I love that word treasure. What if we saw ourselves that way? As worthy of treasuring?*
Sam Radford

This is your mistake, which means there’s something valuable in it, something that can teach you about yourself.**
William Seighart

Anne Lamott lists three conditions
toxic to the soul:
Perfectionism,
Contempt for self,
Wanting to be right and better than^ –
A fourth, and a result of this trio, is to perhaps
look away from the messes and mistakes we make,
Fearful of what we may find:
With the mistake your life goes in reverse.
Now you can see exactly what you did
Wrong yesterday and wrong the day before
And each mistake leads back to something worse^^.

Lamott is always disarming in her personal honesty,
Finding a way to tread the healing side of the
self-compassion/self-destructive line,
Helping us to learn how to follow because
it is likely that we, too, are ailed by
at least one of these injurious conditions, finding
at least three soul-skills we are capable of:
Curiosity is one way that we know
our souls are functioning.
So is deep goodness.
So is presence.^

Curiosity,
Goodness,
Presence:
We can do these.

*Sam Radford’s blog: Guard the good treasure entrusted to you;
**William Seighart’s The Poetry Pharmacy;
^Anne Lamott’s Dusk Night Dawn;
^^From James Fenton‘s The Mistake, William Seighart’s The Poetry Pharmacy.