Mara Lee | tilegypsy.com

The 10-panel vintage window survived the trip from Orange, California to the Midwest. It’s a pretty big window at 5′ x 2′ ft … which meant this piece would take a huge bite out of my vintage glass collection.

The vintage windows I look for have to be sturdy, with clear glass that doesn’t wiggle or show separation (rotting) from the frame … not even a little bit.

I use a clear adhesive to glue the glass to the glass, in a well ventilated room, with a wheeled tile cutter, a small hammer – on a sturdy surface – wearing safety glasses with a first aid kit near by … but not children or pets. Safety First – Always wear safety glasses when breaking or cutting random glass dishes, cups and/or glass objects. Depending on the type of glass they can and some will shatter in a bazillion pieces … maybe more. Be careful.

Learn How to DIY with a Glass Class with Mara Lee

Clean the window with a vinegar & water mixture – a couple of times – and let it dry. Glue glass pieces into place filling in with cut glass pieces, clear glass gems, marbles and the like …

Learn How to DIY with a Glass Class with Mara Lee

Learn How to DIY with a Glass Class with Mara Lee

Perfect first pass and not a single piece glued.

Glass on Glass – 10 Panes – Private Collection

Learn How to DIY with a Glass Class with Mara Lee

Watched a Ram Dass documentary with D and fell in love with “The Predicament of “Somebodyness” …

There’s a great line from a wonderful teacher who died some years ago named Kalu Rinpoche, a lovely Tibetan monk. He said, “We live in illusion, the appearance of things, but there is a reality and we are that reality. When you understand this, you see that you are nothing, and being nothing, you are everything. That’s all there is.”

What happens to most of us, and I say most of us, is that when you and I were born, we were born into a social-psychological world, a world with feelings and thoughts, that was inhabited by people who were very identified with their separateness. They were somebody. They were mummy or daddy. They were also this and this and this and this, and they were all the different identities they had, and they trained you about those realities, because those are the realities that were real to them.

Let’s say you started out with completely undifferentiated awareness, and then in the process of socialization, you cultivated your cognitive capacities of this versus that and all your conceptual models that are called your ego and ego structure, and then you got caught in them. You got lost in them, so you thought they were real. You got caught in your own creation, because everything around you supported you becoming somebody. You went into somebody training when you took birth, and you ended up somebody. I bet you think you’re real. I really think you think you’ve got a personal history; you think you’re going somewhere; you think you’ve got problems and neuroses and hopes and relationships; it all sounds real doesn’t it? … Boy were you taken for a ride.

Now, it’s not unreal; it’s just relatively real. The predicament is, you bought into the planes of reality that are all in time. That’s a problem because there’s at least another plane where you’re One with it all, and no one is going anywhere. There’s no time – it’s behind time. So there’s a part of you that is not in time, even though the rest of you is in time, and you bought into the part of you that’s in time, so you think time is passing.

When you get caught in your somebodyness, you as a separate entity, relative to the game of form and tiny. There are galaxies, and you are a tiny, you know, and it’s kind of frightening to have your awareness in something so small when everything around you is so big and unpredictable, and you can’t control it and so to the extent you identify with your somebodyness, there is fear. There’s fear of changes, because you can’t control change. There’s a fascination with change, but mostly fear. There’s fear of death. That colors almost everything everybody does in a subtle way, all the time. Wanting to leave something behind, wanting to get as much out of the moment as you can because you are fleeting; feeling you’re running out of time because there is too much to do. – Source Ram Dass