Cosmos comes to English from Ancient Greek, where it referred to a sort of order in nature, the opposite of Chaos. This meaning stuck into the medieval period in works like the twelfth-century philosopher Bernardus Silvestris’s Cosmographia. In the Renaissance, the period I study, a science called cosmography developed in Europe as a way of making sense of all the worlds the explorers setting out from Portugal, Spain, France, and England were encountering. Still later, in the early nineteenth century the German scientific polymath Alexander von Humboldt named his greatest work, the five volume book Kosmos, which sought to describe the totality of nature as he and his colleagues had observed throughout his long lifetime. Today, Cosmos speaks to something far exceeding the Earth in scale, it’s the observable Universe with a potential for even more that we presently don’t know to be included under that cosmic umbrella.

A term like Cosmos is important because it helps us understand how we make sense of everything around us. I feel like I can imagine the entirety of the Universe but I’m sure if I saw an artistic rendering of the visible Universe, I’d feel like I was seeing a new face. This weekend as I was on my way west back to Kansas City through Chicago, the two cities I’ve called home over these past thirty years, I found my perspective shifting away from that of the stranger in the Northeast to one of familiarity and comfort back in my own native Midwest again. Arriving in Chicago I was delighted to realize I didn’t need the GPS in my car anymore, I knew exactly where I was in a place so vividly familiar to me. The same can be said for the rest of my drive west of Chicago, everything was familiar and wonderful to see.

My own Cosmos then, the order that keeps my life together, is built with Midwestern sentiments and expectations. Something that made life in New York difficult for me was how the customs there are at least somewhat different from what I’m used to. Even in these last few weeks there I still had to remind myself it wasn’t intentional rudeness when people I knew wouldn’t acknowledge me, let alone smile and say “hi” when we’d walk past one another, it’s just the impersonality of life in a place that has never really become familiar to me.

In these last three years I’ve now stretched my world out further, filling in many of the gaps of my own experience here in North America with trips to nearly all of the major cities on the East Coast and to Montréal and Toronto. I now know so many of the highways that link the Midwest & Great Lakes with the east. I found myself thinking about how as a child living in the Chicago suburbs that my family never took road trips east out of Chicago to Michigan, Indiana, or Ohio, nor north to Wisconsin. Instead, whenever we traveled it was west to St. Louis, Kansas City, and Denver further afield. Thus, the ways heading east were new to me as I drove along them this weekend, the easy drive on I-94 from Detroit to Chicago being one such example.

I’ve known many people who define themselves by where they’re from, for good or ill. There have been plenty who are loud and proud supporters of their hometown baseball team, and others who use their origins as an excuse to be unkind to the people around them. Over these last three years I had moved into a state of mind where my own origins were somewhat more dormant, sure I had all sorts of art up on the walls in my apartment celebrating both Chicago and Kansas City, and I’ve interchangeably worn my Cubs and Royals hats, but I’d begun to think of myself more as a person who can shift between places and communities, a skill that I needed to develop in Binghamton. Yet upon my return first on Saturday to Chicago and then on Monday to Kansas City I found all those old emotions and memories flooding back. 

One of the parts of the Christmas story that I always remember is that St. Joseph had to go to Bethlehem from Nazareth to participate in the census because that’s where he was born. I am who I am just as much because of the places I’ve grown up in and the people I’ve lived among as the experiences I’ve had as an individual trying to make things work over these last three years alone in a lonely valley far from home. Home is a word of tremendous significance for me, it’s the place where I feel the most comfortable, the safest, and the most appreciated. For much of my life I’ve seen both Chicago and Kansas City as my home. It’s a sentiment I’ve reinforced this weekend on my first visit to the city of my birth since the pandemic began. Were I to say I have a “homeland,” Lake Michigan would remain its eastern boundary, the Great Plains beyond Kansas City its western. That is the heart of my Cosmos.