I am consistently pulled forward into a mentality of expansion during the autumn season, but especially in the month of October.

There’s a very literal as well as metaphorical blending of the lines between life and death in the October weeks. Summer is over. Leaves, impacted by the colder temperatures and the decrease of sunlight, change color as they cease to photosynthesize, die, and eventually fall from their branches. Animals build dens in which hibernate. Other animals horde nuts and other forms of food so that they don’t starve during winter. Crops are harvested so that they can be used over the coldest months of the year. These are literal ways that we walk the line between life and death every day during autumn.

And these small deaths, these seasonal endings, mark the necessary points for life to begin anew when spring sprouts out of the winter frost. So it’s unsurprising to me that my soul, my spirit, and my mind feel the most ready for expansion as October wraps itself around me.

Obviously I’ve been reading and writing a lot over the last several years, but something I started this week is a personal study of graduate lectures from my M.F.A. Graduate school is overwhelming in many ways, one of them being that you’re so inundated with information, talks, readings, workshops, feedback, etc. that it can be difficult to really absorb it all. I know, especially during the first three semesters, that I didn’t take as many notes as I wanted to, but the lectures were all recorded and put online, so I’m going through them now and taking more notes to then use as inspiration for my studies moving forward.

Because the uncomfortable truth is that making – all making – is a constant moving around. It’s not linear, it’s more like a Venn Diagram with sections overlapping, disconnecting, running parallel. It’s an ever changing process. The person I am now, listening to these lectures, is not the person I was when I first heard them. The pieces I identify with and adopt into my own writing practice will be different than when I first started my M.F.A.

This is also why I reread books so often. When I really connect to a writer or a piece of literature, I tend to hoard their work and consume it on a rotating basis. Jane Austen, the Brontes, Ted Berrigan, Alan Ginsberg, Maya Angelou, Tracy K. Smith, James Baldwin, Angela Davis, Mary Oliver…these writers have heavily impacted my writing, as well as how I see the world and my place in it. I read and reread and rereread their books because there’s never any part of me that is “done” with what they’ve created and made. So why shouldn’t the same be true to lectures? Readings? Workshops?

I am a creature of repetition. I like returning to the familiar because it feels safe, even worn, like a comfort blanket. And it’s not that I’m completely averse to the new and unfamiliar, but the more I move into the unfamiliar, the more I’m drawn to look back at where I’ve already been and what I’ve already read to see if there’s more there for me to absorb.

I’m currently in the process of self-publishing my second book of Instagram poems. I don’t know how many of these I will continue to make, but they’re an extension of the poetry I write every day, the poetry I seek to have published in a more traditional platform. I also love the autonomy of being able to do what I want with my IG poems (which are the same poems I post here periodically), and to make them more widely accessible to an online audience.

I guess my point is to always stay open. Sometimes this means embracing the new, and sometimes it means returning to the old to try and resurrect the lessons learned. Sometimes it means letting go, and sometimes it means holding on.