If i ever get the nerve to say hello in this cafe...

Black Rice

Getting your antioxidants from fresh berries can be pricey. A new report from scientists at Louisiana State University shows black rice is higher than blueberries in the powerful free-radical buster anthocyanin – while supplying more vitamin E and fiber. SWAP IT FOR: instant rice, white rice, or brown rice.  

Gethsemane

Every soul can at least dimly understand the nature of the struggle that took place on the moonlit night in the garden of Gethsemane. Every heart knows something about it. No one has ever come to the twenties – let alone to the forties, or the fifties, or the sixties, or the seventies of life – without reflecting with some degree of seriousness on himself and the world round about him, and without knowing the terrible tension that has been caused in his soul by sin. Faults and follies do not efface themselves from the record of memory; sleeping tablets do not silence them; psychoanalysts cannot explain them away. The brightness of youth may make them fade into some dim outline, but there are times of silence – on a sick bed, sleepless nights, the open seas, a moment of quiet, the innocence in the face of a child – when these sins, like specters or phantoms, blaze their unrelenting characters of fire upon our consciences. Their force might not have been realized in a moment of passion, but conscience is biding its time and will bear its stern uncompromising witness sometime, somewhere, and force a dread upon the soul that ought to make it cast itself back again to God. Terrible though the agonies and tortures of a single soul be, they were only a drop in the ocean of humanity’s guilt which the Savior felt as his own in the Garden.

Fulton J. Sheen, Life of Christ

Style

“Stylish men move just a heartbeat more slowly than the ho-hum majority. Your Uncle Ned is fidgety; Cary Grant was graceful and at ease. Woody Allen is frantic; Johnny Depp, even as the gaudy Captain Jack, seems to have a private cadence in his head. Style moves with dispatch, but never rushes. It doesn’t scurry or blurt things out. Its wisdom won’t wilt while waiting. The wile known as style may require a barely-there across-the-board deceleration. Walk just a little less quickly. Talk as though people will give your thoughts some time. Never hurry wine into a glass, or beer into a mug.  Even loosen your tie with a languor. Style savors the journey, not just the destination. Remember the age-old wisdom: He who has command of others is powerful, but he who has command of himself is mighty.”

-Hugh O’Neill

...making the world more human and more fraternal.

"It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; He is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; He is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is He who provoked you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is He who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is He who reads in your hearts your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle.

It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal."

Pope John Paul II, World Youth Day, Rome 2000

Awake My Soul

Morning Prayer

O, Holy Spirit, beloved of my soul, I adore You. Enlighten me, guide me, strengthen me, console me. Tell me what I should do. Give me your orders. I promise to submit myself to all that You desire of me and to accept all that you permit to happen to me. Let me only know Your will.