Second coffee.

"Let us overcome the angry man with gentleness, the evil man with goodness, the miser with generosity, the liar with truth."

I am constantly amazed at the collective wisdom the human race possesses yet we continue to mess things up. On the shelves in this shop are the distilled thoughts of so many wise beings, some who lived in the 3rd millennium BCE. The quick answer might be that we all have to go round the wheel to find truth for ourselves, often re-inventing the wheel many times as we go! I once burnt a stack of journals I had written over a five year period. Before I burnt them I started to re-read them until I got too depressed to continue. So much wisdom in them. Where had these flashes of self-knowledge gone when they met my everyday life? Vanished like a candle flame in the sun.

Which is shining today. A frosty beautiful start to the week. What will it bring? Well first of all, with the postman, a nice copy of 'The Nowadays Fairy Book' by Anna Alice Chapin with illustrations by Jessie Willcox Smith that I won for a pittance on ebay. JWS was an interesting woman with definite opinions:
" A woman’s sphere is as sharply defined as a man’s. If she elects to be a housewife and mother—that is her sphere, and no other. Circumstance may, but volition should not, lead her from it.
If on the other hand she elects to go into business or the arts, she must sacrifice motherhood in order to fill successfully her chosen sphere.”
I suppose she was a product of her times, late Victorian, but I don't think many women would agree with her today. Part of me does, against all the evidence that women now triumphantly do both.
Better get on with some picking and packing.