Hear Jim’s podcast at https://youtu.be/LtczGvPRDw0

or read the transcript below:

.

Life, actually…

.

RUMINATIONS OF A DOWN SOUTH RUMINATOR

.

Whenever I begin writing a love letter to my people—the Down Southers who surround me—I go kind of blank.

.

This could be because I’m trying too hard to be understandable.

.

In this love letter to my people I want to be both specific and eloquent at the same time, so that my words will stay around for a while.  We writers live with this impossible hope, the hope that something profound will issue forth from our innards as we ply our trade.

.

Of course, this does not happen frequently.

.

So, why is writing a love letter so difficult?

.

As inwardly-focused as we authors are, it is amazing we ever see anything objectively. The poetry of life, the adventure of life, can get in the way of specificity. We are stuck in our own dreams.

.

So how do I get this letter written?

.

An answer hurls itself at me in a rumpled note I just retrieved from the floor of my writing room. This note contains a quote by one of those long ago thinkers we might have heard of but of course never voluntarily study, Jean Jacques Rousseau.

.

Now what in the world would someone like Rousseau, who lived several hundred years ago, have to say that in any way would apply to an obscure writer ensconced in the Deep South?

.

Well, here is this guy’s quote that stays with me and propels me forward:

.

“To write a love letter we must begin without knowing what we intend to say, and end without knowing what we have written.”

.

That’s it. That’s the thought that taunts and instructs me.

.

If I’m to write a love letter to the Down South people I’ve lived among these many decades, I have to stop ruminating, stop over-thinking, stop examining…I have to plunge into the task like any young’un who is confused and motivated by the passion of the moment.

.

I have to write that letter full-blast, straight-forwardly, unapologetically, forgetting the rules of etiquette and grammar. What good is love if it has to be fussed over, gussied up, lipsticked beyond recognition, self-consciously faked?

.

So, I’ll get started. I will write my love letter in a burst of passion and joy. I will put it aside unread until I can catch my breath.

.

Then, as Miles Davis once said about his music, I’ll play it first and tell you what it is later

.

© 2025 A.D. by Jim Reed