods not only meet our needs but our children's needs, and their children's needs.
If we are to restore our health and beauty and heal the earth, we must become conscious of our dependence on the health of the soil and the labor of those who act as its stewards. Part of that awareness is to be willing to pay a little more for organic and biodynamic foods and skin care products. The rewards from this investment are greater beauty, health, and economic stability, and a greener earth - the basis for peace among us all.
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