The Glassblower's Breath

There is a glass on a shelf somewhere near you. Maybe a drinking glass, maybe a vase, maybe a paperweight — something transparent, holding its shape in the light. Pick it up in your mind and turn it slowly. Notice the wall thickness, whether it is perfectly even or one side slightly heavier. Notice the base, how it sits flat, how the bottom is thicker and denser than the walls above it. None of this is accidental. Someone breathed this object into existence. Literally. A gather is what the glassblower takes from the furnace: a mass of molten glass collected on the end of a blowpipe, glowing orange-white, soft as honey, roughly the size of a large orange. The temperature inside the furnace is over a thousand degrees. The glass at the tip of the pipe is viscous, but just barely — if you touched it, it would not drip. It would move like thick caramel, slowly, in the direction of gravity. Gravity is the enemy.