The Glass Mountain

My father and I began making glass together in Phoenicia New York in the fall of 2016. My dad was successfully sober during that period and I began to learn my father’s art directly from him. In the summer of 2018, I was alone, walking in the mountains of Zermatt. I found the threshold of the mountain, passed through it and painted. My father, a Luzerner, a crazy heart glass artist - happened to be in Zermatt a month later, watching the moon rise above the Matterhorn. He was having a somewhat mystical experience. But I knew he was drinking again. Glassmaking is a process of making the broken pieces fit, the broken pieces of yourself, of your idea of home of God or Love, making them become something whole, and that whole becomes a part of the great work in-progress called living. During Covid, we started our Glass Mountain collaborations. He had achieved a silver and gold, hard earned, abiding, god willing sobriety. The Matterhorn painting on silk was our first motif.

The following is a story of the genesis of my father and my stained glass collaborations based upon mystical mountain experiences and his way to sobriety.

The Glass Mountain


In the summer of 2018, I was alone, walking in the mountains of Zermatt. I found the threshold of the mountain, passed through it and painted.

I painted on pink silk from Mumbai, incandescent Indian pink, the color of the madness of Love.

Stepping onto the silk, I knew I couldn’t just paint the mountain.

I had to make the shape of the mountain’s occurrence with my body, to understand with my feet the million years of the mountain, a glaciation lifting quickly, melting down.

I painted to show some ancient connection
Between us (between everything alive).

For a Swiss Chinese painter from New Jersey this was illumination, this was Messi holding up the Blaugrana, this was Shiva and Shakti playing Thunder Road at the Stone Pony.

I wrote a 27 page poem about this experience, a quantum gravity theory kind of poem, no one has ever read it.. except my father.


My father, a Luzerner, a glass artist, a crazy heart, a bonafide original - happened to be in Zermatt a few months later, watching the moon rise above the Matterhorn.

He was having a somewhat mystical experience.
But I knew he was drinking again.

I knew from the tone of his texts, and all the Caps locks.
OH MY GOD… IS THAT ME ??!! He wrote.

I remember when I was young, my father was staying downstairs for a spell and one night he came home from the city and smashed a hole in one of his beautiful stained glasses.

I remember looking at the hole in the mountain, and felt, I don’t know how we’re going to fix this. Later he soldered a shot glass and a Supertramp cassette tape inside the hole and hung it up in the dining room. I loved so many of his pieces, but I guess I never really got into Supertramp.

Almost every fall my fear of his nosedive into the alcohol abuse and mania would create a clenched knot between my throat and my heart, black turquoise, I swallowed a lot of poison. I knew we were loved, and even in those desperate times where the demons held sway, there was something beneath the wreckage, there was grace and there was Love. But yeh, I developed a complex. Anger.

My anger was cut off from my heart, disembodied, intense and destructive.

…


My dad and I began making glass in Phoenicia New York in the fall of 2016. My dad was successfully sober during that period and I began to learn my father’s art directly from the Glass man. This was a good, wholesome, golden time on the banks of the Esopus River, making stained glass angels, river spirits, orbs of Becoming, and watching the River flow with my father. We went to the source of the Esopus, with no gas, coasting all the way down the pantherkill.

‘How do you make the angels?’ I asked. ‘I make them with an unencumbered spirit. I make them specially for someone who needs an angel. Someone who needs to know they are being looked after.’ He had this soft light in his eyes and I knew he was thinking of my sister, Alina. She was his guardian angel, as she was mine.

He told stories of when he was child, stories of his father and mother, unsettling stories of his time at the magic mountain TB sanatorium. He was illuminating and making peace with his demons, one by one. Day by day.

Glassmaking is a process of making the broken pieces fit, the broken pieces of yourself, of your idea of home of God or Love, making them become something whole, and that whole becomes a part of the great work in-progress called living. The Japanese art of kintsugi is like this, repairing the broken china with gold. When I show my mother a finished glass, in her eyes gracefilled and forgiving, the broken are whole.

…


In 2019 we went to a Robert Plant show in Philly. My dad leapt down to the landing and started dancing like a Bernese cowboy. The security were directed to clear people out of that area, but they let him dance, god bless them, the man needed to dance. My ‘O God’ feeling gave way to a chuckle, then a full bodied laugh of pride. His dance was nearly utterly free. He made his way back to where I was sitting, I made him laugh telling some wild, unrepeatable story, and we danced to Robert Plant, who kicked ass.
‘Now That’s a Rockstar,’ I said and my dad laughed.

That was the last time I remember my father not being sober. More or less. He achieved a silver and gold, hard earned, abiding, god willing sobriety in 2020.
It was just before the birth of sweet Paloma, his first grandchild, and just after I reconnected with Ziggy in San Francisco, my Beloved wife.




It was during these Covid days, we started our Glass Mountain collaborations. The Matterhorn painting on the Indian pink silk was our first motif. It was important that I drew the mountain from life, and that going to the mountain was a collective spiritual experience. We took turns cutting, fitting, soldering, like jazz - call and response. I would say, ‘Do one of your crazy moves..’ It was like working with a force of nature, a force that had shaped the mountain of my-self. We wrapped the pieces together (with copper foil) watching Liverpool games, and we’d go out and play tennis. We talked about Mo Salah, about the house in Luzern, about music, about Paloma and Ziggy. We talked about skiing, our experiences on Engelberg and Taos, skiing down the Kachina like a dream. ‘Cutting glass is just like skiing,’ I noted. Not quite.
I tried to tell him that I was grateful that he didn’t leave us, when he and my mother separated, that I was afraid he would leave, afraid he would be pulled off the edge of the world into oblivion, and I couldn’t let him go. Perhaps I told him that in my fear and anger, self doubt and loathe, distrust and delusion, I felt unworthy of love. That this anger was not his fault, not my fault, but a cycle handed down the line from some immemorial wound, some broken treaty, some lost lesson. I wanted to say that I always felt it there, above and below, in the place where we know things, your Love, the angel in the sky.
Some things I left unsaid, let them waft out and drift down the Delaware river, which flowed close, while I cut a shape with the diamond cutter that would fit within his, within mine. Sometimes the glass would break in an unforeseen way, due to a fault or fissure that was born within the glass. These we usually took as signs from the glass angels to honor the nature of things. It was repair, kintsugi, repairing with gold. It was therapeutic, a healing rippling forwards and rippling back. Mostly we worked quietly, had pizza, celebrated goals, listened to Jimi and the Dead, put our pieces together, and soldered the glass mountain.

Looking at the finished panel, I am transported to that valley of Valais mountains, walking these wondrous meadows in the wind, then to the side of Rigi walking down with my old man, then we’re skiing down the Steinberg, almost in big trouble, and onward and these moments ever alive in the spirit of memory are strung together to offer the Goddess. ‘You must let the sun into each piece of glass.’

We’ve completed several Matterhorn pieces to date, Pilatus, the Pedernal in Abiquiu and Taos mountain. Ziggy has joined the team and has created a magnificent pod of angels and devi. After the arduous work of cutting, shaping, soldering, applying patina, and washing is through, when we finally hold the panel up to the sun, to reveal to ourselves and Ziggy, the broken pieces of our story, that they were broken to find their way to this piece, into this whole, the sun breaking into each color, every shard shining its presence in a golden absolution, this brief illumination of finally seeing the same mountain, my father and I, and in seeing it anew, the mountain slips back into spirit like the moon rising above the Matterhorn.

It now hangs in my sister’s house, a beautiful light in Paloma and Pax’s eyes. In my mother’s dining room, one of Dad’s hangs, a ship coming through a great crevasse in the glass.