By
Gerald Hausman
Santa
Fe, NM, USA
Once
in a great while you find a book of such unusual merit, it sets you on edge to
read it, and you wonder how it was done, how it happened.
I
am speaking of Darden Smith’s The Habit
of Noticing: Using Creativity to Make a Life (and a Living). It is a collection
of wise and wonderful poetry, interviews with known and unknown artists,
evanescent moments, transcendental seconds spent with trees, streets,
matchbooks, small mites of wonder and massive buildings that look like the prow
of a ship (the Flatiron building, for example).
This
is a lovely hardbound book of insights that could change your life for the
better. Darden Smith, the author, is a healer and a visual artist. His
songwriting retreats for veterans helps them in ways that cannot be explained.
Darden
Smith teaches by showing, singing, and using his life’s work as an example of
how to train yourself to look outside yourself. He shows us how to see the
world as it really is. His method of teaching in the book is both poetry,
conversation, and imagery.
It’s
a collection of common things that suddenly leap forth, breaking away from the
mundane into the world of the supernatural. A cigarette pack, a woman walking
in a Paris morning, a lane of trees disappearing into a horizon line of the
imagination.
The
power of the images in this finely designed and printed volume could surprise
and please anyone with eyes. It is what I call a “lookbook”, something that
begs to be seen again and again.
 |
| Darden Smith |
I
also highly recommend the audio book. Smith’s voice, guitar and finely composed
music will enchant as it entertains. But always, with the things that he does,
it stays with you. It gets into your heart.
How
rare it is that an artist is a songwriter, a singer, a sketch artist, a deep
thinker, a spontaneous man with a genius for communicating on almost any level
with other members of the human race. Maybe this is why Darden Smith is booked on
stage in cities across the U.S. and in Europe.
Here
is a sample of what you will find in The
Habit of Noticing:
Joe
Ely is the only person I know
Who
ran off and joined an actual circus.
Talk
to him about that time even now
And
his eyes light up.
Few
of us can go that far.
But
look around.
Find
your own circus.
That
place,
That
gang
That
draws
You
slowly, slowly out
Onto
your own
Highwire.
The
book is full of funny, thoughtful, surprising photographs, line drawings, and
poems. As well as off-the-cuff interviews packed with wisdom. You will see
dozens of photographs of people you have known, grown up with, admired, laughed
at, laughed with, and enjoyed on so many different levels. You will see them as
they really are. Just people. But – and here is the twist – each one has
something to say about how creativity helped to fashion a life and a living.
I
have never seen a book like this.
Neither
have you.
(Darden Smith photo credit: Michael O'Brien)
Links:
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Gerald Hausman is the author of Not Since Mark Twain - Stories and a regular contributor to Stay Thirsty Magazine.
