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We stared up at the night sky for an hour or three with binoculars, naming our own constellations. We started with the ones that already exist, the patterns that people have found before us in the sky. Big dipper, ursa major and the little dipper, ursa minor. We can visualize the dippers but not the bears so much, even though we try. Cassiopeia, and we try to remember the story: A beautiful, vain queen who annoys the gods somehow and is punished somehow by being stuck in the sky. Not much of a story there, so we try to make up our own, but nothing comes. Undeterred, we instead search for new constellations.

We find two that we particularly like: the Gigantic Dipper and the Mini Dipper. One stretches across the sky, horizon to horizon, magnificent. The other is just a fuzz of stars that we happened to see with the binoculars, minute and perfect.

Staring at stars with binoculars is a strange thing; it feels almost like cheating, like getting away with something, like a secret gift. They’re just cheap birding binoculars, seven times magnification, and we don’t think that they’ll make any difference with something so very very far away as stars, but they do.

With the binoculars, we watch the moonrise. It inches out from behind the hills, illuminating a rosewood tree and turning it frosted and silver. We are awestruck: you can see craters, and ridges, a full gorgeous landscape of texture and shadow. Full moon, and it lights the land around us like a clouded day, almost enough to read by. Later that night, as we curl in our sleeping bags, I find myself waking over and over, the brightness of it pulling me out of sleep, so that I end up passing the night staring up into the sky, counting the stars, watching the moon trace her arc towards morning.

I have learned how to tell time by the stars. The caveat is that I have to know what time it was when the sun set; I suppose the reality is that I’ve learned to mark time by the stars, to tell how much time has passed.

It would please me greatly to live in a world where all I need to know is approximately how many hours it has been since noon, or since sundown, when timeliness means getting home before it is too dark to see or getting out into the field before it’s too hot to work. I would like to live in a world where time moves fluidly, gracefully, not chopped up into rough chunks to be apportioned out like bread in a famine. How can we not have enough time? Time is: when you make a chart of growth or decline or anything in relation to time, time is the independent variable. The only thing we can change about it is our perception, and that’s easy enough, really.

Thich Naht Hahn teaches mindfulness in all things: “When we see a red light or a stop sign, we can smile at it and thank it, because it is a bodhisattva helping us return to the present moment.” I think again of lunch at the Thai restaurant, so impatient for a meal we don’t really need. How much better our time if we are truly present for it. What use looking forward to a future that might never come, or back to a past that can not be changed, when the whole of the ecstatic world is here, dancing, now? Why worry a watch when the stars are busy arranging themselves into patterns so that we can learn the true progression of time?

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