Glass is crazy.

Glass.

It starts as sand. Just sand. Then you heat it until the whole thing gives up being sand and turns into this molten orange light. This glowing glob of almost liquid, almost stone, hanging off the end of a pole.

I’m so jealous of glass workers.

They get some sand, gloop it up, heat it until it becomes glass, and then pull this bright molten thing out of the furnace. There’s usually another person there, an assistant, and the two of them seem almost mind connected. They move together. Somebody turns the pipe. Somebody opens the furnace. Somebody catches the glass on another tool.

Instinct.

The glass is spinning the whole time. It’s soft. It’s glowing. It’s super fragile. If you dropped it on your skin, it would burn straight through.(maybe) I don’t even know how you would get molten glass off your skin. You probably wouldn’t. I don’t want to know.

But look at it.

It’s like water frozen in time into a shape, except it isn’t frozen. It’s something else. It catches light and bends it around inside itself. Blue turns green. Gold slides along the edge. And the people who work with it are amazing.

It’s hot in there all the time. Furnace heat. Orange walls. Everything glowing. They’re standing there swinging molten glass around on a pole, and somehow they’re calm. Somehow they know exactly when to turn it, when to blow, when to put it back into the fire.

You pull it out of the furnace, and you have one little moment of faith. You have to swing it. You have to trust it won’t fall off. Trust your hands. Trust the heat. Trust the other person standing there with the tools.

It gets too cool, it breaks.

You swing it wrong, it breaks.

You blow too hard, it breaks.

You wait too long, it breaks.

And then back into the furnace it goes, glowing orange again, almost breathing. I mean, imagine seeing glass for the first time in ancient times. Lightning strikes the desert, the whole sky turns white, and afterward there’s this strange glass gloop in the sand. A sandy glass tube, maybe. A twisted black jewel.

You would absolutely make an amulet out of that. You’d have to. Something falls out of a lightning strike and comes out shiny? Come on. You’d wear it around your neck. You’d think it had magical properties. Maybe it would tingle when it got warm. Maybe it would glow under the moon.

I don’t know. What is the probability of being in the desert, standing over exactly the right kind of sand, and seeing lightning hit the ground hard enough to turn part of it into glass? I bet it’s insane.

I’ve never found a piece of glass where lightning hit the desert, but I sure might make a necklace out of it if I did. I think when lightning hits the right kind of ground and makes glass, it’s called a fulgurite.

Then there’s the color. They take this molten glass and roll it through little pieces of colored glass, almost like dipping fire into crushed jewels. Red. Cobalt blue. Emerald green. Then they heat it again, spin it again, and the colors melt into the surface.

And somehow they blow through the pipe. That’s insane. They’re holding molten glass on one end of a metal tube, breathing into the other end, and making a goblet. A vase. A little unicorn. They’re putting human breath into glowing glass and giving it a shape.

Dude.

Venice, too. Those old glassworkers making mirrors and chandeliers and tiny animals on an island, guarding the secrets of how they did it. Whole rooms filled with fire and colored light. Everybody walking around knowing how to turn sand into something that looks like frozen rain.

The steadiness it takes. The nerves. You have to be bold. You have to be confident. You have to jerk that thing out of the furnace and immediately know what happens next. There’s no standing around thinking about it. The glass is cooling while you’re thinking. The glass does not care that you’re nervous.

You have to move. Spin it. Blow. Heat it. Shape it. Hand me that tool. Open the furnace. Move. And all of this risk, all this fire, all this molten orange danger, so somebody can have a cup. Or a unicorn.

Man. That’s is cool!