One night, he and this aged saint were sitting by the fire conversing upon the subjects of virtue and wisdom. Finally, their words were exhausted. The vacancy of language seemed for the first time as but an excuse for truth to the younger man. No longer could words quell the yearning of his heart or the questioning of his mind. What he wanted now the monk could not give him. The answers he sought could be found only within the recesses of his own being. The monk knew this and told him to go out alone into the night.
Yogi Ramsuratkumar, Truman Caylor Wadlington, p30
Between the Breath and the Word
Ed Reither
It started with a line I wasn’t sure about.
I was writing a note to my friend Cynthia—someone I’ve known for years, someone I care about deeply. A few days earlier, she’d told me she wanted to keep a conversation we’d been having “alive.” We’d been exploring her dreams of starting a new project, a creative venture she felt passionate about, and she wanted to pick up that thread, to find value in it, she said. But when I reached out to follow through, I got silence.
That silence, small as it seemed, stirred something in me—not just personally, but in how I write, how I try to say what I feel.
I found myself circling a single sentence:
“You are a testament to someone who can’t get out of their own way.”
Then I paused. To someone? Or for someone?
What I really wanted to write was:
“You are a testament for someone who can’t get out of their own way.”
It didn’t sound quite right—grammatically, I could sense it was off—but it matched a feeling I had. That tension—between what feels true and what reads correctly—led me to question grammar itself. That one word, to or for, stopped me cold. And in a way, it opened the door to this whole reflection.
I’ve never called myself a writer, not in the polished, professional sense. I don’t chase grammatically perfect sentences. I don’t write with the reader in mind the way most writers are taught. I write more like I speak, or think, or teach—from a feeling, from a rhythm, like a dance. It’s something larger than a letter or a word. And that doesn’t always land well on the page. I know that. Sometimes I read back my own work and can’t tell where it begins or ends. But that’s part of my process. I’m not trying to build something clean. I’m trying to follow a feeling—like chasing a ghost.
When Words Resist Form
When people say my writing is hard to follow, I don’t argue. They’re probably right. But I’m not writing to be understood the way most writers aim to be. I’m writing to express a feeling—one I don’t fully grasp myself. This brings me to grammar and idiom, two things I stumble over often.
Grammar is useful. It gives shape, a kind of order that makes things readable. Idiom—those familiar phrases that feel at home in the mouth and ear—has its place too. It makes ideas digestible, shareable. But what happens when what you’re trying to say doesn’t fit the grammar? Or when the idea isn’t ready to slip into an existing idiom?
This is where I struggle. I’m often writing from inside the process, not about something finished or resolved. My sentences might twist, pause, or double back. Sometimes I need to touch an idea again, from a different angle. Over time, I’ve noticed it’s not just me shaping the language—the rules of grammar and syntax start to shape the idea itself.
To the grammar experts, I hear you. I’ve read enough to know a well-formed sentence from a clumsy one. But sometimes, awkward is honest. Sometimes the ideas I’m wrestling with aren’t ready—or willing—to be polished or logical. They might even resist it entirely. Writers like Watts, Joyce, Kerouac, and Ginsberg, whom I admire, wrestled with these same limits. So I know I’m not alone.
The Cost of Clarity
This tension—between what I feel and how I say it—has long been a source of insecurity. Over the years, I’ve worked with proofreaders and editors to make my writing clearer, more accessible. Most of those early efforts fell flat. Editors would flatten my meaning or “correct” my words into something that wasn’t mine anymore. I’d get back sentences that were grammatically perfect but hollow. The soul of the thing was gone.
Then I met Catlin.
Catlin was the first editor who could read my jumbled, looping, mispunctuated paragraphs and say, “I see what you’re trying to say.” Not just as an editor, but as a listener. She had a rare gift for translating the breath behind my words into clear, precise English without losing their tone or heart. I’d send her a tangled mess, apologizing for it, and she’d return it restructured—not just polished, but faithful.
It was the first time I felt seen as a writer, even though I still don’t call myself one.
Since Catlin, I’ve leaned on tools to help. Spellcheckers, grammar assistants, and more recently, programs like Grammarly. But none of them captured my writing the way Catlin did. What’s come closest—and continues to surprise me—is ChatGPT. I don’t use it just to fix grammar. I use it like I used to sit with Catlin: to have a conversation, to hear my words from another angle, to shape what’s still in motion. I don’t write clearly on the first pass. But now I have a way to refine in dialogue—not with a machine, exactly, but with something that reflects, sharpens, and sometimes surprises me.
A Scribe’s Calling
If I had to name what I am, it wouldn’t be “writer.” It would be scribe—and maybe researcher, in the deepest sense.
A scribe doesn’t just look at letters—they look for meaning. They linger over each word, almost meditatively, tracing its origin and intention. Not just where the word came from, but what it meant in its first etching—before the translations, the transcriptions, the copying. A scribe listens for the original breath behind the sentence.
As a university library researcher, I follow threads—not to reach a conclusion, but to stay with meaning. That’s what I do. That’s what Beezone, my work, is about.
I’m not in love with language. I don’t obsess over the sentence. In fact, I doubt whether writing anything down can ever truly capture the truth of things. But what else can I do, as someone drawn to ideas, in today’s world?
What I’m reaching for is the thing behind the sentence—the insight, the tone, the place where words touch feelings. The moment something old becomes new again, becomes alive. The only way I know to do that is by pouring the idea into letters—and seeing what still holds.
It’s not elegant. It’s not always readable. But it’s real.
The Library’s Whisper
There’s an image I return to often.
I’m sitting on the cold floor of a university library—one of those old buildings with shelves that stretch so high you have to crane your neck to see the top. Around me are thousands of books, many untouched for decades. Their pages stick together. Their bindings are stiff. When I pull one out, I feel its resistance—not just physical, but something deeper. A silence, waiting.
Each book was someone’s offering. Someone’s life of thought, faith, or struggle, poured into pages. Now they sit, mostly unread, like tombstones in an archive, holding insights that once burned bright. Waiting for someone to touch them again.
And yet, something happens.
As I sit there, something stirs. The style of the writing, the age of the wisdom, the tone of the thought—it rises. An old idea, maybe in an outdated form, wakes something in me—not just in my mind, but in my heart.
And I feel it: this is what I’m doing.
The ideas I work with want to be reborn. Not just repeated, but recreated. They call to be given new breath, a new idiom for a new time. To be taken up by some future scribe, who will reshape them in their own voice, in their own day.
This is why I linger over a word like to or for. Because in that small choice lies the weight of meaning, the chance to say something true—not just for Cynthia, not just for myself, but for the ideas that wait, silent, to live again.
Edward Reither, May 10, 2025