A Book Of Days

When was the last time you treated an ordinary day like a small work of art? In A Book of Days, Patti Smith argues that a meaningful life isn’t assembled in dramatic bursts but distilled, day by day, from attention, remembrance, and devotion to the things you love. She contends that the humble materials of a day—your hand, a cup, a cat, a song on a worn CD player—can be shaped into a practice that keeps you grounded in grief, buoyant in joy, and connected to a larger human family. But to live this way, you have to learn to look: at objects as talismans, at places as portals, and at social media as a bow for shooting arrows toward the common heart.

Drawn from Smith’s Instagram practice launched on the Spring Equinox of 2018, the book is arranged as a devotional calendar—three hundred sixty-six image-and-text meditations, one for each day (leap day included). It’s not a memoir in the strict sense; it’s a portable museum of a sensibility. You travel through birthdays and burial grounds, desks and beds of artists, the aftermath of hurricanes and the sanctuary of cafés, always with a short caption that turns an image into a story and a day into a keepsake.

A calendar that is also a compass

Smith’s year is a map of artistic kinship. You mark January with Joan of Arc, Virginia Woolf’s dreaming bed, and Gérard de Nerval’s mantra—Our dreams are a second life. March carries you to Georgia O’Keeffe’s adobe studio and International Women’s Day via Fields Medalist Maryam Mirzakhani. April moves from Raphael’s Transfiguration to a child in a Moroccan cemetery handing Smith a silk rose by Jean Genet’s grave. These dates become coordinates; you don’t just remember when people lived and died, you rehearse why they still matter.

The hand and the archive

The book opens with her hand—the oldest icon—as the avatar of her presence online, and with a retired Polaroid Land 250 camera standing like a loyal companion whose film has been discontinued. Smith moves between analog and digital with ease: she writes captions by hand or on the phone, posts cell photos and archival Polaroids, and treats Instagram not as performance but as correspondence. Annie Leibovitz once told her that worthy photos would one day be made with phones; Smith shows how that future can be contemplative, not frantic (a contrast to the algorithmic rush criticized in works like Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now).

Remembrance as creative engine

Much of Smith’s year is an act of pilgrimage. She visits the desks and beds of Borges and O’Keeffe, sits by the graves of Keats, Shelley, Sylvia Plath, and Rimbaud, and carries objects that serve as condensed biographies: her father’s cup, Sam Shepard’s pocketknife, a St. Francis tau. Memory isn’t mausoleum-building here; it’s fuel. At CBGB’s closing, she ends with a eulogy amid calla lilies. At her Rockaway bungalow—once ravaged by Hurricane Sandy—she receives a neighbor’s flag and slowly restores her sanctuary. The past anchors the present so the present can keep moving.

Smith’s guiding ethic

“Here are my arrows aiming for the common heart of things… Three hundred and sixty-six ways of saying hello.”

Why this matters now

In an age when platforms court cruelty and misinformation, Smith reframes social media as a daily practice of attention, gratitude, and service. Her entries are scrappy oracles: a CD player stacked with Ornette Coleman and Marvin Gaye; a setlist that acts as a performance’s spine; a boyhood golf parable from her father; 11:11 as a pocket-sized ritual for wishing. You learn to cultivate steadiness through small vows (shed what is not needed), to tend grief without fetishizing it, and to braid activism with art—Greta Thunberg’s birthday standing beside MLK Day, Earth Day accompanied by a searing “Supplication to Nature,” Juneteenth honored in jubilant remembrance.

In this summary, you’ll see how Smith’s tools—the hand, the phone, the notebook—become a craft of seeing; how pilgrimage to graves, museums, and landscapes turns history into companionship; how family, friends, and fellow artists constitute a living lineage; how public conscience (from Rosa Parks to Pete Seeger) fuses with private ritual; and how a calendar becomes a composition about time, resilience, and attention. Whether you’re a maker, mourner, activist, or simply someone trying to notice more, A Book of Days proposes a modest, durable remedy: keep looking, keep noting, keep saying hello.

When was the last time you treated an ordinary day like a small work of art? In A Book of Days, Patti Smith argues that a meaningful life isn’t assembled in dramatic bursts but distilled, day by day, from attention, remembrance, and devotion to the things you love. She contends that the humble materials of a day—your hand, a cup, a cat, a song on a worn CD player—can be shaped into a practice that keeps you grounded in grief, buoyant in joy, and connected to a larger human family. But to live this way, you have to learn to look: at objects as talismans, at places as portals, and at social media as a bow for shooting arrows toward the common heart.

Drawn from Smith’s Instagram practice launched on the Spring Equinox of 2018, the book is arranged as a devotional calendar—three hundred sixty-six image-and-text meditations, one for each day (leap day included). It’s not a memoir in the strict sense; it’s a portable museum of a sensibility. You travel through birthdays and burial grounds, desks and beds of artists, the aftermath of hurricanes and the sanctuary of cafés, always with a short caption that turns an image into a story and a day into a keepsake.

A calendar that is also a compass

Smith’s year is a map of artistic kinship. You mark January with Joan of Arc, Virginia Woolf’s dreaming bed, and Gérard de Nerval’s mantra—Our dreams are a second life. March carries you to Georgia O’Keeffe’s adobe studio and International Women’s Day via Fields Medalist Maryam Mirzakhani. April moves from Raphael’s Transfiguration to a child in a Moroccan cemetery handing Smith a silk rose by Jean Genet’s grave. These dates become coordinates; you don’t just remember when people lived and died, you rehearse why they still matter.

The hand and the archive

The book opens with her hand—the oldest icon—as the avatar of her presence online, and with a retired Polaroid Land 250 camera standing like a loyal companion whose film has been discontinued. Smith moves between analog and digital with ease: she writes captions by hand or on the phone, posts cell photos and archival Polaroids, and treats Instagram not as performance but as correspondence. Annie Leibovitz once told her that worthy photos would one day be made with phones; Smith shows how that future can be contemplative, not frantic (a contrast to the algorithmic rush criticized in works like Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now).

Remembrance as creative engine

Much of Smith’s year is an act of pilgrimage. She visits the desks and beds of Borges and O’Keeffe, sits by the graves of Keats, Shelley, Sylvia Plath, and Rimbaud, and carries objects that serve as condensed biographies: her father’s cup, Sam Shepard’s pocketknife, a St. Francis tau. Memory isn’t mausoleum-building here; it’s fuel. At CBGB’s closing, she ends with a eulogy amid calla lilies. At her Rockaway bungalow—once ravaged by Hurricane Sandy—she receives a neighbor’s flag and slowly restores her sanctuary. The past anchors the present so the present can keep moving.

Smith’s guiding ethic

“Here are my arrows aiming for the common heart of things… Three hundred and sixty-six ways of saying hello.”

Why this matters now

In an age when platforms court cruelty and misinformation, Smith reframes social media as a daily practice of attention, gratitude, and service. Her entries are scrappy oracles: a CD player stacked with Ornette Coleman and Marvin Gaye; a setlist that acts as a performance’s spine; a boyhood golf parable from her father; 11:11 as a pocket-sized ritual for wishing. You learn to cultivate steadiness through small vows (shed what is not needed), to tend grief without fetishizing it, and to braid activism with art—Greta Thunberg’s birthday standing beside MLK Day, Earth Day accompanied by a searing “Supplication to Nature,” Juneteenth honored in jubilant remembrance.

In this summary, you’ll see how Smith’s tools—the hand, the phone, the notebook—become a craft of seeing; how pilgrimage to graves, museums, and landscapes turns history into companionship; how family, friends, and fellow artists constitute a living lineage; how public conscience (from Rosa Parks to Pete Seeger) fuses with private ritual; and how a calendar becomes a composition about time, resilience, and attention. Whether you’re a maker, mourner, activist, or simply someone trying to notice more, A Book of Days proposes a modest, durable remedy: keep looking, keep noting, keep saying hello.

Patti Smith opens her digital practice with a photograph of her own hand and the handle thisispattismith. That choice is the thesis: the oldest icon meets the newest medium, and authenticity is a physical gesture—reaching out, pledging, healing. She writes her captions by hand in a notebook or on the phone, and she composes daily, treating Instagram as a portable studio and letterpress rather than a stage. The result is a body of work that feels intimate, not performative, even when it ripples out to over a million followers.

From Polaroid to pixel

Her longtime companion, a Polaroid Land 250 with a Zeiss rangefinder, now sits retired—film discontinued, atmosphere unmatched. She misses the specific light of Polaroid emulsion, but she appreciates the phone’s flexibility and the way it lets her unite with the “exploding collage” of our culture. Annie Leibovitz foreshadowed this shift in 2004, casually predicting that phones would one day make worthy pictures. Smith renders that future dignified by bringing Polaroid habits to the phone: shoot sparingly, honor stillness, and let the caption carry weight.

Captions as scrappy oracles

A caption in her hands is more than metadata; it’s a hinge that opens the image into time. A desk in winter light becomes an invocation to work; a setlist—a performance’s spine—becomes a craft note; a snapshot of a lemon sends Cairo the Abyssinian into a study of medicinal history. When she posts a still life with Finnegans Wake, she anchors it with Joyce’s seventeen-year labor and the license to take your time reading it. These micro-notes are, in her words, “keys to unlocking one’s own thoughts.”

In our hands

“Social media… can also serve us. It’s in our hands. The hand that composes a message, smooths a child’s hair, pulls back the arrow and lets it fly.”

A practice, not a performance

Because Smith aims her posts like arrows, the platform’s hazards—cruelty, reaction, misinformation—don’t dictate her tone. Instead, she schedules her attention to the calendar’s drumbeat and lets birthdays, solstices, and feast days prompt her. Greta Thunberg’s birthday calls for a salute to youth pledged to activism; on Maryam Mirzakhani’s she praises a “queen of geometric imagination.” The consistency protects the practice from the algorithm’s tug (compare to Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work, which frames daily sharing as a creative lifeline but warns against vanity metrics).

Tools and rituals

Objects keep her honest. Her father’s cup anchors mornings and recitations of Leigh Hunt’s “Abou Ben Adhem.” Sam Shepard’s pocketknife and a St. Francis tau whisper Keep going. A CD player rotates Ornette Coleman, Philip Glass, Marvin Gaye, and REM—listening as ritual, not background. When chaos mounts, she cleans, imagining “aliens” judging her organizational prowess and turning drudgery into play. Even her “other camera”—the phone—gets named the equalizer, an acknowledgment that tools matter because they let you pay attention, not because they are novel.

By translating a tactile, analog attention into a digital cadence, Smith gives you a model: don’t ask the medium what to make; ask your hand what wants making. Then use the medium to send it—one image, one caption, one day—into the world.

Patti Smith opens her digital practice with a photograph of her own hand and the handle thisispattismith. That choice is the thesis: the oldest icon meets the newest medium, and authenticity is a physical gesture—reaching out, pledging, healing. She writes her captions by hand in a notebook or on the phone, and she composes daily, treating Instagram as a portable studio and letterpress rather than a stage. The result is a body of work that feels intimate, not performative, even when it ripples out to over a million followers.

From Polaroid to pixel

Her longtime companion, a Polaroid Land 250 with a Zeiss rangefinder, now sits retired—film discontinued, atmosphere unmatched. She misses the specific light of Polaroid emulsion, but she appreciates the phone’s flexibility and the way it lets her unite with the “exploding collage” of our culture. Annie Leibovitz foreshadowed this shift in 2004, casually predicting that phones would one day make worthy pictures. Smith renders that future dignified by bringing Polaroid habits to the phone: shoot sparingly, honor stillness, and let the caption carry weight.

Captions as scrappy oracles

A caption in her hands is more than metadata; it’s a hinge that opens the image into time. A desk in winter light becomes an invocation to work; a setlist—a performance’s spine—becomes a craft note; a snapshot of a lemon sends Cairo the Abyssinian into a study of medicinal history. When she posts a still life with Finnegans Wake, she anchors it with Joyce’s seventeen-year labor and the license to take your time reading it. These micro-notes are, in her words, “keys to unlocking one’s own thoughts.”

In our hands

“Social media… can also serve us. It’s in our hands. The hand that composes a message, smooths a child’s hair, pulls back the arrow and lets it fly.”

A practice, not a performance

Because Smith aims her posts like arrows, the platform’s hazards—cruelty, reaction, misinformation—don’t dictate her tone. Instead, she schedules her attention to the calendar’s drumbeat and lets birthdays, solstices, and feast days prompt her. Greta Thunberg’s birthday calls for a salute to youth pledged to activism; on Maryam Mirzakhani’s she praises a “queen of geometric imagination.” The consistency protects the practice from the algorithm’s tug (compare to Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work, which frames daily sharing as a creative lifeline but warns against vanity metrics).

Tools and rituals

Objects keep her honest. Her father’s cup anchors mornings and recitations of Leigh Hunt’s “Abou Ben Adhem.” Sam Shepard’s pocketknife and a St. Francis tau whisper Keep going. A CD player rotates Ornette Coleman, Philip Glass, Marvin Gaye, and REM—listening as ritual, not background. When chaos mounts, she cleans, imagining “aliens” judging her organizational prowess and turning drudgery into play. Even her “other camera”—the phone—gets named the equalizer, an acknowledgment that tools matter because they let you pay attention, not because they are novel.

By translating a tactile, analog attention into a digital cadence, Smith gives you a model: don’t ask the medium what to make; ask your hand what wants making. Then use the medium to send it—one image, one caption, one day—into the world.

In Smith’s year, art is both something you make and somewhere you go. She walks to desks, beds, graveyards, and museums as if to studios where others are still working. These places don’t just house relics; they hold atmospheres. Standing at Borges’s semi-circular desk in Buenos Aires, she notes how it seemed designed to help rein in his infinitely expansive universe. Beside Virginia Woolf’s dreaming bed in Rodmell, or Georgia O’Keeffe’s ladder-shelved adobe in Abiquiú, she reads the rooms as self-portraits of process.

Beds, desks, thresholds

Smith photographs O’Keeffe’s bed, Raphael’s final Transfiguration, and the wax tableau of Borges at Café Tortoni—coffee in perpetuity. She peers at a battered McQueen T-shirt gifted by Michael Stipe and calls the designer the “Mozart of cloth.” She lingers at Wo Hop in Chinatown, where after third sets at CBGB in the ’70s a big bowl of duck congee cost under a dollar. Each threshold—atelier, café, bedroom—becomes an apprenticeship in how others arranged their days to make work.

Cemeteries as classrooms

She is at home in cemeteries. In Rome’s Cimitero Protestante, not far from Keats’s stone, she feels Shelley’s spirit rise into her frame. In Heptonstall’s St. Thomas à Becket churchyard, she opens Plath’s Ariel to “Poppies in October.” In Larache, by Jean Genet’s tomb, a child named Ayoub hands her a silk rose—a small miracle. At Rimbaud’s baptismal font, she recites a woebegone chorus for the solitary poet; on another day she digs up a horseshoe on the Rimbaud family land in Chuffilly-Roche—read as a sign of protection and good work.

Sacred geographies

Pilgrimage also means landscapes that predate books: Uluru’s sacred skin; Teotihuacán’s ancient wheel, a “birth of thought”; the Avenue of the Dead’s small deity holding an orb. After the Notre-Dame fire, she wonders whether Joan of Arc’s interior statue survived the flames—even as she photographs architecture “mourning” from outside. In Bilbao, Frank Gehry’s titanium-scaled Guggenheim rises while she races through a Richard Serra, tracing how modern form still stirs ancient awe.

The hospitality of museums

Her museums are not hushed vaults; they are hospitals for the soul. In Padua’s Scrovegni Chapel, Giotto’s cycle of frescoes culminates in a lesson on human salvation; stepping out, she’s struck by the “innocent sky, leaves of gold”—Nature’s own fresco. In the Borghese, Caravaggio’s shepherd-boy Baptist shares space with Houdon’s tender sculpture—two visions of the same figure that let you see more by seeing twice. (This pairing recalls John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, which argues that context reframes our gaze.)

Pilgrimage, then, is Smith’s way of studying continuity. You go because the rooms still speak, the stones still hum, and history is less a past tense than a chorus you can still rehearse with today.

In Smith’s year, art is both something you make and somewhere you go. She walks to desks, beds, graveyards, and museums as if to studios where others are still working. These places don’t just house relics; they hold atmospheres. Standing at Borges’s semi-circular desk in Buenos Aires, she notes how it seemed designed to help rein in his infinitely expansive universe. Beside Virginia Woolf’s dreaming bed in Rodmell, or Georgia O’Keeffe’s ladder-shelved adobe in Abiquiú, she reads the rooms as self-portraits of process.

Beds, desks, thresholds

Smith photographs O’Keeffe’s bed, Raphael’s final Transfiguration, and the wax tableau of Borges at Café Tortoni—coffee in perpetuity. She peers at a battered McQueen T-shirt gifted by Michael Stipe and calls the designer the “Mozart of cloth.” She lingers at Wo Hop in Chinatown, where after third sets at CBGB in the ’70s a big bowl of duck congee cost under a dollar. Each threshold—atelier, café, bedroom—becomes an apprenticeship in how others arranged their days to make work.

Cemeteries as classrooms

She is at home in cemeteries. In Rome’s Cimitero Protestante, not far from Keats’s stone, she feels Shelley’s spirit rise into her frame. In Heptonstall’s St. Thomas à Becket churchyard, she opens Plath’s Ariel to “Poppies in October.” In Larache, by Jean Genet’s tomb, a child named Ayoub hands her a silk rose—a small miracle. At Rimbaud’s baptismal font, she recites a woebegone chorus for the solitary poet; on another day she digs up a horseshoe on the Rimbaud family land in Chuffilly-Roche—read as a sign of protection and good work.

Sacred geographies

Pilgrimage also means landscapes that predate books: Uluru’s sacred skin; Teotihuacán’s ancient wheel, a “birth of thought”; the Avenue of the Dead’s small deity holding an orb. After the Notre-Dame fire, she wonders whether Joan of Arc’s interior statue survived the flames—even as she photographs architecture “mourning” from outside. In Bilbao, Frank Gehry’s titanium-scaled Guggenheim rises while she races through a Richard Serra, tracing how modern form still stirs ancient awe.

The hospitality of museums

Her museums are not hushed vaults; they are hospitals for the soul. In Padua’s Scrovegni Chapel, Giotto’s cycle of frescoes culminates in a lesson on human salvation; stepping out, she’s struck by the “innocent sky, leaves of gold”—Nature’s own fresco. In the Borghese, Caravaggio’s shepherd-boy Baptist shares space with Houdon’s tender sculpture—two visions of the same figure that let you see more by seeing twice. (This pairing recalls John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, which argues that context reframes our gaze.)

Pilgrimage, then, is Smith’s way of studying continuity. You go because the rooms still speak, the stones still hum, and history is less a past tense than a chorus you can still rehearse with today.

Smith doesn’t catalogue the dead to be morbid; she keeps a roll call so life can keep singing. “Memory is Music,” she writes on Fred Sonic Smith’s day, placing his Mosrite guitar—untouched by other hands—beside the claim. When she names Lou Reed, River Phoenix, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Susan Sontag, and so many more, she’s not closing their files; she’s activating their work inside her own days.

A grammar of talismans

Objects carry this grammar forward. Her father’s coffee cup still holds his philosophy; a Lincoln death mask conjures “elegant simplicity.” Her sister’s sewing basket, mother’s key ring, Sam Shepard’s Stetson, and the Depression-era Gibson he gifted her—each is a line in an ongoing sentence. Even Snowy the dog gets a portrait enumerating her virtues, a reminder that love’s ledger includes animals and that epitaphs can be plainspoken and complete.

Marking civic grief

She honors public losses with the same clarity. On World AIDS Day she grieves and recommits to education. On September 11 she presents a small, gilded work—South Tower, mixed media, gold—and writes, “We bend to remember the departed, then rise to embrace the living.” On the day JFK was shot, she recalls being sixteen and devastated, then pivots to gratitude for the blessed task of remembrance.

Mourning turned outward

“We bend to remember… then rise to embrace the living.”

Making from the gone

At CBGB’s closing, she and Flea end with a eulogy to departed friends—calla lilies symbolizing innocence and rebirth. At her Rockaway house after Sandy, a neighbor’s flag protects the ruined bungalow from looting; later, the sanctuary is refurbished, work resumed. Even release dates become constellations: she planned Horses for Rimbaud’s birthday; delayed, it was released on the anniversary of his death, as if the album found its truer hour. The message to you is steady: ritualize the names, hold the objects, make the work.

In this way, remembrance ceases to be a museum of loss and becomes a studio of continuity. What’s gone provides pressure and permission to go on.

Smith doesn’t catalogue the dead to be morbid; she keeps a roll call so life can keep singing. “Memory is Music,” she writes on Fred Sonic Smith’s day, placing his Mosrite guitar—untouched by other hands—beside the claim. When she names Lou Reed, River Phoenix, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Susan Sontag, and so many more, she’s not closing their files; she’s activating their work inside her own days.

A grammar of talismans

Objects carry this grammar forward. Her father’s coffee cup still holds his philosophy; a Lincoln death mask conjures “elegant simplicity.” Her sister’s sewing basket, mother’s key ring, Sam Shepard’s Stetson, and the Depression-era Gibson he gifted her—each is a line in an ongoing sentence. Even Snowy the dog gets a portrait enumerating her virtues, a reminder that love’s ledger includes animals and that epitaphs can be plainspoken and complete.

Marking civic grief

She honors public losses with the same clarity. On World AIDS Day she grieves and recommits to education. On September 11 she presents a small, gilded work—South Tower, mixed media, gold—and writes, “We bend to remember the departed, then rise to embrace the living.” On the day JFK was shot, she recalls being sixteen and devastated, then pivots to gratitude for the blessed task of remembrance.

Mourning turned outward

“We bend to remember… then rise to embrace the living.”

Making from the gone

At CBGB’s closing, she and Flea end with a eulogy to departed friends—calla lilies symbolizing innocence and rebirth. At her Rockaway house after Sandy, a neighbor’s flag protects the ruined bungalow from looting; later, the sanctuary is refurbished, work resumed. Even release dates become constellations: she planned Horses for Rimbaud’s birthday; delayed, it was released on the anniversary of his death, as if the album found its truer hour. The message to you is steady: ritualize the names, hold the objects, make the work.

In this way, remembrance ceases to be a museum of loss and becomes a studio of continuity. What’s gone provides pressure and permission to go on.

Running through Smith’s days is the comforting weight of kin—parents, siblings, children, godparents, and chosen family—stitched together by ordinary things. Her mother, Beverly Williams Smith, “gave me life and guided my first steps,” a line that becomes literal in December: on her first Christmas in 1947, she crosses the kitchen for the first time, coaxed by a toy rabbit. Decades later, every birthday begins with a 6:01 a.m. voicemail from her mother: “Wake up, Patricia, you are born.”

Parents and their objects

Her father’s cup holds coffee and poetry—Leigh Hunt’s “Abou Ben Adhem”—and his admiration for Ralph Nader’s lifelong service to people. Her sister’s sewing basket and her mother’s key ring (B for Beverly) turn housekeeping into heraldry. A laundry basket glimpsed in Denmark summons the memory of sheets on a sunlit line; gratitude for eyeglasses becomes a small prayer for the gift of reading itself. Ordinary objects, seen with care, become altars.

Marriage as collaboration

With Fred Sonic Smith, the family thread is equal parts love and music. They wed at the Mariners’ Church of Detroit—“when alchemy was real”—and his Mosrite guitar remains untouched by other hands. Together they improvise on sax and clarinet, interpreting Pollock’s paintings. When she writes “Memory is Music” on his birthday, it reads as both family creed and creative vow.

Children and godparents

Her daughter, Jesse Paris Smith, recurs as marcher, gift-giver of cups, birthday celebrant in Rome and Verona, and reader of Leaves of Grass by Whitman’s tomb. Her son, Jackson Frederick Smith—“protector and joy”—appears onstage at Fondation Cartier, stoic in his favorite shirt. Jesse’s godmother, artist Patti Hudson, beams “ever-present goodness.” These glimpses model what it means to bring children not just into a home but into a lineage of art and care.

Animals and companions

Cairo the Abyssinian cat is “the color of the pyramids,” mesmerized by a lemon’s medicinal lore, and turns twenty-one with feline aplomb. A white Icelandic pony slips through the tapestry of a misty day as if a unicorn; a young Senegalese goat bestows Capricorn blessings on two bandmates. Even mismatched mittens and steaming cocoa triggered by a chance encounter in Washington Square get folded into this kinship fabric. (Compare to Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights, which treats each sighting as an occasion to praise.)

Together, these vignettes say: if you tend the small rituals—cups, calls, key rings—you keep the family’s music in tune. In that tuning, you find your own voice steadier, day after day.

Running through Smith’s days is the comforting weight of kin—parents, siblings, children, godparents, and chosen family—stitched together by ordinary things. Her mother, Beverly Williams Smith, “gave me life and guided my first steps,” a line that becomes literal in December: on her first Christmas in 1947, she crosses the kitchen for the first time, coaxed by a toy rabbit. Decades later, every birthday begins with a 6:01 a.m. voicemail from her mother: “Wake up, Patricia, you are born.”

Parents and their objects

Her father’s cup holds coffee and poetry—Leigh Hunt’s “Abou Ben Adhem”—and his admiration for Ralph Nader’s lifelong service to people. Her sister’s sewing basket and her mother’s key ring (B for Beverly) turn housekeeping into heraldry. A laundry basket glimpsed in Denmark summons the memory of sheets on a sunlit line; gratitude for eyeglasses becomes a small prayer for the gift of reading itself. Ordinary objects, seen with care, become altars.

Marriage as collaboration

With Fred Sonic Smith, the family thread is equal parts love and music. They wed at the Mariners’ Church of Detroit—“when alchemy was real”—and his Mosrite guitar remains untouched by other hands. Together they improvise on sax and clarinet, interpreting Pollock’s paintings. When she writes “Memory is Music” on his birthday, it reads as both family creed and creative vow.

Children and godparents

Her daughter, Jesse Paris Smith, recurs as marcher, gift-giver of cups, birthday celebrant in Rome and Verona, and reader of Leaves of Grass by Whitman’s tomb. Her son, Jackson Frederick Smith—“protector and joy”—appears onstage at Fondation Cartier, stoic in his favorite shirt. Jesse’s godmother, artist Patti Hudson, beams “ever-present goodness.” These glimpses model what it means to bring children not just into a home but into a lineage of art and care.

Animals and companions

Cairo the Abyssinian cat is “the color of the pyramids,” mesmerized by a lemon’s medicinal lore, and turns twenty-one with feline aplomb. A white Icelandic pony slips through the tapestry of a misty day as if a unicorn; a young Senegalese goat bestows Capricorn blessings on two bandmates. Even mismatched mittens and steaming cocoa triggered by a chance encounter in Washington Square get folded into this kinship fabric. (Compare to Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights, which treats each sighting as an occasion to praise.)

Together, these vignettes say: if you tend the small rituals—cups, calls, key rings—you keep the family’s music in tune. In that tuning, you find your own voice steadier, day after day.

Smith braids activism into her calendar so tightly it looks like ordinary life. On Greta Thunberg’s birthday she salutes youth pledged to the planet; on MLK Day she quotes “The arc of the moral universe is long…”; on Juneteenth she pairs solemn remembrance with jubilant celebration. Thomas Paine appears—with “The world is my country…”—to remind you that doing good can be a working creed.

Civil courage in lineage

Rosa Parks’s justified refusal to give up her seat ignites a paragraph about each person living as a model for others. Jesse Jackson’s birthday anchors a memory of an A.N.S.W.E.R. rally against the Iraq war. Pete Seeger’s banjo carries a tattooed credo—This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender—while Smith, at 91, watches him still summoning song into service. These moments remind you that art is not merely expressive; it’s participatory.

Ecological witness

On Earth Day, Smith sounds a stark “Supplication to Nature,” a litany of locusts, blazing rainforests, smoldering peatlands, rising seas, melting ice shelves, and bleached reefs. If we be blind… Nature turns on us. It’s both prayer and warning, delivered with prophetic cadence. Elsewhere, Lynn Davis’s photo of a “majestic torso of ice” becomes a monument for a landscape “tragically uncertain.” (In tone, it recalls Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and, more recently, Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction.)

A climate litany

“In place of songbird, the shrill cry of the locusts… the Barrier Reef bleached as the bones of forgotten saints.”

Art as service

Smith celebrates artists whose work widened the circle: Sor Juana’s proto-feminist clarity, Simone Weil’s austere search for truth, Yoko Ono’s peace activism, Alice Ball’s life-saving leprosy treatment at twenty-four, and Hendrix’s dream of Electric Lady as a global studio for collaborative peace. The statue of Hagar by Edmonia Lewis—the exiled mother led to water by an angel—becomes a parable of refuge and grace. Even Glenn Gould and John Coltrane are framed as spiritual laborers, channeling Bach and prayerful improvisation as portals to the beyond.

Taken together, these entries ask you to reinscribe your days with public purpose. To make something. To help someone. To say something truer than yesterday.

Smith braids activism into her calendar so tightly it looks like ordinary life. On Greta Thunberg’s birthday she salutes youth pledged to the planet; on MLK Day she quotes “The arc of the moral universe is long…”; on Juneteenth she pairs solemn remembrance with jubilant celebration. Thomas Paine appears—with “The world is my country…”—to remind you that doing good can be a working creed.

Civil courage in lineage

Rosa Parks’s justified refusal to give up her seat ignites a paragraph about each person living as a model for others. Jesse Jackson’s birthday anchors a memory of an A.N.S.W.E.R. rally against the Iraq war. Pete Seeger’s banjo carries a tattooed credo—This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender—while Smith, at 91, watches him still summoning song into service. These moments remind you that art is not merely expressive; it’s participatory.

Ecological witness

On Earth Day, Smith sounds a stark “Supplication to Nature,” a litany of locusts, blazing rainforests, smoldering peatlands, rising seas, melting ice shelves, and bleached reefs. If we be blind… Nature turns on us. It’s both prayer and warning, delivered with prophetic cadence. Elsewhere, Lynn Davis’s photo of a “majestic torso of ice” becomes a monument for a landscape “tragically uncertain.” (In tone, it recalls Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and, more recently, Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction.)

A climate litany

“In place of songbird, the shrill cry of the locusts… the Barrier Reef bleached as the bones of forgotten saints.”

Art as service

Smith celebrates artists whose work widened the circle: Sor Juana’s proto-feminist clarity, Simone Weil’s austere search for truth, Yoko Ono’s peace activism, Alice Ball’s life-saving leprosy treatment at twenty-four, and Hendrix’s dream of Electric Lady as a global studio for collaborative peace. The statue of Hagar by Edmonia Lewis—the exiled mother led to water by an angel—becomes a parable of refuge and grace. Even Glenn Gould and John Coltrane are framed as spiritual laborers, channeling Bach and prayerful improvisation as portals to the beyond.

Taken together, these entries ask you to reinscribe your days with public purpose. To make something. To help someone. To say something truer than yesterday.

Smith treats attention as a craft—less mystical than it sounds and more repeatable than you think. She sets small vows (shed what is not needed), keeps a winter-lit desk, and lets a bookcase by the bed become a setlist for reading. She knows the anatomy of a show: a setlist is the spine; before the downbeat she and Tony Shanahan sense the night’s atmosphere and draft the concert’s inner narrative.

Rituals of making

She carries talismans—Rothko postcard, St. Francis tau, Sam Shepard’s knife, a Murano bowl flecked with gold—that whisper Keep going. She turns cleaning into a game with imaginary aliens scoring her organization. She celebrates gratitude for eyeglasses and the discipline of keeping a notebook. She reminds you that a black coat with or without a handkerchief can be a uniform of focus, as can a favorite shirt onstage at Fondation Cartier.

Reading as apprenticeship

Her reading life is a garden of mentorship: Sontag nudges her toward Austrian literature (Roth, Musil, Bernhard, Broch), and she falls under Broch’s incantations of Virgil. She cradles Diane Arbus’s Revelations, visits Bulgakov and Kavan, quotes Nerval’s Our dreams are a second life, and keeps a Suggested Reading list that ranges from Rimbaud to Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall—a pandemic-era revelation about self-reliance. (This reading-as-apprenticeship echoes Zadie Smith’s idea that reading is creative work.)

A soundtrack for labor

Music scores the workday: Ornette Coleman’s harmolodic flights, Philip Glass’s trance architecture, Marvin Gaye’s soul, REM’s jangling intelligence. Hendrix’s dream of Electric Lady, Coltrane’s Meditations, and June Christy’s “Something Cool” each model how discipline and emotion braid together. A set at CBGB yields congee at Wo Hop; an encounter with Ultraman in Tokyo proves that play keeps edges soft.

Play, constraint, momentum

When worn-out boots beg for a ramble, she stays at the desk and writes through the night—adventure enough. Chess’s Fischer-Spassky table becomes a metaphor for strategic patience; a boy building a ship in Namibia is a study in iterative craft. Even a bronze boy with birds in her garden invites speculative magic: perhaps the birds take wing when no one hinders them. Attention, Smith shows, is less about inspiration and more about cultivating places, objects, and playlists that make work inviting—every single day.

Smith treats attention as a craft—less mystical than it sounds and more repeatable than you think. She sets small vows (shed what is not needed), keeps a winter-lit desk, and lets a bookcase by the bed become a setlist for reading. She knows the anatomy of a show: a setlist is the spine; before the downbeat she and Tony Shanahan sense the night’s atmosphere and draft the concert’s inner narrative.

Rituals of making

She carries talismans—Rothko postcard, St. Francis tau, Sam Shepard’s knife, a Murano bowl flecked with gold—that whisper Keep going. She turns cleaning into a game with imaginary aliens scoring her organization. She celebrates gratitude for eyeglasses and the discipline of keeping a notebook. She reminds you that a black coat with or without a handkerchief can be a uniform of focus, as can a favorite shirt onstage at Fondation Cartier.

Reading as apprenticeship

Her reading life is a garden of mentorship: Sontag nudges her toward Austrian literature (Roth, Musil, Bernhard, Broch), and she falls under Broch’s incantations of Virgil. She cradles Diane Arbus’s Revelations, visits Bulgakov and Kavan, quotes Nerval’s Our dreams are a second life, and keeps a Suggested Reading list that ranges from Rimbaud to Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall—a pandemic-era revelation about self-reliance. (This reading-as-apprenticeship echoes Zadie Smith’s idea that reading is creative work.)

A soundtrack for labor

Music scores the workday: Ornette Coleman’s harmolodic flights, Philip Glass’s trance architecture, Marvin Gaye’s soul, REM’s jangling intelligence. Hendrix’s dream of Electric Lady, Coltrane’s Meditations, and June Christy’s “Something Cool” each model how discipline and emotion braid together. A set at CBGB yields congee at Wo Hop; an encounter with Ultraman in Tokyo proves that play keeps edges soft.

Play, constraint, momentum

When worn-out boots beg for a ramble, she stays at the desk and writes through the night—adventure enough. Chess’s Fischer-Spassky table becomes a metaphor for strategic patience; a boy building a ship in Namibia is a study in iterative craft. Even a bronze boy with birds in her garden invites speculative magic: perhaps the birds take wing when no one hinders them. Attention, Smith shows, is less about inspiration and more about cultivating places, objects, and playlists that make work inviting—every single day.

A Book of Days is not just arranged by time; it is about how to live inside it. Smith orients herself by equinoxes and solstices, by World Storytelling Day and World Poetry Day, by birthdays and death days that become bright pins on a map. In this constellation, serendipity matters: Horses was delayed to Rimbaud’s death day; Piaf and Cocteau died a day apart as if the singer called the artist home.

A year and a day

She offers the book as a year and a day for those born on leap day—an inclusive blessing that makes room for outliers. She tends micro-rituals you can lift into your own life: 11:11, make a wish; intermission thoughts about Tosca’s “I lived for art, for love”; turning tarot cards to glimpse stamina and discipline; ending the year with “Happy New Year, everybody! We are alive together.”

Cycles, ruins, renewal

Time is not only forward motion; it’s repair. After Hurricane Sandy, her Rockaway house is saved from looting by a neighbor’s flag, then refurbished. Notre-Dame burns; she photographs mourning architecture and wonders about Joan’s statue. Hadrian’s library lies in ruins; she marvels at the worlds we lose and the ones we still enter through surviving words. Picasso’s Guernica responds to a bombing that took hours to execute and thirty-five days to paint—art as a slower, stronger timekeeper.

Seasonal attention

Seasons tilt the mood: January’s vows to be useful; a February desk in winter light; March’s equinox and Scheherazade’s endless stories; April’s Easter cycle; June’s saintly and secular solstice sounds; December’s Advent hush around Ozu’s gravestone marked by mu—nothingness. You feel tempo changes, crescendos and rests, that help you pace your own year.

Time, for Smith, is collaborative. You borrow the hours of the dead, offer your own, and keep the metronome of attention steady enough that when history knocks—gently, brutally, or with flowers—you’re there to answer hello.

A Book of Days is not just arranged by time; it is about how to live inside it. Smith orients herself by equinoxes and solstices, by World Storytelling Day and World Poetry Day, by birthdays and death days that become bright pins on a map. In this constellation, serendipity matters: Horses was delayed to Rimbaud’s death day; Piaf and Cocteau died a day apart as if the singer called the artist home.

A year and a day

She offers the book as a year and a day for those born on leap day—an inclusive blessing that makes room for outliers. She tends micro-rituals you can lift into your own life: 11:11, make a wish; intermission thoughts about Tosca’s “I lived for art, for love”; turning tarot cards to glimpse stamina and discipline; ending the year with “Happy New Year, everybody! We are alive together.”

Cycles, ruins, renewal

Time is not only forward motion; it’s repair. After Hurricane Sandy, her Rockaway house is saved from looting by a neighbor’s flag, then refurbished. Notre-Dame burns; she photographs mourning architecture and wonders about Joan’s statue. Hadrian’s library lies in ruins; she marvels at the worlds we lose and the ones we still enter through surviving words. Picasso’s Guernica responds to a bombing that took hours to execute and thirty-five days to paint—art as a slower, stronger timekeeper.

Seasonal attention

Seasons tilt the mood: January’s vows to be useful; a February desk in winter light; March’s equinox and Scheherazade’s endless stories; April’s Easter cycle; June’s saintly and secular solstice sounds; December’s Advent hush around Ozu’s gravestone marked by mu—nothingness. You feel tempo changes, crescendos and rests, that help you pace your own year.

Time, for Smith, is collaborative. You borrow the hours of the dead, offer your own, and keep the metronome of attention steady enough that when history knocks—gently, brutally, or with flowers—you’re there to answer hello.