"I love glass. I love that it is a liquid even though it seems to be a solid. I love that it can slow light down from a cosmic 186,000 miles per hour to a near-street-legal 36. I love that it can carry giga-bytes of information across 4,000 miles of Atlantic bottom in less than a second. I love that it can be molded into the crude, but practical mug or blown into the thinnest of champagne flutes. I love that it can be formulated to allow visible light to pass with little restriction even as it reflects nearly all infrared radiation. I love that it can have the lowest density of any solid. Most of all I love the beautiful way it vitreously becomes any color of our choosing by absorbing all the unwanted energies.
We humans can be like glass. We're constantly bombarded by the widest possible spectrum of external influences, but our presence is knowable only by the stimuli we reflect, absorb or allow to pass right through. We're seen by others only as shadows, observable only through the changes we affect on our environment." by Will Whitted
Today I am in the debt of two friends: one who is close both in location as well as state of mind and the other who lives far away and who I have met only through the magic of the blogosphere. The beautiful photograph is the work of Diane Walker, whose blog, "Contemplative Photography" is a favorite haunt. Do visit her site. Her photography and poetry inspires.
The essay on glass by my friend was a response to an improv game we've been playing called "Portkey." I learned this game from Matt Smith of Seattle. The game begins when one player sends a random word to someone else. That player then responds by seeing where the word "takes them." He responds with a story or reflection that is triggered by the word. At the end the one having told the story then pulls a word from within their story and sends it back to the first player (or another, if there are more than two in the game." Wasn't this an amazing response to the word, glass?
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