A little thought experiment. Here’s how the same misunderstood phenomenon, viewed through distinct cultures and perspectives, can generate common stories with varying degrees of similarity and differences.
Two Tellings
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I. A Story
In the early days, when the world was still learning its colors, the sun rose and set in plain white light, and the clouds drifted by like clean sheets of paper. Nothing was wrong with this, exactly. But the sun, who watched the world all day, began to notice how everything below was busy becoming itself: the flowers choosing their reds and yellows, the sea deepening into blue, and the fields turning every shade of green they could think of.
Only the sky stayed empty.
One evening, as the sun lowered toward the horizon, she dipped her fingers into the ocean, which by then had learned a thousand shades of blue. She lifted her hand and brushed it across the nearest cloud. The cloud blushed pink, then deepened into rose, then settled into a soft purple, surprised at itself. The sun laughed and reached for more, gold from the wheat fields, orange from the persimmon trees, and the deep red of a fox slipping into its den.
She painted until the whole western sky was a wet canvas of color.
She has been doing it ever since, every morning and every evening, because she cannot help it. The clouds drift past her hands, and she cannot let them go uncolored. And though she has never said so, the truth is this: she paints them because she will never see them from below, and she wants the world to know that even the sky is loved.
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II.
As a Native American Myth
Long ago, when the world was still soft and the animals spoke with one another, Sun walked across the sky each day carrying only her white light. The People looked up and saw brightness and nothing more, and the clouds above were pale as bone.
Coyote, who notices everything, came to Sun one evening as she rested at the edge of the world. “Sister,” he said, “why do you give the earth so many gifts and leave the sky empty? Bear has his brown coat. Salmon has his silver. Even the smallest stones have learned to shine. But the clouds above your head wear nothing.”
Sun was quiet for quite a long time. Then she said, “I did not know they were waiting.”
The next morning, she rose with new purpose. She asked Hummingbird to bring her the red from the throat of the fire-flower. She asked Salmon to bring her the pink of his belly when he turns home to the river. She asked the autumn leaves to give her their gold, and Crow, who keeps every shadow, to lend her his deepest blue. One by one they came, and one by one they gave.
When she had gathered these things, Sun pressed her hands against the clouds. Where she touched, the colors stayed. The clouds at the edge of morning turned rose and gold. The clouds at the close of day burned red and purple, like coals in a long fire.
The People came out of their lodges and saw, and they understood that Sun had heard them even when they had not spoken. From that day on, she paints the sky twice, once when she arrives and once when she leaves, so that no one would forget that the sky, too, belongs to the world, and the world is full of gifts.
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