With eu2be, I hope to refocus the beauty conversation to include more of us, and whether it's MLK’s holiday weekend or not, his legacy and lessons are relevant every day.
In today’s parlance, he was one of the biggest brands of his time. And yet, he didn’t go to Memphis to meet with celebrities and distinguished dignitaries. He was there to spend his “brand capital” in support of striking sanitation workers.
It was a fateful trip and his body confirmed this. I hadn’t known that King was so exhausted on the night of his famous speech, suffering from a sore throat and fever, that he asked his friend Ralph Abernathy to take his place.
Sensing the crowd’s disappointment, Abernathy summoned King to brave the bad weather and come to the temple where hundreds awaited him.
“I may not get there with you…”
This is a phrase that can only be conceived from a person whose not only in touch with their deepest self, but one who operates from it. It is wealth management where the wealth you pass on isn’t assessed in dollars and cents but in intergenerational care of the human family to which you belong.
These assets of care come in the way of stories, practices, technologies and the arts. I believe this is why this phrase remains as poignant today as when it was first delivered. It embodies a foreboding concept, but nonetheless, well known to dispossessed and displaced people throughout history,
With no speech in hand, King spoke extemporaneously delivering powerful insights—you might call them heirlooms, about the human condition and our role in it.
King’s insights didn’t come from an external source. It came from his deepest self as a feeling, part of the intuitive intelligence that flows through the body.
From the moment of our arrival at birth, the clock is ticking, and the arc of our entire human experience is one that reaches over a much longer period than our single lifespan.
MLK understood the big currents that sweep us along, and he knew about the long arcs that bend our arrow’s aim.
It is pure grace how our ancestral knowledge, a valuable inheritance, saves us time and time again—from ancient stories and traditions, to time-tested medicines and practices, to the ingredients used in eu2be’s bottled treasures.
It is evidence that those who came before—MLK taking his place in this lineage that night from the dais, cared enough about us to pass on tools we would need to get to the promised land and for when things wouldn’t go the way we want.
But we mustn’t give up.
Yes, life comes for us, and times will come when we’ll get knocked off balance. But we’re not the first to feel this way and we won’t be the last.
We have a powerful inheritance of collective intelligence that exists to assure us of an easier navigation of both the magic and the tragic of life.
Perhaps it’s my deep appreciation for what he passed on that resulted in our first artworks being based on him and his legacy.
In starting eu2be, I hope to redefine our ideas about beauty and refocus the beauty conversation to include more of us.
That’s why eu2be’s philanthropy is committed to human creativity and the arts. Like caring for our skin, the arts carry the power to take us deeper into ourselves.
So I’m proud that the artworks pictured above and here were the very first of our commissioned art projects.
The arts are about taking the creativity of the world and making it yours.
In the same way that our bodies need to feel cared for, we need the arts to nourish our imaginations and souls.
Since each of us is living a piece of the longer human story, let’s embrace the beauty practices that help us to remember our deepest selves—the part of us that connects to the enduring human collective so we can hold more light.
This matters. So, yes, I’ll keep saying it.
Because we’re hard-wired for beauty and truth, our bodies need to feel cared for, and our skin is an expression of a deeper order of things. It’s connected to everything within us and to the world outside—and caring for it is a conducive regimen, not only for caring for the body, but also the person we are to become.
These are the tools that help us take the fragments of life and assemble them into something coherent, substantial, and lasting.
So create it, live it, share it. And pass it on.
XOXO,
eu2be founder/ceo Charla Jones
