This piece was written as part of a collaboration with visual artist Kyra Hinton for The Rabbit Room’s Hutchmoot: Homebound Pass the Piece project. You can view/purchase a print of the connected artwork here. 

We cannot see the River of Stars where the Great Bear swims and the Hunter stalks, and so we have no more myths to make of them. Scientists say more than eighty percent of the world’s population live under light-polluted skies, oblivious to the nightly flow of the cosmos. The Babylonians said the Milky Way was the severed tail of the dragoness Tiamat, the Greeks that it was the milk dripping from Hera’s heavy breasts. The Maori say it is the canoe of the warrior Tama Rereti, and the Khosians of the Kalahari say a little girl cast fiery embers into the sky. It is the strewn treasure trail of fleeing thieves, and the flight path of birds at season’s change. Our astronomers tell us it is a barrel spiral galaxy of four hundred billion stars and planets, two hundred thousand light years across from one side to the other, swirling around a supermassive black hole. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too great to understand, and so I must turn to these metaphors and myths to make sense of mystery. And then there is You, the man behind the starry curtain, the One who is said to know them each by name. I can recall Betelgeuse and Alpha Centauri, Pollux and Castor and Canus Major, but after that memory starts to fail. Is this bright band, I wonder, just the hem of Your garment? Do you cast the cosmos about You as a cloak? Do you see me, see all of us mortals, floating out here in the River of Stars?