In the warmer months I associate myself mostly with the Big Dipper and the Northern Cross -- when I can get far enough away from the blurring envelope of summer haze once in a while to have a good look. In fall, when the clarity returns, it is undeniably the Milky Way that seems to be the focus of whatever star consciousness I can muster up. But come the clean crystal air of December and the blasting winds over Big Savage Mountain, Orion, the Hunter, runs my life.

Usually it takes the form of an attack. I fall prey to Orion. I’m heading downhill toward Cumberland (where I live) at night, when suddenly I run into Orion head on, hanging out there in the Southeast banded by the three glittering stars of his belt. His sword, containing the smudged Orion Nebula, dangles below it. At about the seven o’clock position from his back foot glimmers the brightest of all the stars – Sirius, the Dog star – forming the head of Orion’s canine companion of the same name. And when the moon is pale or is in the new phase, I can also discern Lepus, the hare, running scared beneath Orion’s feet, as though he had just been flushed out of the luminous thicket of the galaxies by Sirius. And above Orion are the piercing horns of my own sign, Taurus.

The Maryland Department of Transportation ought to pay more attention to the stars when they plan the location of roads. Any highway that offers up such a sterling view of Orion is simply not safe for people who, even momentarily, live their lives under the influence of stars -- to say nothing of those who, like myself, can be driven mad by the night sky. And so to avoid having my name being listed in the Police and Fire Log of my local newspaper, I pull off on the berm and come to a quick stop. For by then I’m in full flight out over the silhouettes of mountains, drifting helplessly in the direction of Orion and his menagerie, and bridging the frail boundary that exists between the sky and earth. Time seems to meander by irreverently and loses all traces of anything like the steady precision that I have molded myself to.

That’s when I remember what a perfectly awful history I have had with time.

To be truthful, I have never really understood it. And it has probably been one of the greatest nuisances of my life. Ever since I started seventh grade and had to change classes to the loud ringing of a bell every 55 minutes or so, time has bothered me to no end. I also got my first serious watch around those years (not the kind with Mickey Mouse on the face that wouldn’t be missed if it ended up in the washing machine), and I think that’s when I began to develop an awareness that growing up was somehow linked with knowing where I should be and at what time I should be there.

Back at good old East Main Street Elementary School the subjects were merged together in a fluid sort of way without hard boundaries. I seldom even looked at the clock on the wall except to check if it was time for lunch or time to go home – the two nodal events of my day (except for the girl with shiny bangs and olive skin who sat in the next row and charmed the hell out of me every living moment I laid my eyes on her divine presence). But in 7th grade, things became more distinct and onerous. And now, at age of 55, the situation has advanced to this digital bleeping on my wrist which dogs me all the time, and all but replaces the once reassuring wandering throb of my pulse.

But looking up at Orion, I somehow don’t think that the stars give one hoot n’ holler about what we measure or how we measure it. Orion keeps to his own counsel. And the longer I live, the more seriously I think about the opposed agendas of time conscious humans and those of the stars.

There are a lot of things that happen under Orion that don’t happen according to my wristwatch. Outside the building where I live Black Capped Chickadees hang upside down on prickly Virginia Pine cones and pick out the seeds that have not fallen out. Ravens congregate in an animated cawking in an old White Oak tree, waiting maybe for some animal to finish its death throes, or for someone to drop a ketchup drenched french fry or pitch out the remains of a Big Mac. Some Rose Breasted Grossbeaks flit in and out of the branches of a Norway Spruce back of my church, and a Broadwing soars out high over Cumberland, pitched back and forth by the surly mountain wind, scanning the rooftops and bridges for an unwary pigeon.

And up along Bear Pen Run in the Savage River Forest, Deer Mice have left their diminutive trails in the snow, a Vole has raised a tunnel as it pushed under the snow, and Springtails, looking like flakes of nervous pepper, bunch up near the stream on a drift. Bobcat tracks pad to and away from a messy depression in the snow with a few left over tell tale feathers of an unfortunate Grouse.

These are the images that come to mind under Orion, when I am stopped beside the interstate on a snowy evening.

After a while, I turn the engine over and ease back onto the highway. In a few minutes, I bottom out into the electric glare of Cumberland, and Orion, along with his minions, disappear. And my remembrances of my recent walk along Bear Pen Run and the mice and the voles and the bobcat seem to fade away just as quickly. All of it seems like it was in another age. We miss so much in our tick-tock ignorance. Yet strangely it is all so close, underfoot even, in the backyard, if you just look for it. For when you really get up close and personal with Orion, you can sense so keenly the heaven-connectedness that is everywhere.

And it is then, as I slide by the chattering fluorescence of my own town, that I have a small but comforting realization, that, in the end, it is not electric toothbrushes, microwave ovens, the rattling of cyberspace, nor all the other marvelous little time chopping gadgets we keep coming up with, that incline us toward glory. But rather -- as Orion seems to inform me – it is the steady and unclocked light of a near and compassionate creation that truly lights up the cosmos.