How is ‘becoming with’ a practice of becoming worldly? We learn to be worldly from grappling with, rather than generalizing from, the ordinary. With figures and cartoons, philosophical controversies, stories from situated geopolitical-geocultural histories, and biological approaches, this essay argues that species of all kinds, living and not, are consequent on a subject- and object-shaping dance of encounters. Earthlings coshape one another in layers of reciprocating complexity all the way down. Response and respect are possible only in those knots, with actual beings looking back at each other, sticky with all their muddled histories.