Go Organic When Buying These Fruits...

According to Envirnomental Working Group the following fruits absorb pesticides more easily than others therefore you should always try to
purchase those that are organically grown:

Peaches ~ Apples ~ Nectarines ~ Strawberries
Cherries ~ Grapes ~ Pears

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Natural Health Magazine offers these tips to help keep your memory sharp:

#1 Meditate Try meditating for 10-12 minutes each day as a 2007 study from the University of Pennsylvania suggests that daily meditation may train your brain to remember more. Twenty adults aged 52-70 meditated for 12 minutes per day for 8 weeks and follow-up tests revealed increased blood flow to the region of the brain that is linked to learning and memory.

#2 Consider Taking Citicoline This is a form of the B vitamin choline and is said to help replenish the brain's phosphatidylserine, a nutrient believed to enhance memory, thinking, and learning in older adults. A 2007 study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found people 50-85 with inefficient memories improved their delayed recall after taking 1 gram of citicoline every day for three months. Those who took 2 grams had even better results.

#3 Link Your Left & Right Brain Functions A 2007 British study tested students by asking them to follow a computer program prompting side-to-side eye movements for 30 seconds: the participants remembered 10% more words on average than those who made vertical eye movements or did nothing. So try moving your eyes from side to side for 30 seconds to encourage your brain's two hemispheres to work together!

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The New York Times recently published portions of inspiring commencement addresses given by some well-known people. I was particulary taken with Jessica Lange's (actress) address at Sarah Lawrence College, and J.K. Rowling's (author) speech at Harvard, and wanted to share the excerpts with you:

"Be present. I would encourage you with all my heart - just to be present. Be present and open to the moment that is unfolding before you. Because, ultimately, your life is made up of moments. So don't miss them by being lost in the past or anticipating the future.

Don't be absent from your own life. You will find that life is not governed by will or intention. It is ultimately the collection of these sense memories stored in our nerves, built up in our cells. Simple things: A certain slant of light coming through a window on a winter's afternoon. The sound of spring peepers at twilight. The taste of strawberry still warm from the sun. Your child's laughter. Your mother's voice.

These are the things that shape our lives and settle into the fiber of our beings. Don't take them for granted." ~ Jessica Lange
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"By any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all of my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.

Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged.

I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life."
~ J.K. Rowling