The following is all from the Free Will Astrology newsletter

"Strawberries are too delicate to be picked by machine. The perfectly ripe ones bruise even at too heavy a human touch. Every strawberry you have ever eaten has been picked by callused human hands. Every piece of toast with jelly represents someone's knees, someone's aching backs and hips, someone with a bandanna on her wrist to wipe away the sweat." —Alison Luterman, quoted in *After the Ecstasy, the Laundry,* by Jack Kornfield

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Prayer can have a medicinal effect, according to a study of 990 heart patients at St. Luke's Hospital in Kansas City. Five prayer teams prayed daily on behalf of half of the patients. Though they did not know they were being prayed for, their health improved faster and they needed fewer drugs than the patients who did not have the benefit of the prayers. The report on the experiment appeared in the Archives of Internal Medicine, published by the American Medical Association. (Source: Associated Press)

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"A major psychiatric study of 1,200 Finnish reindeer herders found midwinter to be quite a cheery time, despite darkness and daily temperatures that averaged a bone-chilling minus 22 degrees. 'All kinds of disorders, including depression, were rare in the darkest season,' Dr. Nayha Vaisanen and his team of scientists concluded in the 1994 issue of the journal Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavia." —Lisa M. Krieger, *San Francisco Examiner*

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MIRABILIA REPORT

Mirabilia n. innovations generated by unseen presences, enigmatic phenomena on the cusp between fake and real, odd acts of deliverance that inspire love or wonder or both; from the Latin mirabilia, "marvels."

* In 2002, scientists discovered a secret underground river running 800 feet below a Mauritanian town in the Sahara Desert. With a flow rate of 8,450 gallons per hour, it is the biggest unnamed river in the world.* Oblivious to dire biblical prophecies about swarms of locusts, residents of Beijing, China, warmly greeted their arrival in 2002. They scooped the insects up in large bags, deep-fried them, and made them the main dish of an enormous feast.

* Two percent of your fears are based in fact and are actually worth worrying about, while the other 98 percent are either imagined or else not yours, having infected you through the psychic version of contagion.

* Astronomers have discovered a crystal as big as our moon at the core of a dying white dwarf star.

* A Japanese genius invented a robot that can belly dance.

* Twelve percent of the population [of the US] believes that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife.

* Because half of the world's vanilla crop is grown in Madagascar, the whole island smells like vanilla ice cream.

* Your body contains so much iron that you could make a spike out of it, and that spike would be strong enough to hold you up.

* Bali has 80,000 temples.

* Some piranhas are vegetarians.

THIS WEEK IN PRONOIAC HISTORY

In an act of random violence, playwright Samuel Beckett was stabbed by a pimp on a Paris street. A stranger, the pianist Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, found him and got medical help. She visited him in the hospital, and eventually the two were married.

Bach's St. Matthew Passion is a highly regarded musical composition. Yet the score disappeared and the work wasn't played for years after Bach's death in 1750. In 1829, composer Felix Mendelssohn rediscovered the long-lost manuscript being used as wrapping paper in the estate sale of a deceased cheese salesman. He arranged for a public performance of the piece, and its revival began.

SACRED ADVERTISEMENT

This perfect moment is brought to you by the thousand-year-old rose bush that's growing on the wall of the Hildesheim Cathedral in Germany, and by the fossilized remains of a 40-million-year-old wild rose found in Florissant, Colorado.