Learning to Fall

We live in a time where everything is fed to us, how to feel, how to see, how to live our lives. Writing is a door to a new world where we can detect and explore deeper thoughts about just anything. I often find myself getting lost in writing and looking for bigger ideas. My poetic voice is starting to develop its place in me, reaching out from my thoughts to the paper. The voices of the past, present, and future that teach us things, take us on trips throughout the world, showing us love and fear. It’s taken me to places I never thought I’d be, both mentally and physically. The school I attend has helped me grown and develop my writing, and the more I write the more perspective of the world I find. I’ve fallen in love with writing despite the many hardships that come with it.

Poetry is my life. On hard days I can trust it to hold me up, even when it feels like it’s dragging me through all of my thoughts. It’s like looking in a mirror, a mirror of emotions, of my life. A lot of people give it up for many reasons. Not knowing where to start or where to end. Not trusting the process of writing. Being able to write is being able to fall, to open your eyes, to trust your mind even if it feels like it’s wrong to do so. It gets easier. Once you break through all the barriers and learn to free fall you’ll find yourself exploring something you never knew could exist. It takes awhile to get used to writing if it’s not something you’re already used to, and it takes a lot to not throw the towel down and give up.

A poem is more than just something we write, it demands something from us. More than just words and imagery and story. It needs control over itself. To exist it needs to form itself out on a sheet. We only give it structure. To let go of that dominance over the poem you need to learn to let loose. It’s like going on autopilot and letting your real emotions talk for once. Spill your guts out onto the paper and watch it blossom into something. It is hard to learn to let your heart speak before your mind. This is what we’re taught to do. But poetry doesn’t follow any instructions. Someone once said, “All a poet must know is that poetry is forever evolving. We don’t change poetry, we change with it.”

Being a writer can be one of the best things to happen to you. Learning to give in to the true nature of yourself is beyond anything I could ever try to explain. It can be bigger than all of us. It invites everything inside a person to shift, and the power of writing is power over yourself. It can be intimidating to share your work or even try and sit down and write something. As long as there’s an idea and the will to do something, you can do anything. For me, learning this process of “falling” has been the most important part of being a writer.

Israel Solis, Jr., Visual Art and Poetry Editor