July 15, 2026

The air does not sit above the room
waiting to be reached
Already filling every corner
encompassing you where you stand

I have been carrying a word around for years now, tucked into the private pages of a working “Codex” I have kept for most of my adult life. I did not coin the word. I found it in a footnote, in a theologian’s reading of a medieval friar, and something in me recognized it the way you recognize a face in a crowd before you can say why. The word is kataphysics, and I think it is time to bring it out into the daylight and see what it can do for someone who has never heard it before.

Here is what I am not going to do. I am not going to give you a seminar on Greek prefixes and then send you back to your day with a vocabulary word and nothing else. I have written that essay, in longer and drier forms, for people who get paid to read essays like that. What I want to do here is something closer to what I call thinkering: thinking and tinkering at the same time, turning a word over in your hands the way you might turn over an item you found on a walk, when you are uncertain what it is for, only sure that it is worth carrying home.

This is the first in a series. I will tell you at the end what is coming next.

§1. Two Directions

Start with two small Greek words that have quietly organized most of Western philosophy without most of us ever noticing they were doing the organizing.

The first is meta, which means beyond, after, above. When Aristotle’s editors filed his notes on first philosophy on a shelf after his notes on physics, they called the later book ta meta ta physika, “the things after the physics,” and the name stuck so well that it became the name of an entire way of thinking. Metaphysics, ever since, has tended to mean: what lies beyond the physical world, above the things we can touch and measure, the higher register where the real answers are supposedly kept.

Something discomforts me, and hopefully you, when thinkering that habit of mind. Before we go after other things, let’s diagnose that. The instinct to reach beyond the physical and the immediate, toward some higher and purer register, is not just a philosopher’s preference. It is the oldest trick in the book of every system that has ever needed ordinary people to accept an order they had no part in choosing. If truth lives up-there, above the mess of bodies and dirt and daily need, then the people standing in the mess have no ground on which to argue back. Someone always gets appointed to speak for the “up-there.” It is rarely the people doing the actual living down-here.

The second word is kata, and it points the opposite direction: down, through, along, according to, within. A theologian named Ilia Delio used it to describe how St. Bonaventure, the medieval Franciscan, thought about creation: not as a ladder reaching up toward God, but as a world already soaked through with the presence it supposedly needed to transcend. Not meta-physics, reaching beyond the physical. Kata-physics: going down into the physical far enough that it stops looking like a surface and starts looking like a depth. That is, moving-alongside-all-that-moves.

Picture two ways of trying to understand a river.

The metaphysical way climbs the ridge above the valley to get a clean overview, the river reduced to a silver thread far below, understood by being risen above. The kataphysical way wades in. It does not get the overview. It gets wet, cold, pushed sideways by a current it cannot fully see, and it learns things about the river that no ridge-top vantage could ever teach it: what the water actually does to a body standing in it, near it, toward it.

Kataphysics is my word, borrowed and repurposed, for a way of thinkering that wades-in on purpose.

§2. Three Words That Are Not the Same

Before I can tell you what wading-in actually looks like, I need to hand you three words and ask you to hold them apart, because most of philosophy’s oldest confusions–especially of the metaphysical variety–come from letting these three collapse into one.

Call the first World. World is everything here-and-now we humans gather up and arrange to survive and, if we are fortunate, to thrive. Your kitchen table. The traffic patterns of your city. The unwritten rules of your family gatherings. World is always already built. It can be built well or badly, kindly or cruelly, and every human being alive is currently standing inside some version of it, arranged mostly by people who came before us and are not answering our calls.

Call the second Reality. Reality is not the same as World, and this distinction matters more than it might first appear. Reality is what makes it possible for anything at all to show up as this rather than that: the conditions under which a chair is different from a goose, a Thursday different from a thunder cloud, my grief different from your joy even on the days they arrive together. Reality is the horizon of meaning, the invisible grammar that lets differences exist at all. World can be unjust. Reality cannot; it is simply the condition of things being distinguishable, prior to any human arranging of them.

Call the third Source, and here is where the wading-in gets deepest. Source is what makes World and Reality possible in the first place; nonetheless, Source sources neither as a thing inside the World nor as a rule governing Reality. It cannot be pointed to the way you point to a chair. It cannot be listed among the conditions the way you list the rules of grammar. To borrow language here from Karl Jaspers, it is something closer to the ground from which every new horizon we could ever reach keeps arriving, without that ground ever itself becoming one more horizon we could stand on and survey. We might also call Source the horizoning of all horizons.

Most metaphysical systems, across a great many centuries, have quietly merged Reality and Source, as if the horizon of meaning and the ground of being were the same thing seen at different distances. Climb the ladder of differentiation far enough, so the old story goes, and you will arrive at Source the way you arrive at a summit. I do not think that is true, and I do not think it is an accident that it is not true. Source is not a summit nor a vantage point at the top of anything. Rather, a better analogy would be closer to the “air in the room” from my opening poem: not waiting up there to be reached, but already filling every corner right-now, down-here, including the corner I happen to be occupying.

§3. A Grammar Borrowed from the Mass

So how do you talk about something that is, by this description, both everywhere and nowhere? Not everywhere in the lazy sense of “everything is basically the same,” and not nowhere in the sense of “it doesn’t really exist.”

Everywhere as pervasion. Nowhere as never an object I could hold up and say, “There, that one, I found it.“

I found the grammar I needed, of all places, in memories I have of the oldest liturgy I know. Near the end of the Roman Catholic Mass, just before the great communal Amen, the priest lifts the bread and the wine of the Eucharist and says: “Through him, with him, and in him…”

Stop where your are… I am not asking you to buy the theology wrapped around that sentence. I have my own complicated relationship with that theology, which is a subject for another essay. What held-me-fast, years ago, and has not let-me-go since: the grammar itself. Notice which prepositions did not make the cut. The sentence does not say beyond him, above him, after him; rather, the phrase invokes through, with, and in.

Those three small words are doing enormous work, and once you notice it you cannot stop noticing it. Through names a movement, a going-by rather than a going-over. With names an accompaniment, a walking-alongside that never claims to stand outside what it accompanies. In names a dwelling, an abiding-inward without the claustrophobia of being sealed inside a box. Through, with, and in are the prepositions of pervasion. Beyond, above, and after are the prepositions of ascent. I think an enormous amount rides on which set of prepositions a person, a tradition, or an entire civilization decides to live by.

This is the whole of what I mean by a grammar of pervasion rather than ascent. Kataphysics is not a new doctrine about what Source is made of. It is a discipline of speaking, and eventually of living, via prepositions that go through and with and in rather than prepositions that reach beyond and above and after. It does not require me to believe in anything I do not already believe. It only asks me to notice which direction my attention has been trained to travel when I go looking for what matters most. And, then on purpose, asks me to attempt traveling the other way for a while.

Here is a small, entirely unglamorous way to give this a try before I let you go.

The next time you find yourself doing something ordinary with your hands–washing a dish, folding a shirt, waiting for water to boil, rearranging your computer desktop–resist the pull to think of it as an interruption on the way to something more meaningful happening later or elsewhere. Stay-down in the experience instead. Notice the actual temperature of the water. Notice what your hands already know how to do without your supervision. You are not going to find Source by rising above the dish. You might, for one strange unguarded second, notice that Source was already in the water the whole time, and in your hands, and in the noticing itself.

That enacts kataphysics not as a completed system but a consistent mode for travel in any direction, chosen on purpose. Chosen, also, over and over, day by day, sometimes moment by moment because moving-alongside is a direction the world systems keep training out of us.

This is preliminary thinkering, and I mean that word preliminary honestly. I am not done with any of it. The next essay in this series will take the grammar I have only sketched here– through, with, and in–for drifting into the harder territory of suffering, struggle, and what I have come to call transistance: a way of moving-alongside (through, with, and in) the conditions of a life rather than climbing over them or simply enduring them. That essay will also introduce a small, weird interpretation of “transpire, ” a hermeneutic of the term I have been building for years, and exlucidate why I think it belongs among the other actions I have connected to transistance: transgress and transform.

For now, I want to dedicate this one to Dr. Shoshana, who recently completed her Ph.D. at the University of North Texas and kindly visited an old Mountain Dog to mind-walk about pedagogy. I know she would never blink if she heard me say out loud: The summit was always the wrong direction.

Let us together lovingly struggle to stay-alongside each other through, with, and in the Way.