Living In The World As If It Were Home

Living In The World As If It Were Home is a remarkable collection of meditations from one of Canadas finest poets - a truly essential text for students of esoteric thought natural history and ecological poetry. In these essays Lilburn shares his belief that desire for the world in which we live can lead us to a state of being that he calls the chthonic self - a condition that moves towards resolving our separation from the natural world and its innately mysterious inhabitants. First published in 1999 this prescient text makes a vital philosophical contribution to the contemporary debate about rewilding.Consciousness walks across the land bridge of the deers stare into the world of things. This is knowing. It tastes of sorrow and towering appetite. Their look seems a bestowal; I feel more substantial less apologetic as a physical thing from having been seen. The traded look goes on in the building dark. There is no intention here nothing of fairy tale or hagiography animals lying down with the solitary animals bearing messages scrolls caught in the clefts of their hooves. There is only wild seeing the feel of it unimaginable: I am seen straight through (of that no doubt) but cannot say how I am seen. Travelling back through the conductor of this gaze something of me a slant Id never guess enters them. Their look has a particularity an inexpressibility so high-pitched it attracts myths. No wonder some say the darkness of the forest is a god.Lilburn who spent several years as a Jesuit explores a rare path of early Christian mysticism known as apophatic theology - the negative way; sharing his belief that a route used to reach the divine can also be used to forge a genuine relationship with nature which is no less divine than anything alluded to in theological texts. He is concerned with cultivating eros and surrendering to an unceasing longing; it is this longing that may remove our anthropocentric beliefs and bring us closer to a world from which we have become estranged.A quiet path a path of etiquette a path of seeing; the landscape of the South Saskatchewan River becomes tinglingly alive its various histories become presences its inhabitants - deer coyote poplar river - are mysterious; distant yet offering glimpses through their singular perfections towards a route home; towards our own lost placement in the cosmos.Surrendering to this new way becoming a disciple of deer soil lichen eventually alters our perceptions reinvigorating them stripping away the extraneous so what we are left with is the poverty of a truthful seeing a never-ending longing and a ceaseless desire that may restore us to a genuine relationship with the world surrounding us the world which we long to return to as home.