It is hot, but life goes on. We just take our walks a little earlier, or a little later. I recently returned from eight days in Jeonju, where I study gayageum near the northeast corner of the Gyeonggijeon Shrine. My walks with our teacher Ji Seong-ja between lessons normally circle its walled complex, but one morning we were in no hurry and reached the entrance at that brief moment when the doors were open but unguarded.

We slipped inside through the bamboo tunnels and sat down under centuries-old thick-trunked zelkovas. It was cool enough for mosquitoes to thrive, so we only lasted through the first bites. On our way out, we were stopped at the gate by an official. I let our teacher do her “just a local grandma” schtick, even though she is an Intangible Asset, while I pretended to be monolingual.

The next evening, our walk took us around the outside of the wall. Long-needled pines overhang the western section, along with “100-day reds” (“crepe myrtle” in English), their blossoms heralding fall even while the days still burn hot and scream with cicadas. We have something similar in Alaska-fireweed. As its pink blossoms creep up the stalk, fall slowly takes over from summer.

Our teacher and I sat down near the west gate on a bench carved from a giant granite boulder. Even though it was dusk, the seat still radiated heat like a kiln sauna. After sitting a while, we lay down across the stone in full view of the security cameras, head to head, looking up at the darkening sky.

The clouds floated by, covering and uncovering a single point of light. Our teacher asked if I thought it was a star. I considered other possibilities-a planet? satellite? Those words are not in my Korean vocabulary, so I went with star. But only one shone brightly enough to see.

“I miss seeing the silver river water,” I said aloud in Korean. The “Milky Way,” as we say in English, was a regular sight in the night sky where I grew up in Alaska. It has been four years since the first pictures came back from the James Webb Space Telescope, and we now know the universe holds as many as two trillion galaxies. And yet the sky over modern Korea is no longer the clean silver river water that still stretches so vividly above my childhood home. It has actually gone milky. Just as we learn all this, humans revolving around one of the 400 billion suns in the galaxy that is theirs have begun to believe that they themselves are stars, that their water, muri johta, is good.

If it is hard to see the “Silver River” in Jeonju, it is impossible to find amid the bright lights of Seoul. I have tried. There is a wall near my neighborhood that you can pick up at Jahamun, the “purple mist” 紫霞 gate, named after the haze at dawn and dusk-once a natural mist, now fine dust particles and light pollution, less purple than yellow.

Just down the hill is the Yun Dong-ju Literature House. Yun (尹東柱, 1917-1945) lived nearby in 1941, the year he wrote of counting stars “on this hillside where so much starlight has fallen.” He died at twenty-seven in a prison cell in Japan. The museum’s second chamber, the “Open Well,” was repurposed from an abandoned water tank. Visitors stand at the bottom of the concrete void and look up at one square of sky.

Each frame the Webb Telescope sends back to earth is also a small square of sky. Piece together enough of these and you’d get something like a sky-sized jogakbo, the patchwork wrapping cloth Korean women sew of scraps joined edge-to-edge with exposed seams. On Chilseok (七夕), the August night the Weaving Maid crosses the bridge built by magpies and crows over the Silver River to her Ox Herder, girls sewing jogakbo once gazed up and prayed to her-Jiknyeo (織女), weaver to the gods-for a steadier hand. I’m not sure they ever thought of the sky and the cloth as separate things.

Near the Open Well’s inch of sky, in Buam-dong, lies the Whanki Museum. In the last years of his life in New York, knowing there were not enough corvids in the world to bridge the ocean, painter Kim Whanki (金煥基, 1913-1974) filled canvases with blue dots. The series title borrowed the closing line of a poem by his friend Kim Kwang-seop: “Where, and as what, shall we meet again?” While the paintings appear to depict star fields-the poem begins, “Among so many, a single star looks down at me,” and continues, “The deeper the night, the more the star disappears into the brightness…”-Kim spoke of the friends he had in mind as he set down and ringed the dots one at a time, embedding in each the memory of a name he did not write.

Among so many, a single star looks down at me
(…)
The deeper the night,
the more the star disappears into the brightness
(…)

My own dots are musical notes attached to moments and spaces spent with a teacher. Mostly they are the moving ones of sanjo, so maybe they are more like the galaxies in Webb’s photographs, smeared into arcs by the mass in front bending light around itself-the nearer thing making the farther thing visible by warping it.

Often translated in English as “scattered melodies,” the first sanjo was patched together by Kim Chang-jo from woven melodies down in Yeong-am, Jeolla, at the end of the nineteenth century. Then it went north, the way everything here goes north-to the capital and universities where it is taught in rooms with no mosquitoes.

In September, Korea’s galleries come north too, joining others from 30 countries at COEX for Frieze and Kiaf. The city will be as muri johta as it gets-the “good water,” meaning the “good crowd”-shimmering with spectacle and bright, sky-muting lights.

We may be made of stardust, but we are not stars.

I will be back in Yeong-am that week, at the Kim Chang-jo Sanjo Festival. The “Silver River” will likely remain hidden, and the magpies will be in the pines, done with their bridge. But viewing the moon coming up over Mt. Wolchul (月出山) should be good.