What came first the chicken or the egg?

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I had been reading books on glass chemistry when the dream came. In it, I was placing ferrous sulfate at the bottom of a crucible, already coated with a molten borax frit. Then I packed the chamber with sawdust, sealing it inside a larger container to force a reduction atmosphere. A voice—calm, certain—said: it will produce an amine.

I woke with that instruction lodged in me and carried it out in waking life, not as strict laboratory work, but as a kind of Raku firing. The result wasn’t what the voice had promised in any literal sense. Instead, the surfaces of my pots and clay forms bloomed—thin skins of color, shifting reds, rainbows, metallic sheens. The chemistry spoke in another language.

Over time, I began to understand that what I was seeing wasn’t substance so much as surface: extremely fine layers of particles, interference effects, light scattering across fragile films. The same phenomenon appeared elsewhere once I knew how to look. Pond scum carried it—those oil-slick iridescences, transient and alive. I photographed them, lifted them into digital collage, and found I could reproduce that same shimmering skin in another medium.

Then, only last year, standing on the volcano on the Big Island, I saw it again. The lava, once molten had captured a beautiful iridescence—not uniform, but flickering across its surface. Sulfur, fused into the flow, scattering light in a thin particulate layer. The same principle, scaled up to geology.

What began as a dream about transformation turned into a continuity: furnace, pond, photograph, lava. Different materials, same phenomenon—a skin where light breaks, divides, recombines. Not an amine, but something just as precise: a way of seeing.