Hartwell Road

We've all traveled Hartwell Road but most of us have not explored it as deeply and thoughtfully as Reg Darling. Hartwell Road is an internal place a touchstone that centers and nourishes us - a place that contains our experience and provides a route to our own true nature. Darling's journey wends though a terrain rich in folk wisdom and communion with the real world (minus all the consumerist crap); it meanders through the philosophy of art and the sublime act of creation; it traverses the wonders of sexual passion and the ultimate solace of true love; it cuts back into a maze of drug-induced insights and the pristine clearing of deep spiritual conviction; it climbs through the bonds we build with the people around us and the inevitable physical end of those connections; and it plows headlong into the necessity of political activism and the bravery of standing against popular notions about what it means to be free.<p> This book will likely induce tears as it transports you through reflections on the connections and losses in your own life - a process at once painful and glorious. This is a book that will speak directly to the non-conforming spirits of the baby-boom generation - especially as we navigate the mounting upheavals and uncertainties of the 21st Century and come to grips with our own impending mortality.<p> While Hartwell Road sometimes seems exotic and foreign we round the bend and realize it is the same road that we too have been walking only seen from a slightly different and meticulously well-rendered point of view.<p> Dan R. Talley is an arts administrator curator and critic who has been involved in the making exhibiting and analysis of contemporary art for over 30 years. He is a practicing vegetarian and a long-time animal rights advocate who nonetheless finds Darling's sensitive and deeply felt philosophy about the order of nature strangely compatible with his own.