Self Reliance - A little cold frosty morning inspiration


It is 14 degrees fahrenheit this morning, blue skies and the shop is cold. Days like these make getting going difficult. The heaters in the shop suck. I am cold.
The shop is a disaster getting ready to go to Denver next week for the International Sportsmen Show. We have one new fly fishing surprise to unveil for the show and a full cabinet of Upland Gear to offer as well.
Later this afternoon, when the sun sinks low and sneaks into the wide open shop windows the front of the store will heat up.
It will warm up.
But for the time being it is knuckle throbbing cold.
Sip the warm coffee and enjoy this bit of inspiration.
My wife teaches high school English.Emerson's work comes up around the dinner table a lot. A couple weeks ago after dinner, accompanied by a cheap but drinkable Luck Duck Mascato, we read the passage below from her silly text book . I give you the frosty morning inspiration of Self Reliance...
 “There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact makes much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture in the memory is not without preéstablishcd harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give hint no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
And if that didn't get you pumped up, here is a video of lonesome fiddler in the snow playing the old fiddle tune Cold Frosty Morning.

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