Foundations of Lyric Metaphysics, Part I: What IS Lyric Metaphysics?

We all move through the world with an internalized sense of what reality is. Most of the time, this sense is so familiar—so absorbed, so unquestioned—that it becomes invisible. We don’t think of it as a worldview. We think of it as the world.

Call this our background metaphysics: the quiet set of assumptions about how things exist, how change happens, what counts as real, and how we participate in it.

We inherit these assumptions from culture, schooling, language, science, theology, the technologies we use, and the stories we tell about what it means to be a person. And whether or not we ever say them out loud, they govern how we interpret everything: conflict, attention, learning, agency, ethics, value, love.

Most people never use the word metaphysics, but everyone lives inside one.

A metaphysics is simply the background sense of what is real,  how things exist,
and what forces shape life.

Without realizing it, almost all of us grow up inside what I call a Thingness ontology.

In this worldview, the fundamental units of reality are separate things: separate people, separate minds, separate bodies, separate objects, separate identities, separate moments, separate thoughts, and separate events.

Things are imagined as: bounded, self-contained internally determined, only secondarily connected, and the primary bearers of meaning and action

In a Thingness ontology, what is real is what is “in here,” inside the self. Reality is imagined as a collection of insides: my thoughts, my feelings, my decisions, my identity. What counts as solid is whatever has clear boundaries—whatever can be pointed to and separated out from the rest. And what really matters is what can be isolated, measured, or owned: my achievements, my property, my opinions, my data.

Interaction, in this picture, is something that happens between fundamentally independent units. Two already-formed selves meet. Two already-stable entities collide. Relation is what connects them for a while, but it does not fundamentally alter what they are.

This is the metaphysics behind so many ordinary phrases. “I need to work on myself” assumes that the self is a contained thing you can step back from and adjust. “This is my identity” suggests a fixed inner object you carry around. “That situation didn’t affect me” imagines a core that remains untouched by circumstance. “Facts speak for themselves” treats facts as little sealed units of reality, independent of the web of interpretation and power they live in. “They’re just being emotional” casts emotion as a private disturbance inside an individual, rather than a relational signal.

All of these ways of speaking rely on the same hidden picture: that the thing—the person, object, fact, moment—exists in itself before it ever exists in relation.

In a Thingness ontology, relation becomes three things at once: it is optional (you can, in principle, subtract all relationships and still picture the thing as fully itself), it is secondary (it comes after the units are already in place), and it is instrumental (valuable mainly for what it does for the things involved).

Let’s unpack this carefully.

Unpacking Relation in a Thingness Ontology

When relation is imagined as optional, it means we can picture a person apart from any context at all and still believe we have captured something essential about who they are. We imagine that identity, character, even consciousness would remain fundamentally the same if we stripped away family, community, history, language, or place. The solitary self—self-sufficient, intact—is the metaphysical ideal.

If relation is taken to be secondary, then it is understood as something added after the fact. First there are individuals, already formed; then they interact. This is the quiet logic beneath phrases like “I lost myself in that relationship,” or “I finally found myself again”—as if the self precedes the encounter and remains unchanged by it unless something goes wrong. Relation, in this view, is a kind of overlay on top of the real, not a constituent of it.

And when relation is imagined as instrumental, its value is judged by what it enables the individual thing to accomplish. Relationships become tools—helpful if they support personal goals, inconvenient if they disrupt them. We seek connection for what it can do for us, rather than for what it is in itself. Even love, under this ontology, becomes a kind of private possession: something I feel, something I have, something I give or withhold.

Taken together, these assumptions make it difficult to recognize just how profoundly contextual, interdependent, and co-constructed our lives actually are. They hide how much of who we are arises not from within the boundaries of the self, but from the relational fields we are woven into. They make it seem as though relation is a choice, when in reality it is a condition. They frame encounters as interruptions, rather than the very medium through which we become real.

The Consequences of Thingness Ontology

If Thingness were merely an intellectual habit, it might not matter much. But a metaphysics is never just an idea. It shapes how reality appears to us; it shapes what we think is possible within it. And when we inherit an ontology that prioritizes independent units over living relation, the consequences spill quietly into every corner of life.

One consequence is fragmentation. We begin to see moments, people, and events as isolated pieces rather than part of a continuous unfolding. A bad day becomes a personal failure rather than the aftershock of a relational field that shifted somewhere else. A conflict becomes a clash between two bounded selves rather than the expression of a pattern neither person created alone.

Another consequence is isolation. When the self is imagined as a sealed container, anything that disturbs us—a feeling, a desire, a shift in orientation—can feel like a defect within. We tell ourselves that we should be able to handle life on our own. We treat dependence or openness as weakness. We work privately through struggles that were never private to begin with.

Thingness also hollows out meaning. Meaning becomes something the individual mind produces, like an internal conclusion. But the experiences that move us—beauty, grief, tenderness, revelation—don’t arise as solitary acts. They come into being from the resonances and ruptures between us. Meaning is relational, but in a Thingness worldview, there is no language for this. We’re left trying to explain significance in terms too small for its origin.

Ethics, too, becomes distorted. If individuals are primary, then responsibility is imagined as a series of isolated choices made by isolated agents. We overlook all the ways our actions are shaped by the situations we inherit, the histories we inhabit, and the fields of power and vulnerability we move within. Ethics becomes rule-bound rather than relational; procedural rather than perceptive; concerned with correctness rather than coherence.

And perhaps most painfully, Thingness ontology makes love appear inexplicable. If selves are sealed, then how does one life enter another? How does another’s joy ripple within you? How does grief pass between bodies? How can two beings become more themselves together than alone? To try to understand love through Thingness is to be left with metaphors of fusion or sacrifice—neither of which captures the experience of becoming more real through another’s presence.

Over time, a Thingness ontology makes the world feel thinner than it is—disconnected, mechanical, lonely. Not because life lacks depth, but because we lack a metaphysics capacious enough to describe the depth we actually experience.

The Pivot Into Lyric Metaphysics

And this is precisely where Lyric Metaphysics enters—not as a rejection of the world we have inherited, but as a fuller description of the one we are already living inside.

Lyric Metaphysics begins with a simple, radical shift:
Things are not primary. Relation is primary. And the things we take as given are what relation settles into.

This reverses the inherited order. Instead of picturing life as composed of separate units that sometimes interact, Lyric Metaphysics sees life as an ongoing weave of pattern, resonance, influence, and response. What we call “a thing”—a self, a moment, an insight—is a temporary crystallization of a much larger relational process.

In this view, we do not begin as isolated beings who later connect.
We begin already entangled—already shaped, already shaping, already in the flow of mutual becoming. The boundaries we draw are conveniences, not ontological truths.

Lyric Metaphysics is “lyric” because it trusts experience—not just as sensation, but as a way of knowing. It honors rhythm, texture, atmosphere, and the subtle alignments through which meaning emerges. It sees the world not as a machine but as a pattern of unfolding; not as a set of objects but as a living, responsive whole.

It is “metaphysics” because it asks the deepest questions:
What is real?
How does change happen?
What is a self?
What is meaning?
How do we come into coherence with one another?

The more closely we attend to life—not life as we abstract it, but life as we feel it—the more the Thingness worldview begins to crack. Something fuller leaks through. We start to sense that the world is held together not by separateness, but by relation. Not by solidity, but by rhythm. Not by control, but by coherence.

Lyric Metaphysics gives us language for what we have always known but rarely named:
that reality is woven, not assembled;
that we become real through one another;
that meaning is a pattern we participate in;
that life is not a structure of things, but a song.

This series will explore the four structures that give Lyric Metaphysics its shape—
the Field, the Between, the Feeled, the Song—
not as abstractions, but as the living architecture of experience.

But first, we begin here: with the possibility that our lives make more sense when we start with relation rather than the solitary self; with emergence rather than essence; with coherence rather than control.

Lyric Metaphysics is not a new theory.
It is a truer description of the world you are already in.