The long way back to wonder.

In the summer of 2023, I took my first few glassblowing lessons. There was something immediately compelling about the material: its heat, its movement, the concentration it demanded, the strange combination of control and uncertainty. I kept going back.

There was also something almost too obvious that drew me there in the first place: my last name is Glassman. In the years before, I had begun looking more closely at my paternal lineage, trying to understand and make peace with parts of the lineage I carried. Somewhere in that process, and looking for a new creative outlet, I became curious about my name. Eventually the curiosity was embodied: I wanted to know what it felt like to work with glass.

A few months later, I broke my neck. The injury could have paralyzed me. Under slightly different circumstances, I could have died. Lying in the emergency room, frightened and in enormous pain, I remember replaying the decisions that had brought me there and judging myself relentlessly. I should have known better. I shouldn't have put myself in danger. I wanted to go backward and somehow rewrite what had already happened.

And then I heard a voice from somewhere deep within my body: Accept this like you have chosen it. Something shifted. For perhaps the first time in my life, there was nowhere else to go and nothing to do. There was no history to revise and no future I could control. There was only the body I was in and the breath I was taking.

Soon afterward, my experience became harder to explain. I remember leaving my body and moving into a vast, dark space that felt timeless and expansive. In whatever space I found myself in, there was an overwhelming sense of love and wholeness. My maternal grandmother, Dorothy, who died many years before I was born, appeared beside me. I don't pretend to know exactly what happened or where I went. The mystery is part of it. And eventually, I came back to my body.

After an initial period of euphoric disbelief (I’m alive?) recovery was not transcendent. Much of it was painful and repetitive, and in the months that followed I slipped into a deep depression. I spent long hours in physical therapy trying to regain strength and trust in my body. But somewhere within that period, one thought emerged and gave me a small but meaningful sense of possibility: When will I be able to blow glass again?

Many months later, my return was terrible. Everything felt wrong, and my body did not move the way I remembered. The thing I had imagined returning to did not immediately return me to myself. That came later. Back in Vermont, in a setting that felt familiar and supportive, I started getting consistent repetitions again. Slowly, the movements became clearer, and the work began to show it. My body started understanding things before my mind could articulate them. I began to recognize myself again.

Glass has become inseparable for me from that experience of return. When I work well, there is a quality of attention that is difficult to find anywhere else. Like in my near-death experience, there is nowhere to go. I am listening as much as I am doing, sensing what the material needs next and trying to move toward the next right action without hesitating and without rushing.

And sometimes, after all of that attention, the piece still breaks. I used to experience those moments almost entirely as failure. I still care enormously. Losing a piece can hurt precisely because I know how much concentration, effort and desire went into making it. But glass keeps teaching me another possibility: Care deeply, and let go anyway. Take a breath, and begin again.

That practice feels connected to what happened to me in the hospital. Everything can change, and everything eventually does. We can bring extraordinary intention to what we are making without convincing ourselves that we can keep it forever.

There is a Jewish prayer called Modeh Ani, traditionally said upon waking, that begins from gratitude for having one's soul returned for another day. Since the accident, I have found myself extending that idea in my own way: Grateful am I for this breath. Grateful am I for this opportunity. Grateful am I for the chance to make something that wasn't here before.

That matters to me because every piece of blown glass begins with breath. You gather molten material from a furnace, begin shaping it, and eventually breathe into a blowpipe. That breath generates volume. From there, every decision enters the object: every reheat, turn and tool mark; every moment of confidence or correction; gravity, temperature, timing and chance. The glass remembers what happened to it.

Bodies do, too. Both can be fragile without being weak. Both are changed by experience. Neither remains untouched by what happens to it. And perhaps there is something beautiful in allowing those histories to remain visible rather than trying to erase them.

My ambition now is to develop a visual language that becomes unmistakably my own: relationships of color, pattern, movement and form that, one day, someone might recognize without seeing my name. But I don't want mastery to remove the surprise. I want each object to remain singular. I want the people who live with my work to feel something of the joy and attention that went into making it. And I want to leave enough space in the process for the material to answer back.