Welcome to the Gathering Pod, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast. I'm Martha Beck.

The first thing I want to tell you, I may have quoted this before, but I love it. It's a poem, part of a poem, by the magnificent Antonio Machado.

And it's beautiful.

I tried to learn Spanish so I could read his poetry.

And I could sort of, but not really.

But in English it goes like this.

Last night as I lay sleeping, I dreamt, oh, marvelous error,

that there was a beehive here inside my heart, and golden bees were making white comb and sweet honey from my old failures. I read that and just went, oh, it was like somebody had taken off a 90-pound pack. Ah, my old failures that I carry around as the, you know, shame and I

should, I wish I could go back, regret, all these things. And here he was telling me that it's not

just a failure is not just okay. It's actually useful. It could make the sweetest parts of my life. Well, because I'm doing this

course on Practical Way Finding at the moment, and it's about creativity, the creativity mindset,

I have been reading about the discovery and the invention of many, many, many things. And here

is what I have found.

Error isn't just useful.

It's absolutely crucial to getting things right.

The way we get things wrong educates us, turns us a little bit.

So the goal that we're looking at is more in line

with reality and with our truth, making mistakes.

Is it the way we learn?

I mean, think about the way you learn to talk.

It wasn't by studying a grammar book and saying, should I have lain down, mummy?

Or should you have laying me down? Nobody knows how to conjugate the verb to lie.

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