The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own. – Heraclitus, fragment DKB89

My soul grows in the earth of your soul; your soul grows in the earth of mine.

The soul is the fully unfolded life of the Unique. In this unfolding, the placetime of the Unique’s becoming is planted, world-entanglement birthing the world-as-it-appears within the garden of being-in-time. The soul is a physical thing, a here-now that is incarnated in our intertwining, the world revealing itself through our being-in-the-world. I am here-now in this placetime. I am here-now in the soul. I am here-now with-you. I am here now. It’s okay, it’s okay, I’m here now.

Loving you is not an accident, not incidental, not abstract. I fall for you and trip into a new here-now, a placetime that is birthed in our loving, which inaugurates our world. Our. There is no separation – the world I inhabit appears to me as it does in my unfolding, but it always does so in my unfolding-with-you, my unfolding-with-the-world. There is no unfolding-alone. Souls overlap one another, dwelling in the common placetime that grows in our entangled activity. The here-now we form is the real — the world is always-and-already a here-now with-you, and there is no world other than -with. There is no private language because there is no private world.

The world that I am is a world that appears only in its intertwining with other worlds and with the commons cosmos. Ontological pluralism does not bottom out in worlds, but in fractals: worlds-in-worlds-in-worlds, planets-in-solar-systems-in-galaxies. The world I am repeats and transforms the worlds I dwell in and the worlds I dwell in repeat and transform the worlds that constitute them. The garden roots and the garden flowers. In forming a world-with-another, we apocalypse, unwinding the interiority of our world-appearing to open-ourselves to another world’s revealing. Love is always apocalyptic, as to love requires stepping-out-of the solipsism of one’s own experience to re-orient towards the commons, our intended-attention becoming a path through which we navigate out of our isolation. Love is attending to the unfolding of another, and one attends through dwelling in the common placetime formed through the intertwining of beloved-and-beloved, grazing grass with their fingertips and dipping their feet in the cool water of the pluricosmos. I love you and I dwell with you in our common unfolding. I love you and I present with you, unearthing our pasts like a well-loved photo album, holding-you-close in our futuring. Love saunters the cosmos of you-and-I; you-and-I plant the future of our togethering. Together we together our common-soul.

Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things which exist; observe too the continuous spinning of the thread and the contexture of the web. – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Image: Skating Rink ‘Dynamo’ by Pyotr Konchalovsky (1948)