On my right calf, I have a stained glass depiction of Odin’s ravens landing on a branch of Yggdrasil, the tree of life. Next to that are two stained glass panels to tell one of the stories in Norse mythology. The one with the blue sky depicts the old gods called the Vanir who experienced a golden age near the beginning of time and sat in the grass playing games with golden pieces until the giants attacked from over the mountains. The one with the orange sky depicts the same place but after the events of Ragnarok where great figures like Odin and Thor were killed, and the surviving Vanir reached over the bones of the fallen gods to pick up their old golden playing pieces, and helped humans build a new society.
On my left calf, I have a stained glass depiction of two songbirds landing on a dead branch. This was a scene you’d occasionally see painted on the inside lid of harpsichords to remind the player that though the harpsichord was seen at the time as one of the pinnacles of human accomplishment (musical, mechanical, architectural, artistic, etc.), “it’s just dead wood until you make it sing.” No matter how far technology advances, we will always need that human element! The birds are the goldfinch and eastern bluebird, the state birds of New Jersey and New York respectively, where I grew up. They fly in front of the mountain I saw walking to school every day when I lived in Austria. The shape of this panel (and the one with Odin’s ravens) comes from the Princeton University chapel, since I grew up there and that’s where my love for stained glass and music was born.
