I just could not wait to share this first post of the year with you guys, it has been so busy! We took some much needed time off to spend a beautiful month back home in Honduras with family. Aside from the showering of love and warmth, it was a beautiful opportunity to touch ground and remind my girls where exactly we are from and how blessed we are to be a part of that. Even though they might be too young to understand what it all means & how important it is to be connected to one’s roots, I know that it is never too soon to show them.

Coming back to our other home in Germany to a very cold and seemingly lonely Winter is never easy. The short sunless days and the long freezing nights take a toll on anyone, but after some time now, I have learned to appreciate the beauty of all the cycles Mother Earth has to offer us. And this Winter, I am celebrating 10 years of cycles, and appreciating the stillness and calm that comes with these days. What does that entail? Less of the outdoors and a whole lot more indoor lounging around, warm drinks, hibernating, and maybe, just maybe a bit of deep house cleaning.

And so it goes, that most of nature goes dormant in Winter. Humans however, don´t. Our bodies do react to the seasons, and feeling in tune with each one can make your living a whole lot healthier & therefore easier! We need food & sleep, and even though our metabolisms change and we definitely don’t get the same amounts of vitamin D from our non-existent sun, we still need a balanced diet to get through our days. And for that I am thankful for eggs, my personal super food. I know for a fact that I have always thought to myself, if I were to be stranded somewhere with only ONE food, it would have to be the egg. It is just the most versatile and internationally used food product ever, an organic vessel to humanity! I mean, humans and human ancestors have scavenged and eaten animal eggs for millions of years, not to mention the innumerable amount of recipes that use them!

It is only partly inevitable that the egg industry today would need to produce around 90 million tonnes of eggs per year. I have no idea how many eggs that is, but wow. Sadly enough, this great demand in eggs has exceeded the natural cycle of hens in the world, which has turned the whole egg-business into a dirty & rather toxic production scheme, where not only are animals massively tortured, but the results themselves can no longer be trusted as a real “animal” product most of the time.

PETA says it quite simply: chickens are the most abused animals on the planet. If not cultivated and killed for their flesh, hens are used (abused) for their eggs, living their lives in total confinement – from the moment they hatch until the day they die. Chickens raised for flesh are often packed by the thousands into massive sheds and fed large amounts of antibiotics and drugs to keep them alive in conditions that would otherwise kill them. This reckless use of antibiotics makes drugs less effective for treating humans by speeding up the development of drug-resistant bacteria. YUCK!

As far as motherly love goes, a hen will cluck to her chicks in a natural setting before they even hatch while sitting on the eggs in her privately protected nest. They peep back to her and to each other through their shells. This is nature in its most beautiful form. On factory farms, hens are forced to lay their eggs in barren metal cages, crammed together with five to 11 other birds; eggs are then taken from the mother as soon as they are laid and placed in large incubators. It is only expected that with a rapidly-growing human population, we would need drastic production systems to keep up with feeding everyone. But the harsh truth no one wants to admit is, that we no longer rely on feeding ourselves the way nature intended us to and have become comfortable & lazy in trusting that the supermarket will have our weekly eggs there for us to buy whenever we want or need. That is not the way it should be.

We can only do our part and either consume less or find reasonable substitutes for all animal products in the hopes of creating a more conscious existence on our planet. Little things can make a huge difference. City living does not allow us all to have a fresh egg each day, but we can support the right local producers and do our best to avoid unnecessary waste. I was delighted when my friend, who lives on the outskirts of the city, told me she was going to be raising hens. This week I got my very first order of 20 beautiful colorful eggs, locally home-grown from hens that get all the love from my buddy. It cannot be denied, there is definitely a certain kind of magic that comes with eating these eggs, and I cannot help but think it is Mother Earth silently whispering in my ear….”thank you”.