"It takes a poet to see the extraordinary in the mundane.... This is reading for the joy of it." [Full review at https://www.blacklocks.ca/book-review-going-home] -- Holly Doan -- Blacklock's Reporter, 20171218
In a series of essays, lectures, confessions, and interviews, all based on years of reading and research, Lilburn shares not new but old, reclaimed ways of thinking--long-ignored riches from the Christian, Judaic and Islamic contemplative wisdom traditions.... In order to undo the Western extractive, colonial approach to land--one that uses, warehouses, and dominates--we have to return to our former strengths, what Lilburn calls 'cognitive rebar.' What justice asks of us is that we do the work to prepare for conversation." [Full article at http://www.focusonvictoria.ca/novdec2017/the-larger-conversation-contemplation-and-place-r5/] -- Amy Reiswig -- Focus Magazine, 20171201
"This book is exactly what I think is required in the emerging scholarly and literary work on decolonization in Canada. This isn't a dry and heavy academic text marking up conceptual territory: territorializing knowledge with confusing title and jargon... This book is much more in the traditions of mystical contemplative philosophy." -- Cary Campbell -- SubTerrain, 20180701
This collection of essays is the third in a series of books in which Lilburn reflects on his own sense of rootlessness, often as a cultural phenomenon. The current book's emphasis on the colonial condition is new... [The] construal at the heart of the book is individual and specific: North Americans of European descent suffer from a colonial malaise consisting significantly of a malformed relation to place. - Carolyn Richardson, The Fiddlehead, November 2018
[Lilburn] feels that beneath 'the smoothness, the relative fine running of late capitalism,' theres a disturbing hunger... And why? Because, argues Lilburn, through chapters on philosophical inquiry, spiritual struggle, deep ecological concern, and unsparing self-confession, we have not truly learned how to live on this land so relatively new to us, a land acquired in many ways through violence and dishonesty.... What Lilburn attempts in this larger conversation is to find a way back, through earnest inquiry with philosophers, mystics, poets, and saints stretching back thousands of years, to the 'essence of nature'..." - BIll Robertson, Saskatoon StarPhoenix, November 17, 2018
"In 1999, writer and poet Tim Lilburn published the non-fiction work Living in the World as if It Were Home, a meditation on humanity's relationship with the natural environment that has become a classic and was the first book in a loose trilogy examining the connections between politics, environmentalism, philosophy, and modernity. Eighteen years later, the final part of the trilogy, a volume of contemplative essays, is available from UAP." -- Quill & Quire, 20180201
