It is the pure air of geopoetics, shaped through the sensibility of language and ways of living among mountains, rivers, plains, and valleys. An air that passes through the reduction of place into lines and measurements in order to cross into the poetic and existential dimension of every contemplative soul guided by the rhythm of longing for the earth as a compass for vision—not a neutral passage, but a trace of neglected memory fragments. Between knowledge and emotion, walking and thinking, text and nature, desire runs deeper than merely defining poetic geography: “a desire for life and the world, and for the driving force. The geopoetic project is not another cultural trend, nor a literary school, nor even poetry in general as an intimate art. It is a movement concerned with how human beings root their existence in the earth; it is not about imposing a system, but about conducting an exploration and gradual investigation that places itself, from its starting point, somewhere between poetry, philosophy, and science.”[1]
Through this text, the open Libyan space turns toward us, extending its hand, keen that we follow it—that we become it—by merging our sensitivity to things in nature with the emotion of the text tied to every lonely stone on the edge of the valley: in the trembling yellowing of grass resisting the dry climate, in the secret of mountains inhabited by the ancient sorrow of ancestors, and in all the sacred paths produced by collective memory and the beliefs that endow the terrain with a fertility of meaning surpassing its natural function. From this perspective, Libya—with all its diverse landscapes and cultural history, in the full wonder of its natural scenery—and this geopoetics that belongs to it preserve us from the centrality of the Western world, from our cities that have lost their scenery, and from the fading of the emotion that leads us to write about human sensibility when spending the night in the Zalla desert near a fire, or when climbing the Acacus mountains, or walking into the unknown across the rocky expanse of the Black Al-Haruj—to find the gate of abundance beyond the methodologies of the state and closed scientific institutions. All of this only to continue sensually approaching the cultural project of geopoetics and the raw material in the popular geography carried by the voices of people in sorrowful oral narratives, intimate customs, and strange local vocabulary. It is the geography of ordinary people who shape it through the sensations of singing, the hardship of trails they know without maps, and through names that do not resemble those in dictionaries—names that sprout from the life of villages, the wilderness, and the myths that shepherds carry in their pockets without realizing it. Those ordinary people who reclaim life by simplifying the world: a reclamation that “begins with reclaiming our sensitivity to small details: a stone on the path, the silence of a deserted beach, or a solitary cloud.”
