Watch out for the tests...

Poetry Oracle: Week of June 26th

Welcome back to the Self Love Confidential Poetry Oracle, where the universe sends you the message you need to hear by way of a poem from one of my books. I’ll select the weekly poem(s) by trusting my intuition, the very thing I hope you’ll start to do as a member of this self love community.

If you need proof that you should keep up with the the changes you’re making in your life, today’s oracle is for you.

Me in awe of the Chiharu Shiota exhibit at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

Chiharu Shiota (b. 1972, Osaka) is a Berlin-based artist whose installations, sculpture, and performance art invoke psychogeographic spaces of memory, emotions, and the cyclical nature of life and death. Using red, black, or white yarn as a base material, Shiota often creates meticulously webbed environments that span the length of entire galleries and mimic organic forms such as cobwebs, veins, and fractals.

On Tuesday June 21st, all three of my kids started camp. I reached the starting line of my summer of liberation. I had big plans for this summer: big plans for taking care of ME. So on Tuesday, I dropped off the kids, worked out, went to lunch with an old friend at a museum and explored several galleries. This was exactly how I envisioned my summer of self love. Wellness, culture, human connection.

But then the tests came at me fast and furious.

Wednesday I went through a traumatic biopsy.
Thursday Stella hurt her back.
Friday Teddy stayed home from camp and has had a fever ever since.

I cancelled my workouts. I cancelled therapy. I barely left the house. No wellness. No culture. No human connection (with anyone outside my immediate family).

My first instinct would normally be to throw in the towel and give up. Summer of liberation, summer of ME? What a joke. But then I remembered something. That something being this poem from The Shift.

The Shift: Poetry for a New Perspective, page 21.

“When you finally love yourself
The tests will soon follow
The past will dangle itself before you
Beckoning you like a warm bed
But you weren’t born to sleep
You were born to rise.”

Perhaps you’ve experienced this, too. You’ve committed to making a change, and then all of a sudden a bunch of things happen that make the change feel impossible. This is your reminder that the tests are validation. You’re onto something. Keep going.

For me, the past that dangles itself before me is a past where I sacrifice myself for the sake of others, where I hibernate in my home, where I become stagnant. Just because my pattern of self sacrifice and isolation feels familiar, doesn’t mean it is good for me. I don’t want to spend my life in bed — figuratively or literally. Do you?

So this week, I’m going to make sure I again get in my wellness, my culture and my human connection. Whatever your changes looks like, I hope you’ll double down with me and honor them.

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