Last week’s rocks have faced the test of time and converted itself into sand. Now we pass to the Hourglass.
Indeed, before being associated with death, the hourglass has its roots in time. The falling of sand, one of the first measurements of time, symbolizes instability and the constant transformation of things. It’s natural then that this object would remind people of “memento mori”, i.e “remember you will die”.
The hourglass is the main attribute of the gods of Time, Chronos or Aion.
Yet, given that this object needs to be turned constantly, it also conveys the idea of a cyclic time - reenacting the constant return of things and actions.
The hourglass is also a reminder of measurement in the sense that one has to use time wisely, preserving oneself and not simply throwing away the gift of life. Ascetic figures are often depicted with hourglass in western tradition.
Now you take the floor, what do you associate with the hourglass?
Absolutely nothing. Hourglasses have never got my attention.
The Hourglass is Time, Chronos [Χρόνος].
The everlasting Flux.
The doctrine of radical flux of Heraclitus of Ephesus. The ever-changing nature of the Cosmos.’
“Τα πάντα ρεί” .
Love,
Thelma
I associate it more with inevitability. How, once it’s run out of sand, it’s run out. Which is simply why I cannot see the hour glass as my representation of time, but simply God himself.
Whenever I have the chance to look at an hourglass i am terrified how fast time can go away..the sand going minute by minute…there is nothing to do to make it stop…so it just urges me to life every minute to the full(’carpe diem’)…as every minute is a present of the Present(time).
thank you, georgiana
The beautiful curves of a woman, through which life passes…
Love to all women, Paul
Dear Paul from Austria, very vividly expressed!!!
Today you are not at all.. metaphysical.
Love,
Thelma
Time, precious time !
If you borrow book you expect it back, if you borrow money you expect it back, sooner - better, if you borrow whatever you keep track of it, but how is it possible that The Time something that can never be brought back we give so easily, we waste it so nonchalantly ?
That is the hourglass for me.
Luce
Time of jesus,approaching nearer and nearer than anyone can think or imagine,and almost there.My hourglass reminds me of it.
Yes dear Thelma… I seem to have lost my meta… today ;) … but don’t worry I have definitely not lost my morality…
Love, Paul
The hourglass reminds me of myself. A woman constantly giving and receiving the dust of my soul. The ups and downs I feel about my body and my life.
An hourglass tells to make good use of my time, to pour positive energy into the universe. It reminds me of the infinite.
Lo que está arriba estará abajo y viceversa.
My first thought is always of that hourglass on the tv -having to listen to it when my mother would watch -Days of our lives …but also when you cook -cakes or boil eggs you can use a hourglass to keep track of time ,now the energy company here in Australia sent out small ones to every house hold with a suction attached to it so you have a certain amount of time in the shower to reduce water wastage -but it comes in handy so others do not use all the hot water :-) ..Blessings Tania
Hi Paul!
Question you asked about giving up all prior beliefs to believe in “self”?
Self and God are one. One has security in ’self’ through God.
I don’t have any one religion. Frankly, I don’t believe in man made religion. But I definitely believe in God!
Blessings,
Carole
Eu associo a ampulheta como um tipo de jogo,
assim como um brinquedo que marca o tempo de variados modos de tempo…
Beijos,
Mari Raphael.
I associate the hourglass with a very slow windows pc… ;)
cheers,
Juan
There is a saying – “That it will not come back again is what makes each day so sweet”. The hourglass – teaches me the significance of the present moment, to cherish and not take for granted the blessings that God has bestowed upon me. To dance and sing and tell everyone that “Life is Beautiful”.
Dear Paul from Austria,
..and you definitely never lose your..humor…
Thank you for your appreciation to ..women,
in metaphysical terms!
Love,
Thelma
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=apyrfx9-d9o&feature=related
Have a nice day.
Love to all of us,
Thelma
It is my first time to think what the hourglass means to me. Well, I would say it’s transformation. Whether you like it or not, when the time passes, you will be transformed. Now, I truly feel that I have to use time wisely. love
Ever observed the point where the sand actually drops…that is
very interesting…that is where the present lies!
Yo lo asocio con los juegos de mesa, esos en los que se usa un reloj de arena para cronometrar el tiempo. Lo asocio con el paso del tiempo en general. Y no sé porque me he acordado del cuento de “el libro de arena” de Borges. El tiempo se acaba por juntar y es imposible separar un minuto de una hora. Un recuerdo no es un minuto exacto, es un fragmento de algo más largo que se une con otro recuerdo…
Besos desde Barcelona,
******************************************************
I associate it with the table games, those in which uses an hourglass to mesure the time that you need to do some proof.
The partnership with the passage of time in general.
And I do not know why I just remember the story of “the book of sand” by J.L.Borges. Time is running out for collecting and it is impossible to separate one minute in an hour. A memory is not exactly one minute, is a fragment of something longer that joins with another memory …
Kisses from Barcelona,
For me an hourglass is a nice toy.I always loved to turn them around and watching the sand going from one side to another..
Love,
Lia
p.s Dear Paul, you are a pirate and a poet…I’m speechless!!
The hour glass reminds me of how quckly time flies, whether you like it or not. It is a gentle way of saying that time is precious and not to be wasted.
Tempo é dinheiro, infelizmente….
Hourglass
a beginning and ending
and yet…flip it over
it begins again
life/reincarnation
day/night
each season rolls into the next:
we go on…or not
Shushma, I loved your comment about the present. I think about those grains of sand and how they are serving their purpose circling in the hourglass instead of perhaps being free on some sunwashed beach or bringing pleasure to children playing in a sandbox. To those of us whose nature are free spirits blowing in the wind (like grains of sand), the hourglass brings measure and focus. It reminds us of the discipline and direction we must have to fulfill our purpose.
Peace to you, DW
What will happen when the glass breaks? We cannot seize time in the unmanifested, we use time to give a past, a present and a future…to give space a form…and I guess we need that to become as above, so below.
Love
All ways
H
Beautiful…Barcelona 20 euros en un cafe… your multi-lingual posts always cheer me up… and your teaching me spanish…;) thank you…
Love, & more euros for coffee, Paul
Beautiful Hildegarde… just beautiful…
… and “What will happen when the glass breaks?”
Then time becomes what it is… immeasurable…
Love, as always, Paul
I am a software engineer and I have seen that I keep the important tasks in my project always for the last moment but then ofcourse I know when the deadline is for the project to be completed……
Hourglass reminds me that there is a deadline too to the project called life, only thing is we don’t know beforehand when the deadline is and we tend to take time for granted and keep the things we love or we want to do for later thinking there is always a tomorrow, when the truth is there might never be a tomorrow…….
Love
M
An hourglass..
it reminds me of when i was a kid, and used to watch Aladdin :D
Some gift that a joung man gave to my mother. A toy.
Ah, the precious time running with every sand grain and not to waist it… I’m not obsessed with the concept of waisting time. Seneca wrote that the person which is doing nothing, in fact is occupied with the two most important things in life: the human and the God (:o) Really, sometimes we need to waste some time (not a too much time of course) to do quite nothing - remember the broken bow after thousand arrows shot one after another.
For me, the hourglass reminds me of the rhythm of the God: every thing going in one way has its turning back. Every thing going down rises again and every sunrise has his sunset. Every time something is going up, something else, in opposite, is going down, there is another turn and again the rhythm continues his perpetual movement.
The hourglass reminds me also for the words: “As above, so below…”
Two nights ago I played a game with two of my adult daughters called Boggle and a small hourglass (minute glass, LOL?) was used for this game :-)
One of other things that I think of with the hourglass is the little hourglass that we see blinking on the computer screen as I move from one thing to another online.
I also think of black widow spiders and the red hourglass marking on the underside of the females.
Paul from Austria, I appreciated the beauty of your comment. Sushma, I can relate to your comment about where the present moment is, not in the past where the fallen grains lie nor in the future where the grains have yet to fall. I enjoyed what everyone had to say about their associations with the hourglass, seeing similarities as well as differences…
One more thing that just came to my mind was Jim Croce singing, “If I could save time in a bottle…” Reminds me of the hourglass where time moves within the parameters of a glass prison…
Enjoy every moment of time in your day today!
…it reminds me of having soft boiled eggs with toast and hot tea when I was young. My mother used to time the eggs with an hourglass - actually minute glass - and then place the cooked eggs, with the top-half cut off, in cups that came in a multitude of different styles…some with legs to hang over the edge of the table, some shaped like chickens, some like ladies’ purses. Dipping triangular pieces of toast into the egg yolk, topped with butter, salt and pepper, was amazing! Thanks for prompting the memory ;)
As I watch the hourglass, I wish life would flow like the falling sand inside of it. I compare each grain with every second of our existence. We can see the grains falling, but cannot tell which will fall next, and where it will land. Life is just as random. We may choose to lead our lives in any given direction, but like the streaming granules in the hourglass, we will not know what each day will bring, or whether or not we will even exist tomorrow. We can turn our lives around when we hit rock bottom, much like we do when we flip the hourglass. And if there is no one there to do that, it is likely that our time will have expired. The sands of time will lay still forever…
It reminds me “THE BOOK of SAND”<by J.L.BOrges.Also,past,legends,history.
Our human nature,the possibility that our death could be near.
THe sand reminds infinite,because is almost impossible to count the grains of sand from desert….
Infinite is opened to both world,to heaven,and to…the other possibility,so we must be very careful how we live,how we pass our time.
..The time becomes what it is…..immeasurable.
My dearest Paul from Austria, you are a poet.
I wonder, are you just an Austrian German-speaking Paul, or a “Paul” living in Austria? Your command of the English language is perfect.
Love,
Thelma
it reminds me of good and bad times coming back but each cycle with different opportunities, different environment, different possibilities.
to me personally it says to spiral
ok this might be really weird, but the hourglass reminds me of peace.
That our the time in our lives are moveing with the hourglass sand.
Never to get back, but trying to just slow down and and help others enjoy life as we enjoy life. Counting our blessings is just the same as sand to numerous to count.
The hourglass.. the perfect analogy to represent how fast life passes by and how fill with tiny perfect momments it’s made of..
Interesting!
Time…life…past, present and future…News?
the number eight, the distillation and Orion.
An hourglass for me basically means many different things that at the end, end up meaning the same thing.
For example I remember when I was a kid I used to play with an hourglass, I was so impatient, waiting for the last sand grain to fall. And when it did I just kept turning it. And sometimes I just turned it halfway until i just let it keep falling. To me this represents Time how time is so independent, even if we turn the hourglass, the sand will keep falling. We are the ones who depend on it, sometimes we are so unpatient with it, but at the end, we cannot stop it, it will keep passing by, untill our last grain has fallen.
This also represents how everything is involved so together withing itself and everything else, because as the sand falls, as time goes by, many different things are also passing by too, it just depends how you use your time, you can either stare at the falling sand, and wait untill the last drop, or enjoy your surroundings. =)
yes Sasha…tiny, perfect moments…slipping through our fingers..
love
Agnieszka
Time exists and does not.
I think I’m not afraid about death. Maybe I should.
I’m under the impression that we never die. That time is infinite in a way. If we are atoms I’m just a composition, a drawing God made. Verily, I made it by myself in Mum’s belly. Using another shape, I will go away in another plain. If I believe in my tates around me, how should I scare the “great unknown”; not so?
I consider this is a great problem. But should we have to be frightened by the end to grow better? In that case, I want a recipe to be. Though I have one…
For, maybe I’m living into an illusion. Maybe I’m afraid and don’t share the idea with my precious mind. I say that, because I had the opportunity to make the “death’s exercice”, precisely at night under a tree. Seemed the place was made for, and I did not.
Still, should we have to be afraid about dying, to appreciate the essence of life, our duty to take up? Maybe.
Thanks to all of you for your answers. Nice day. <3
An hourglass to me is representing time.. But to think it twice, dripping sand in hourglass, for me, associate to illusion.. Because time itself is an illusion.. Time is a boundary made by human, to measure life length.
time is not really exist. There’s no past nor future, there’s also no next minute nor next second. There’s only now.
Andreas (Indonesia)
sorry for the bad english.
Wanbliska, i’ve just read your opinion.
i agree with you, where just a composition of God’s design. Sure, as a matter, we won’t vanish. Energy can’t created or vanished. But as a human, the most perfect God design, we WILL die. What makes human human is the capability of thinking, feeling, seeing, sensing, remembering and much more. When we die, and turn to another composition, we won’t have that capabilities. And the worst thing of die, vanish as a human, is being forgotten. Our existance could be weaker than any fiction character if we died.
if i could choose, i don’t want to die *at least before i left something in this world, so i won’t forgotten*. Because there’s many beauty in the world i haven’t experience.
Sorry! Some of my words wrong-texted!
Wanbliska, i’ve just read your opinion.
i agree with you, we’ re just a composition of God’s design. Sure, as a matter, we won’t vanish. Energy can’t created or vanished. But as a human, the most perfect God design, we WILL die and vanish. What makes human human is the capability of thinking, feeling, seeing, sensing, remembering and much more. When we die, and turn to another composition, we won’t have that capabilities. And the worst thing of die, vanish as a human, is being forgotten. Our existance could be weaker than any fiction character if we died.
if i could choose, i don’t want to die *at least before i left something in this world, so i won’t be forgotten*. Because there’s many beauty in the world i haven’t experience yet.
The hourglass is a symbol that brings people face-to-face with reasons for their fear. This object is associated with “time running out” and life being ‘turned upside-down.’ The shape has been denoted ‘the ideal figure’ for women in popular culture when to appear this way reguires struggle, wearing corsets, belts and clothing that cut off circulation, and also eating very little. The hourglass remind you that you choose how and when you will act.
Dear Andreas
Thank you so much for your answer. I see! So I WILL have all my skills but won’t be up to use it. But if I have the memory about, it would be as a living death!
I prefer to think as Bouddhist that we could return to a body whenever we want.
I think I’m quite eye-opened to feel the difference between life and death, once I’ll be on the other side.
But maybe I’m too selfish indeed.
Love.
__
Hourglass as clocks and calendars are the most stupid things man invented to think he could measure the notion of time. That way, he invented oldness and death.
Dear wanbliska
A living death, indeed. But in the positive way.
It’s just saddening to think nobody knows that i ever lived. Well, i just don’t want to be end up as an unknown.
hehe. You know, i had this imagination, we are books in God’s library. When God read a book, He become the character of the book *which is us* and read the book by living our lifes. So, God lives in us and live our lives. And when the story ended, the book won’t be destroyed, but will be safely keep in the library. Waiting to be read by Him again whenever He wants. It’s quite similar with returning to bodies concept, isn’t it?^^
well, it’s just me talking. Don’t take it too seriously.
hmm, i’m not quite agree with your last opinion. Oldness and death are not caused by measurement that man made. Hourglass is just a tool, without it we’ll still grow old and dying..
Dear Andreas,
I understand your opinion, and the metaphor of the book is peculiarly appropriate. Yes I think this is it. Though God may sometimes close the book quickly for annoying himself. And for others, He like to let them open, just to see until where love is going to grow, or until when stupidity could be written further.
Yes my last opinion came like that. I’m not sure about. But as a holy man thought before, I’m sure we could win through the death. I don’t know why. Maybe I’m too sad, that one day we’re not going to share with the people we love. That they’re still in our heart, so deeply, and even we hold our hand out to them, they are not here anymore, I mean, in flesh and bones.
That we need to hear their voices, and advices, as before, and curiously they’re here, but not. They stand just like a souvenir. But how great is this remembrance of all that great persons that passed into our life, and also, on earth…
For me, hourglasses represent one’s rythm..ones’s life..One should not follow the others’ unless he has the same rythm, the same pace of life…
Also they remind me of a free fall..sand falls and keeps falling until there is no sand left to fall..so maybe i could relate to the sand one’s tears…
Also, i think of transformation, when i see an hourglass..the sand - can symbolize of a person - has changed, has moved, and gone to another place, but it is still the same sand..what has changed are the location of the grains of sand - of what a human is made of (emotions, experiences)-from the movement part..That process can depict the lessons he learns through life, and how he changes through that time.
Also i think that there is a pause , after all the sand has gone down..SOmething has ended..’ a little death’ and the hand is needed to turn the hourglass upside down..that Hand is God..is the Great Mother..setting the Universe into constant motion..And each one of us is a grain of sand..So small yet so important..
Love and Graditude
Annie
A single thing is sure: the future is various from the past. But the fundamental laws of the physical work in the same way in ahead or behind in the time, nevertheless we perceive sliding of the time in a single direction: towards the future. The time is asymmetric. What we have made in actions cannot be made on the contrary. We cannot transform omelette in an egg and we remember the alone the past and not future. (Sciences)
One must pay attention and actively turn the glass for the future to occur in measurement of
hourglass time. How visually a minute flys!
How long a hour? a day, a life..how precious a moment. How short a thought! endurance
As for Mary Baxter, the hourglass reminds me of boiled eggs for breakfast. We used a minute glass to time it in my family too. Now, what comes to mind, is my husband, who is a “clock-nut”. He collects antique clocks, and we have clocks on many walls, and have clocks in all shapes and forms all over our home, I don’t know how many. Every Sunday morning he winds the big old clocks, or they would stop. The ticking and dinging and danging sometimes is a bit too much. Still, I find them contributing to the soul in the house, as giving a rhythm to our life.
Oh, and I forgot to mention, above our television, we have a hyper modern atomic clock, which updates at any moment the correct time according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology Time and Frequency Division, which transmits the exact time signal continuously throughout the United States. Nothing less! Personally, I find men strange sometimes. A lot of the time.
Dear Heart,
You make me laugh..! I’d be crazy with all the tic-tic around!
Have a nice day.
Dear Heart, i really enjoyed your post.. :):)
Once, i dated a man who was obsessed with time..so if i was late for a little, we would quarell..like squarells :)..
and for what??? for time..for some people, time is so precious..
or others say time is money…
Relax people..enjoy life..If you want to live, go slowly..
If you want to rest, go fast..
time is an invention man has made to organize his life and feel safer somehow..
Or maybe there was a king, and he had insomnia..and when the sun would rise he would feel exhausted..so instead he asked one of his associates to come up with an idea to brake up the day..so that he would count and he would finally sleep…
one past tewelve, 20 past twelve, 25 past twelve..this is really exhausting!!!!.and so he finally slept!!!!
But what i want to point out , is that it is really exhausting to chase time, and scatter yourself into piecies in order to make all the jobs done..
So we should come to terms with the time passing by…
We should come to terms with the fact that this is the way life goes on…So why not live this moment?? forget time…every moment is another new moment!! :)
Love and Graditude
Annie
I asociate the hourglass with time, when I think of time I think is unstopable, you cannot stop time no matter what.
The hour glass — the sands of time. Crystalline silicon on display within vitreous silicon. It has two lids or two bases or two components which can swap functions, depending upon one’s point of view.
The hour glass is a beautiful instrument. It’s curves remind one of a woman’s body, but it’s also beautiful because it’s an instrument which measures approximately, not exactly. Approximation is human and beautiful. Precision is sometimes useful, but it’s not human.
The hourglass has been an instrument for measuring the motion of Time since probably Man learnt to quantify time other than gazing at the sun and the Sun dial.
Sand has never been in no one’s grip always, or made a footprint last a lifetime. It has neither blown the way one wanted it to except what the Wind decreed.
The shape of the hourglass is figure 8. Maybe one can relate it to a woman’s or maybe not. 8 also stands for the mystic number.
To remind people of the essence that there is only one certainity in Life and that is to realise that what slips away through the hand and cannot be caught is gone for ever..
Nothing is permanent.
The Rock is broken down by the Wind into Sand and The sand will one day blow away as dust. Flesh and bones we stand and one day too the bones will rust and turn to dust.
Back to where we came from .
The cycle will never end.Because when you turn the houglass to its side.. it means so.. the symbol of Infinity! Two loops merging into one.. where does it start from where does it end.. No one knew , no one can tell..