Stained Glass: melted sand transformed so as to capture the Sun's light, releasing powers & healing colors .
Imagine being the first person to figure out how to make stained glass, then deciding to create a pretty window. While many saw sand, few saw windows.
Do you think Frank Lloyd Wright was articulating the times he lived in, the feeling of his dreams displayed through the glass that was so linear with flat roofs that leaked? While I did not like his architectural structures for being soundly designed, I did appreciate his ballsy approach to creating what he wanted to, being paid enormous amounts of money, being over budget by as much as triple the original estimates to clients, and never actually being certified by a college to be an architect, degreed.
Imagine working in a glass-making business when 12-year-olds cleaned and fed coal into the furnaces that melted sand, scorching, dirty, dangerous work that led to being a glass blower. Next, you would be blowing big bubbles out of molten glass and spinning it, then placing it atop a table and cutting the top and bottom of the bubble off, splitting the side of the soft glowing hot liquid that is freezing to solidity as you work to flatten it out before it fully hardens. Once it does, it will be brittle, not apparent that it is still a liquid frozen hard before your eyes like ice. Sounds simple, but who figured that out, and how to add colors?
Cutting up glass does not require a saw but simply a steel wheel on a handle that scores the outside of the glass that, causes the molecules to align along the scratch for a short period such that the weak area breaks easily until the chaotic action of the swimming molecules returns.
See how purples, gold, reds, and blues transform the sunlight into incredible segments of a ray of energy that appears invisible to the human eye. Adding gold to molten glass will create the color red when it cools, thus making it the most expensive color to make historically, coincidentally being associated with sexual energy. Interesting how gold seems to be associated with sex throughout history.
Those decorative details, the jewels in a piece of stained glass, can add $100 of value each. The colors and shapes, some even being ground and faceted to create prisms as the sun's light races through and splits into a rainbow. The skills, science of refraction, and much more were being done full time, seven days a week, by 16 years old, with children at home to feed, a wife, and a life with skill. Today kids that age are not even allowed to work around hot, dirty, and dangerous conditions. To work 7 days a week, 6 days a week, even would be considered inhuman and borderline slavery if you could supposedly force people to do that in this age.
It is as beautiful as so much of this fantastic fabrication from more than 150 years ago in a time when there supposedly was no electricity, effectively off the grid as wii define it today. What skills have been lost, never to be taught by the elders now long dead? Will they remain lost, or will wii be inspired to create on such dedicated and time-consuming levels again? Who will have the focus, persistence, and, most importantly, willingness to learn the whole process from scratch again? Hard to imagine in this day and age unless there is a revitalization, a renaissance of our society that brings back respect for the skills, the knowledge, the focus it takes to create so many things that are amazing expressions of our thoughts, our life, our memories frozen in time for centuries or longer if Wii, the stewards of these treasures care for them properly.
Thank you for sharing such inspirations as children created long ago, children based on our modern societies jailing kids until well after adulthood once overtook them. Responsibility, coping with stress, working light to dark, and never getting a day off from the job for sickness or vacation was the life of a worker bee in society in 1893. Imagine that in 2023. Such things could never be.
Want some of these pieces for your home yet-to-be or a chapel by the sea? Contact me at (see below the paid content line) for Charter members who get a half-hour consultation initially for free. How can I help you manifest your dreams?
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