Chronos surrounded by snakes, flowers, nights and days.

This is how I represent Time, the God Saturn, the chessboard of our destinies. In its gratuitous power, the DALL-E imager seems to have enjoyed responding to my request. I don't know where its imagination comes from, which artists it plagiarizes, recopies and recomposes.

My request seems unique, but the resulting art belongs to someone else. Isn't that how our lives are? Saturn, the ruler of time, represents for astrologers the lucid clock of what we are. When we're born, the duty he imposes on us to exist is renegotiated 28-29 years later, when he completes his circle around the Sun, thus returning to the degree of our birth. It's an almost parallel cog in the monthly lunar cycle.

At 30, we feel our adult nature for the first time. It's time to consolidate what we want to be. Around sixty, we realize life, feeling its quiet fatigue, sometimes tinged with wisdom, which settles in our bones and thoughts. It's a patient urgency to carry on and enjoy. Just before turning 90, the last winter sets in. If, of course, we make it. My father left this life exactly at his final Saturnian return. In his chart, the star governed his secrets.

Some are born under a good Saturn, others are offered a slightly more bitter cup. When I was born, the star was in Capricorn, ninety degrees apart from Venus, signifying a slow process of relationship building, a struggle no doubt between the passions of an adolescence too distant or little lived and the harsh reality of being human. My love affairs have not been straightforward. They didn't cause me many wrinkles, though. I have always continued on my patient path. I'm a wise man surrounded by my flowers and snakes. I try to account for my life and regiment it while maintaining an inner disorder. The planet will pass over my birth sun next year as if time were going to take deeper root in the soil of my heart.

I'm not an astrologer for nothing. I have a sense of the hours, a love of certainty even if the lessons I draw from it wouldn't fit on a single page.

We all possess this clock, in varying degrees and oriented according to our seasons. We don't age similarly, although the end brings us together in the implacable silence of Chronos.

No matter. This God shows us the way, the path to build, the way to act. The tic tac is universal, reasoned and beneficial. Life is made to sculpt the bones of what our heirs will be.

Our lives form a trickle of sand that rushes through a glass tunnel. Then, the merry-go-round begins again. An invisible hand (a hand?) turns the hourglass, and the snakes swallow their tails once more.