This photo, in a mirror, depicts, among other things, the chair where for the past 6 years I’ve been getting my hair cut. The barber, Mr. B, plays the R&B and soul music radio station, and the conversations are of the sort only found in barber shops. We talk about love, politics, life, the future, how the neighborhood’s changing. How the times are changing. And yet, the more they change, the more the things that stay the same stick out, beacons of wisdom for the true seeking heart. I’m overwhelmed with gratitude for all the care that happens in spaces like this, how the barber’s careful hand and eye can transform a man in a couple of hours, can send him back out into this—call it a cold world—brand new, shining, feeling something like beautiful.

Increasingly I am attracted to sites of refuse. What we throw away onto and into spaces of passage tells so much about who we are and how we operate. I’m drawn to textures of refuse, and to the earth’s incessant churning which turns what we throw away back into its raw materials (even if it takes a million years), to be reborn in some remote eon. Do the aluminum cans recall their prior lives? Does the plastic remember, even vaguely, that it once flowed in the veins of leviathans?

This morning, the spirituals were a worship and praise service. And tonight, I’m thinking of the injunction by Christ (I’ll find the verse) where he tells the followers not to think beforehand but let the spirit move you to speak what is on your heart. I’m thinking about that and about the last 3 Facebook messages I’ve received, all of which came from men who wanted to share something related to freestyling. I think it’s interesting the role that freestyling has in the minds of men of my generation. I wonder what that hold is about. I notice always a sense of wonder for people who can freestyle well–who can come up with things that make linguistic & conceptual sense without thinking about it beforehand. (Notes, 2021)